EyeView's Blog

5 Things To Think About For Your Video

I came across this great post from a month or two back that I had to share with you. It’s from Christopher Ming Ryan’s excellent blog entitled The Way We Watch.

When he’s not blogging, Ryan works as a writer, producer and director at Wheelhouse Communications supporting clients like PepsiCo, AT&T and Random House.

The stated purpose of the blog is to talk about producing video in a 2.0 world, but rather than talk philosophically about his subject, Ryan focuses on the pragmatic with post after post delivering usable tips and useful recommendations. 

This post is one of the more lightweight entries, but it covers such great ground that I want to give it another airing.

Using links to one great article and four YouTube videos, Ryan presents a list of five key factors in creating a video for marketing.

1. Make sure it’s memorable – Clear images and language
2. Use sound to hook your viewers and keep them watching
3. Surprise the viewer or at least give him/her a reason to watch to the end
4. Give the viewer a choice – every click means greater engagement
5. Leave them wanting more

Much of this ground has been covered elsewhere, so it’s nice to see it presented in such a succinct way with great links to back it up.

Web Video Is Key

One of the joys of the Internet is finding other people who really get whatever it is that you are interested in. I stumbled across Wayne Ford and his site Video is Key recently and was excited by his take on all things video.

Wayne comes to video as a producer and editor for Buzz Media and it’s clear that he understands what it takes to make great video. But, more importantly, Wayne is able to articulate how to make video work online for bloggers and small businesses.

I downloaded Wayne’s report, Web Video Is Key (cheekily subtitled: A Kickass Report For Bloggers And Internet Marketers) and found plenty of great ideas in it.

One of the bravest things Wayne does is to segment web video into a number of types of video such as The Introduction Video, Product Demos and Customer Testimonials. He includes with each description a suggested time limit. It’s one of the things I am always concerned about when dealing with customers who have a clear idea of their message and are convinced that every element of it must be delivered during the course of the video. Pre-defining limits for your video’s duration is a tough thing to do and a tougher thing to enforce with willful clients, but it’s great to see someone putting this down in print.

The rest of the document is packed with useful tips, case studies and links and I highly recommend that you take a look.

Testing, Testing,... one, two,... one, two,...

In case you’re still unclear, I’ve been thinking a lot about testing recently. Testing takes me back to my 6^th grade science classes. How did we determine the effect of salt on boiling water? We tested it. How did we prove that the extension of a spring is proportional to the weight hanging off it? We tested it.

Testing is good, and not just for proving things people already know. Testing also helps us to establish credibility for the things we think we know. Testing may even provide evidence to contradict things we were sure we knew.

There is a vast wealth of advice available for marketers that consists almost entirely of supposition, subjectivity, anecdotal speculation, conjecture, inference and guesswork. Some of the hypotheses proposed online will eventually be tested, but until that time it’s impossible to estimate how many will be proven true and how many false. One thing is certain - just because something worked in one instance, there is no guarantee it will work again or as well in another.

For example, we could say that video increases conversion until we were blue in the face and it would be meaningless. Instead we go out and prove it time and again for each of our customers for each of their landing pages.

This is an actual screen capture from our report platform that shows the increased conversion of one of our customers’ landing pages when it was tested simultaneously, with 50% of the visitors getting the page with video (Embedded Player) and 50% getting the existing video-less page (No Changes). As you can see, the page with the video converted over 30% more visitors than the page without. Tested and proven.

At EyeView, we made ourselves a rule - No Guessing. We promise our customers that when we present a strategy to increase conversion it will not be based on our ‘stamp of authority’. It will not rely on our ‘combined years of experience’. It will not leverage our ‘inside understanding of your industry’.

When EyeView delivers a video solution that claims to increase conversion we will show you exactly what we did and precisely where it worked. The reason we can do that is because we tested it. We tested it when it didn’t work and we carried on testing it until it did.

Always remember that when you make an assumption, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and… er… ‘mption’.

The 10 Types Of People Visiting Your Site

One of my favorite math-nerd jokes goes like this: There are 10 kinds of people in the world – those who understand binary and those who don’t.

I’m not sure the divisions between customer types are so clearly delineated, but I thought I would try to identify some of the groups.

Some of your visitors are Readers. Readers love to read. They read everything. Readers read your Homepage and your About Us page. They go through each of your tabs seeing how much stuff you have to read and then they read some of it. If you have more documentation to read, they may even be prepared to give you their email just so they can get something more to read. Readers like certain kinds of products. Books, for example. Back in the day when Amazon was a struggling bookseller, they had one key advantage over bricks and mortar retailers that wasn’t just about inventory. Amazon was a place where you could go to read all about a product that was made for specifically for Readers. Awesome.

If your target audience is Readers, you had better make sure you have something good for them to read when they get to your site.

Then there are Clickers. Clickers like to click things. Remember when you went to the Science Museum for your 4^th grade outing? The Clickers were the ones who ran from exhibit to exhibit pulling levers and flipping switches. If there’s a button, they’ll push it. Then they’ll push it again. They’ll click and click until there’s nothing left to click.

If you want to sell something to Clickers, it’s best to make them reach it by clicking, probably more than once.

In pedagogical circles, they call Readers and Clickers “active learners”. Teachers are trained to help students become active learners so they can go out into the world and discover things for themselves.

The corollary is, of course, “passive learners”.

Passive learners are Watchers and Listeners. Watchers and Listeners watch and listen for as long as there is something engrossing enough to keep them. They’re in no hurry to move on as long as they are engaged. But, make no mistake about passive learners, they’re still great learners. Passive learners allow themselves the time to get the information they need to make good decisions. If you deliver a compelling argument to a passive learner he may just stick around long enough to be persuaded.

The reality is that none of us are solely one thing or the other. We all have periods when we prefer to be active learners and other times when we need to watch and listen. Getting the balance right to convert your visitors means being open to testing different options and being smart enough not to rely on a single medium to get the job done.