one squared presentation: margot da cunha - video as a marketing element

VIDEO AS A MARKETING ELEMENT: 3X PLAY RATES, CONVERT LEADS, AND UP ENGAGEMENT

VIDEO AS A MARKETING ELEMENT: 3X PLAY RATES, CONVERT LEADS, AND UP ENGAGEMENT

Hello! Im MargotCustomer Success Manager at WistiaHelps customers achieve their goals with videoWrites for the Wistia and WordStream blogs

#WistiaFest / @twitter-handle

Hi there! Thanks for taking time out of your day to join us! Im ___ part of the team at Wistia in Cambridge, MA. Were a video marketing platform built for businesses. In simple terms, we give you the tools to customize the look and feel of videos on your site, and the data to measure their performance.

So my hope is that by the time were done with our call today, youll leave with some really tangible ideas on ways to hit the ground running in your account and start seeing even more ROI on your videos. If youre just starting out with video thats awesome, well also cover some resources thatll be especially helpful for you.

So before we get rolling here, two quick housekeeping items:

Fun Fact: My childhood nickname was The TankCan you guess which one is me?

#WistiaFest / @twitter-handle

The Value of Video

But first, a brief history

What was going down in 2006?

YouTube Made Online Video Possible

Businesses Were Not Making Video for the Web

Now we cant go without videos!

By 2019, 80% of consumer internet traffic will be video.-Cisco

Perhaps youve seen this figure, or something close to it: By 2019, 80% of all consumer internet traffic will be video, up from 64% in 2014.

Pretty remarkable stuff, but that, my friends, is what we like to call a vanity metric:

It gives no indication of quality, but also makes perfect sense video is a rich medium it takes up more space on the internet. What really matters here is:

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59% of senior executives report theyd rather watch avideo than read text.- Forbes Insights

People in decision making roles now prefer video as a source of information.

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64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. comScore

People are also more likely to buy after watching a video. This holds true whether its online retail or B2B transactions.

73% of B2B marketers say video positively impacts ROI.-ReelSEO

A significant majority of marketers using video say it supports their bottom line.

The word video in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%.-HubSpot

Even just the word video significantly increases the likelihood of an email being opened.

The other thing to mention is that high quality video technology has become much simpler to use we all have HD cameras in our pockets and bags now.

Build a human connectionGenerate leads & drive actionLearn from your viewers

Build a Human Connection

#WistiaFest / @ChappyMargot

First up, making simple, effective videos with a personal touch. This is Jay and Thad from Buildium, its a platform that helps landlords manage their properties.

Jay on the left is on the Customer Success team, Thad is on the marketing team and together one of the questions they work on is how best to onboard and grow relationships with new, potentially high value clients. And video is playing a key role in that process.

When Buildium secures a new signup theres an onboarding email series that triggers, and one of those emails looks like this:

Theres Jay with a quick note and a clear, visual CTA to watch the video. When you click through on that link you get to this page:

Highest Click-Through-RateIncrease in Meetings Booked75% Average Viewer Engagement

It's great to be able to turn to the executive team and say because of some very short videos we shot with our customer success consultants, we generated 20 new appointments to discuss a product that we just rolled out."

Heres what Thad in marketing had to say about it:

So if you dont believe me after 1 example, A. I like your style and B. Id encourage you to give it a shot. Do an experiment with some of your sales follow up emails Id be willing to be youll start seeing some of the same trends better click through rates, higher response and more meetings booked.

Record Videos

JOHNNY APPLESEEDType a quote here.


So this is a post from Moz' Whiteboard Friday blog series theyre a powerhouse in SEO strategy and as you can see, they do not shy away from having fun and making thumbnails with a personal touch.

What well cover

Custom human thumbnail~30%higher play rateCustomize Player Color19%higher play rate

Its probably evident from the quality of this image, but its worth mentioning that staging a photo specifically for the thumbnail is now part of their shooting process for videos.

I can say without hesitation that this does make a tangible difference in engaging and retaining viewers. We pulled data on this at Wistia and what we found was across all the videos hosted in our system, ones that had a custom thumbnail applied had about a 30% higher initial play rate. In other words, the percentage of people who load the video on a page and then decide to click play.

Youll also notice that the player color here is customized to match the Moz brand, which in another data pull we found results on average in a 19% higher play rate.

So the lesson here, even before the video starts playing, do some thinking about how to best grab your audiences attention and create that personal connection.

TAKEAWAY: Use a Custom Thumbnail with a Smiling Human Face Making Eye Contact

AND PUT PEOPLE IN YOUR VIDEOS!

Drive Action Directly Through Your Videos


Generate Leads Directly in Your Videos!

Add Call-to-Actions linking to a URL

Add Annotation Links

SQL List Alert Sales!

Video Voicemails

36.9% higher close rate!!!

We knock these out in 1.5-2 hours. Theyre not perfect, the lightings kind of shotty, but its such a differentiating factor that really creates a personal connection with people on the fence and sways them towards us ultimately.

But when should you be using these features?

Where should you be placing them within your videos?

