EyeView's Blog

Online Video Backlash? What Backlash?

I thought it was a peculiarly British characteristic to put examples of success up on a pedestal and then to pelt them with the rotten fruit of envy at the earliest opportunity. So you can imagine my surprise when I read Ben Weinberger of Digitalsmiths writing about the “Internet Video Backlash” here as if online video was already on its last legs.

The truth is that online video is not going anywhere. The struggle to justify its expense is not a new one and it existed long before online video broke out and became the must have feature of every B2C and B2B website.

Weinberger is confusing online video with online video advertising a mistake he is not alone in making. Online video established itself as an important new medium when people began embedding clips on their blogs. Huge communities built up around video aggregators which generated huge bandwidth costs which belatedly forced site owners to try to recoup some of their expenses with advertising. In other words, online video advertising is world’s attempt to catch-up and profit from the surprise success of a new medium. Two years into the boom, no one has quite worked out how, yet.

Recent reports suggest that the largest aggregator, YouTube, may finally be closing in on profitability, but the struggle for most sites continues with huge amounts of unsold inventory.

But what if they’re all approaching the problem backwards? Online video doesn’t have to be the placeholder around which you build your revenue model. For businesses, online video is much more than entertainment. Online video can inform, it can educate and it can convince. Online video is not just an anchor for your revenue generation efforts, it should be a key part of your strategy.

Old world thinking says that online video drives audience and the bigger the audience the more money can be generated from ads. New world thinking says you should calculate your ROI directly from the videos by using them to build loyalty, solve problems and convert users into paying customers.

Online video is fast becoming the medium of choice for C-level executives when they want to learn about a product or business opportunity. More and more people are turning to video when they want to understand more about the site they are visiting. They would rather play a video than wade through paragraphs of text.

If you have spent any amount of time on website optimization to increase your conversion, then it’s time you started using video as part of your site’s optimization plans.

5 Optimization Tips In 5 Minutes

First of all there are semantic issues here that tend to be confusing. When I talk about optimization, I mean optimizing your website to make sure that visitors to the site have the best possible experience and are more likely to complete whatever conversion goal you have set for the site.

I understand that for some people optimizing their website is all about using tags and keywords to ensure that more people who are not on the site will find it when they are searching and that’s fine, but the following tips are not about that.

These are my five tips to making sure that the people who arrive at your site do what you want them to do.

1. Know what it is you want your visitors to do

It seems so obvious but so many sites mess this up. Are you selling something or are you collecting email addresses. Do you want people to watch a video or do you want them to download a PDF. Choose one goal per landing and concentrate on that. You can add steps that lead up to your goal, but you must remain focused on the prize and not get bogged down in the steps.

2. Clear out the clutter

If your main source of revenue isn’t advertising, then get rid of it. That goes for banner ads, Google ads, video ads. If they’re not serving your message, they’re not serving you.

3. Test your Call to Action

So much has been written about the call to action. Where does it go? What words should you use? What color should it be? What words should you avoid? My advice is the same I give to new parents. Listen to everything, try some of the things, use the ones that work and discard the rest. I’m not suggesting that you A/B test your children, but I do think you should be willing to try different combinations for your call to action until you find the one that works best.

4. Location, location, location

If you have never heard the maxim, it’s the answer to the question, “What are the three most important factors when buying property?” While the offline property market may be struggling, the battle for online real estate is very much on. Make sure you use every pixel wisely. Position your messages carefully. Make sure the page flows in a way that guides your visitors to the goals you have set.

5. Use your words

There’s an old proverb that says “you can’t dance at two weddings”. Web copy is constantly getting invitations from rival bridal parties. On the one hand your web copy has to deliver the right mix of SEO-worthy keywords. On the other hand, the same copy has to also drive readers to complete the conversion goal you have set. Get creative. Remember that your conversion copy has to be found and read while your SEO copy just has to be. Use the fold (the natural page break created by the height of your screen) to separate the two kinds of copy.

These are my top 5 tips in 5 minutes. What else have you tested to optimize your site?

The 7 Sins Of Landing Page Design

I was watching Tim Ash’s webinar this week entitled “7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design”. It is simultaneously one of the most terrifying and one of the most illuminating lectures I have attended. It’s terrifying because he does a great job of identifying the many traps that people fall into when building out a landing page. But it’s also Illuminating because, unlike other optimization scaremongers, Ash offers tips for redemption for each of the deadly sins he identifies.

I will add the video to the end of this post but with respect to Tim, here are my high level take aways.