What copy should you be using in your CTAs?

We analyzed data

3.6 million customizations481,514 Call to Actions 15,000 turnstilesFrom 324,015 Wistia-hosted videos

The average Turnstile conversation rate is 11%, but who wants to be average?

Placing a Turnstile in the first 10-20% of the video lead to a 43% conversion rate!

Most people are placing their CTAs at the end butCTAs in the middle receive > conversions


Identify places where a Call to Action would be *useful*#WistiaFest / @ChappyMargot


***Power Words***

***Action Words***

Make Timeline Actions Part of the Production Process

Learn from Your Viewers


Learn from viewers

After all were at an Inbound event, lets check out what HubSpot is doing.

This is Dee Dee, formerly of HubSpot now actually at Wistia. HubSpot uses video across their properties, but a really important use for them is their Inbound Certification trainings, which I imagine a number of folks in here have seen.

And what HubSpot has done particularly well here is to allow data on viewer engagement to drive and inform their strategy over time

So what does that mean in practice. Well, in 2014, Dee Dee and her team took a look at all their Inbound Certification videos, and what they found was about 50% viewer engagement across the board. In other words, the average viewer was staying on to watch about 50% of the content.

What well cover

Make it personalLearn from viewersFocus on lead gen

(For illustrative purposes!)

Learn from viewersShorter videos = higher engagementGreater understanding of Inbound

Increased likelihood of new account

Out of that initial insight they came a hypothesis shorter videos can produce higher engagement, which leads to greater understanding of the Inbound philosophy, which ultimately leads to an increased likelihood of a new HubSpot account.

Learn from viewers

Viewer engagement up from50% to 65%

So they ended up chopping about 90 minutes off of the certification videos while delivering virtually the same exact content. As a result their overall engagement rate rose to 65%, which was a fantastic jump in a short amount of time, and a set of learnings they were able to apply to new content.

In a nutshell, they avoided making assumptions about what viewers wanted to see, they took the time to learn from their audiences behavior, and in the end they took a big step forward in overall engagement.

Not to suggest shorter videos is always the answer, though often it is. But when you think about the bigger picture of what this progress means, gone are the days where you have to wonder about what happens to your audiences attention on a video after they press play.

Individual viewer attribution

In fact theres a few different ways you can associate an individual viewers contact information with their specific viewing activity.

The most advanced progression of this is actually to pass viewer level information to marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Pardot and Marketo, so you can qualify leads and move folks through your funnel based on viewing activity. For example, raising leads scores for people who watch a video to 75% completion, or triggering an alert to the lead ownwer

Cool, but we dont do video

@ChappyMargot

At this point maybe some folks are thinking ok, thats all well and good, but we dont actually have time or resources to prioritize making video, either internally or with an agency.

And I totally get that, so I want to close with some tips and tricks that are a pretty light lift to implement.

The first one is that one of the simplest, most effective videos you can make is a product video, thats screen-recording based. Heres an example of one we have at Wistia:

Ok, so, youre making a product screencasttake that opportunity to make a personal connection with your audience. Trevor here whos narrating is no longer a disembodied voice, it lightens up the whole video once hes introduced right at the start. This almost always produces higher engagement and if you dont believe me, I can help you setup a test.

As youre looking at this you might also be thinking Wow,

Glowing angelically

Trevor is really glowing angelically, that must be some kind of fancy setup!

Wistias studio setup~$4,800Wistias DIY setup5D Mark III DSLR - $2,00035mm 1.4 Sigma lens - $800Cool lights & stands - $1,000Mic & audio recorder- $650Tripod- $250Seamless paper roll- $50iPhone video cameraDIY lighting kit - $100iPhone tripod adapter - $30Basic tripod- $75Seamless paper roll- $50~$250

Well lets take a quick look at that, because I promise that you can do this too. Heres two similar shots to compare side by side of Chris, our head hancho with video. Pretty darn close right?

This image on the left was shot with our professional studio setup, pretty fancy gear that cost around $5k total.

This image on the right? A do-it-yourself lighting setup with items available at any hardware store, plus the iPhone video camera total spend, around $250.

Which brings me to my next tip Wistia can be a resource to help anyone make some basic shots look professional, but more broadly, a few lighting and setup tricks really go a long way. We have a DIY studio kit that Im happy to share, in fact I just tweeted it @jgbsilberg

Find our DIY lighting guide on Twitter @ChappyMargot

Making your first video guide on Twitter @ChappyMargot

Find the scripting guide on Twitter @ChappyMargot

So thats our co-founder Brendan talking about bridges, because he didnt have a script. Very few people can just get up in front of a camera and ad-lib, you have to go in with a plan knowing what youre going to say, and sometimes thats not always immediately clear. We also have a guide to concepting and scripting that I definitely want to point you towards.

Just one more thing, and forgive me for being cheesy get loose, get creative, and have fun. Showing your sense of humor is awesome for so many reasons, not the least of which is that your team will get really excited about the prospect of being part of it.

Thank [email protected]@ChappyMargot

one squared presentation: margot da cunha - video as a marketing element

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