Sin 1: Unclear Call To Action

Redemption: Make your Call To Action clear. Ash makes it seem so obvious. You have to know what you want your site visitor to do and then remove the clutter that stops them from doing it.

Sin 2: Too Many Choices

Redemption: Focus, focus, focus. Ash suggests using visual shortcuts to reduce the need for confusing choice-filled text.

Sin 3: Asking For Too Much Information

Redemption: This is all about people dropping out when it’s time for them to fill in a form. Ash asks the key question, “Is this information absolutely necessary to complete the current transaction?” If the answer is “No”, you need to set the question aside at least until later.

Sin 4: Too Much Text

Redemption: Keep it short and sweet. Front load your text with all the good stuff and never use a full sentence when a set of bullets will suffice. The best advice here is to be a ruthless editor of your own work. This is one of the hardest disciplines to master, but well worth learning.

Sin 5: Not Keeping Your Promises

Redemption: Tell the truth, or at least synch up your ad copy with your landing page so that there are no unhappy surprises for your visitors.

Sin 6: Visual Distractions

Redemption: Make your images relevant, not gratuitous and make sure that they don’t obstruct the Call To Action.

Sin 7: Lack of Credibility & Trust

Redemption: Ash recommends that you remove anxiety by featuring well known trust symbols prominently and by drawing attention to clients with better-known brands to borrow their credibility.

There’s so much to take in here that I will be going over this video a few more times. Here is the original video for those of you who want to get the full impact of Tim Ash’s wise counsel.

The Three Types Of Video For Business

I was inspired by this great post to consider again the uses of online video for business to see if they could be categorized in a way that was helpful for marketers.

Online video has exploded in popularity and entered the mainstream, but video for business usually has to do more than just entertain. I want to look at the three kinds of online video that I have seen and identify what makes them different from each other.

Viral Video

Viral video was the first type of video born from the boom in online video. Viral videos can be expensively put together on a huge marketing budget such as the latest sensation from Evian or they can be cobbled together for the cost of some candy and a few bottles of diet soda.

The success of a viral video is measured by how many people see it. When you make a viral video, you have to consider distribution and promotion. You have to make sure it’s a little unusual or at least unexpected. It certainly has to be original. Viral video is not easy, but, done well, it can raise your profile and bring you traffic.

Conversion Video

Conversion video sits on your business site with a singular goal – to increase the number of conversions from bystanders to buyers, from spectators to subscribers, from visitors to vendees (alliteration is awesome!). Once you set a clear conversion goal, you should measure the impact of your conversion video on that goal.

Conversion video must be accessible, it must be engaging and it must have a clear call to action. Conversion video may not have the style and originality of viral video but it has the virtue of being accountable and, done well, revenue generating.

Educational Video

Education video covers the spectrum of how-tos, tutorials and demos. Educational videos are a great addition to your company’s site because they increase engagement. Educational video can also be a great differentiator for your site which can help build loyalty. A consumer is more likely to purchase equipment from the company that cared enough to teach him how to use it.

Educational videos may also help you to cut down on time spent fielding customer support queries. Educational videos must be clear and precise, but they are less restricted by duration than other types of video. The benefits to your company from educational video may not be felt immediately, but they can help distinguish yourselves in a crowded market.

Conclusion

I’m always thinking about video and the best ways for companies to make the most of it. I think dividing online video into these three groups might help to identify the goals for your video and therefore the best way to measure its success.

Video Ain't What It Used To Be

Video just isn’t video anymore. Or, rather, video isn’t just video anymore. Video has come a long way since the first skateboarding cat did the rounds on YouTube. If video has to do something more than entertain the viewer for 20 seconds then it has to offer more than a one-way viewing experience.

When we sit down to talk with our customers about video they understand that video has to work for them. Our reports consistently show that the longer a viewer spends watching a video, the more likely he or she is to respond to the call to action and achieve the conversion goal set by the site. Viewer engagement is the key to successful video and we are always looking for new ways to engage with the viewer.

The example below explores a number of different ways for the viewer to engage. The narrative of the video is broken up into a series of chapters each with its own link on the left hand side of the player. Some chapters are further divided into sub-chapters. The viewer can choose to watch in any order skipping around to find the items of interest. This reflects the way the viewer might access similar information on a web page.

In addition, this particular video offers a choice of languages. Try switching between the languages using the drop-down menu on the top right of the player. You will notice how the contextual menus on the left side of the player all change to match your choice. Listen and you will hear that the voiceover has also changed. Have a closer look at the content of the video and you will see that the language of the screenshots inside the video has also aligned itself with the language you chose.

Even before you consider the content there is a whole list of things you can do with your video to ensure that your viewers will remain engaged.

After this video went live for eBay it was seen over fifty thousand times in the first few weeks. Each view averaged six sub-chapters proving the video’s ability to engage the viewer and persuade them to watch more.

Video is not just about the content of your video anymore. You need to consider the presentation and delivery of your video as an essential part of its success. You spend an enormous amount of energy refining your message, but what are you doing to ensure that people are paying attention when you talk?

Trigger Happy

Relax, this is not going to be a blog post about gun control. Here at EyeView, a trigger is the name we have for the part of a webpage that lets you know there is a video to be watched. When you click on the trigger the video starts playing. The trigger can be a static graphic or it can be animated. It can just be a picture or it can have text. If it has text there is an unlimited number of variations to the text that you might try.

Once we have proven for a customer (using A/B testing) that the very fact of introducing a video to a site increases conversion, we like to make sure that as many people as possible elect to watch that video. Here we will look at a number of different triggers that we are currently experimenting with. The intention is not to present definitive evidence of which triggers are more effective at driving views, but to look at the different options. Of course even if you think you know which of two triggers would be more effective, the only way to be certain is to test them against each other simultaneously with real site visitors.

Leaving the comparison testing aside for a moment, let's just take a look at some really interesting triggers that the team here have been working on. Over the next few weeks we'll be testing these "in the field" and I'll be able to report back to you which ones were most effective and for which sites.

Try this one for starters:

You do not have the Flash Player installed.
Click Here to install it.

The trigger sits on the page like any other element, but then every few seconds it rattles commanding your attention and giving you the call to action you need to click and start watching the video. Notice also that this trigger shows you exactly how long the video is going to last. Is this more or less likely to encourage someone to watch?

Next up is a different kind of trigger. This one has been designed to reflect the messaging of the site and to encourage visitors who need more information to watch the video that will help them decide to download.

You do not have the Flash Player installed.
Click Here to install it.

This next trigger is a cheeky introduction to the video that uses some of the elements of the video to encourage people to watch. The trigger uses the same kind of animation as the video itself and maintains the tone of the surrounding site. With all those arrows pointing to the play button, it couldn't be clearer.

You do not have the Flash Player installed.
Click Here to install it.

Finally for this post I am going to showcase a simple trigger. This one is elegant and minimalist with a little extra encouragement for you when you roll the cursor over it. Go on, give it a try.

You do not have the Flash Player installed.
Click Here to install it.

That's just a selection of the things we are working on here. Depending on the response I get to this post I may put up some more for you to look at another time. Let me know in the comments which ones you prefer and why you think they'd be more effective.

Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin And Me

Chris Anderson started it. Not content with being the inspiration for a million tedious PowerPoint slides with his concept/article/book The Long Tail, Mr. Anderson has turned another of his coffee-break notions into a best-selling book.

The book is titled Free: The Future Of A Radical Price. I haven’t read it yet although it’s on order from Amazon (at the not-radical price of $not-free). Based on the wealth of information surrounding the book’s launch, Anderson seems to be making the point that you can make a lot of money in business by giving things away for free. It’s an interesting hypothesis and I’m looking forward to all 288 pages of explanation and qualification.

In the meantime, Malcolm Gladwell reviewed the book for The New Yorker and laid into Anderson and his idea. Gladwell was particularly upset over Anderson’s vision for the future of journalism, hardly surprising given Gladwell’s (and, to be fair, Anderson’s) primary source of income.

Then Seth Godin weighed in with a post titled simply “Malcolm is Wrong” and it all kicked off.

For my part the whole argument is kind of academic although I can’t help noticing that none of the people arguing whether or not ‘things’ should be free actually make ‘things’ (ideas and opinions are not 'things' and the market for them has always been volatile). The discussion of whether or not the output of serious journalistic endeavors should be free is entirely spurious. The business of newspapers has never been news. The business of newspapers is selling advertising. A competitive market that drives down the price point for subscription all the way to free in order to sell more advertising is not in the slightest bit radical (sorry, Mr. Anderson) or even unusual. It’s business.

It strikes me reading Gladwell’s petulant review that he doesn’t understand the business he's in. No wonder he’s so upset.

One of the joys of working with EyeView’s broad range of customers is that each of them comes to us with a clear understanding of their business. They know exactly what income streams are important and they build their business models to support them.

Once the hoo-hah dies down, and the debate over Free has subsided, our customers will still be looking for new ways to boost conversion and increase revenue. If that means giving stuff away for free, so be it, but that’s just one weapon in the marketer’s arsenal and hardly a revolutionary one.

Do you understand your business and do you think the idea of free is radical?