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7 Awesome Video Strategies to Skyrocket Customer Engagement, Conversion and Acquisition ENGAGE
VIDEO
CONVERT
ACQUIRE Make The Numbers. Make It Work. Make It Easy.
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Digital Storytelling at its Best. Who’s Doing it Right:
As the world’s largest soft pretzel franchise, Auntie Anne’s stores can be found in malls, transportation sites, colleges and universities, and non-traditional shopping and entertainment centers around the globe. Check out how they use video of real franchise owners talking directly about their experiences. Engaging and informative, it makes you want to become part of the business!
When Words Won’t Do, Show Your Story
7 Awesome Video Strategies to Skyrocket Customer Engagement, Conversion and Acquisition Customer engagement, conversion and acquisition. They’re the hallmark of your Digital Presence and the reasons for your story. But people are busy. They don’t have time to read everything you write. Even if you have an amazing story to tell.
This is important. Pay attention. Video drives engagement. It drives interaction. It drives more time on a page, more page views, more purchases, and everything in between. No, it won’t solve world hunger or bring about world peace but video in your story can make it stand out from the competition. Quite simply, with video, you can really rock. However, not all companies know how to optimize online video for the best results. And the difference in doing it right can make you a digital super hero or a digital super flop. With that in mind, here are seven of the most important tips for increasing the effectiveness of Web video marketing, each of which stands a good chance of bringing substantial increases in traffic and, ultimately, profits to your Web property.
1. Educate, Entertain, and Inform Before You Sell Imagine captivating your customer in that moment where your audience is looking for just that right piece of information, and you’re there, with a crisp, engaging, informative video. The rise of full Internet adoption and increased search engine use often leads to many brand interactions taking place between a consumer and a brand before that consumer ever talks to you or sees your product. This phenomenon is what Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth. It’s where marketing happens, where information gathering happens, and where consumers make choices that affect the success and failure of nearly every brand in the world, no matter what industry you’re in. Keep in mind you are creating and sharing valuable video content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers: Customers don’t want just advertising video when making purchasing decisions, they want valuable information. Customers crave and search for meaningful, engaging content. And it’s helpful that Google rewards highly engaging (therefore highly trafficked) content with good search results placement so more customers can find your content. Customers reward meaningful video content by spreading it via social networks, generating powerful word-of-mouth exposure for you.
So, rather than creating videos focused on selling products, publish videos that help teach prospective customers different ways in which they can improve their lives. This approach allows your website visitors to find the educational content that best meets their specific needs. Pair this educational outreach with direct calls to action, and viewers can then be steered in the direction of your products that will help them reach their ultimate goals.
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Digital Storytelling at its Best. Who’s Doing it Right:
As the flagship brand of Pro Performance Sports, SKLZ develops innovative athletic performance and skill development training products, technology, and knowledge for serious athletes of all ages, skill levels, and sports. Check out how SKLZ uses videos to show off their Lacrosse training equipment.
When Words Won’t Do, Show Your Story
2. Context and Content: Short Versus Long-Form Video The average user spends more than 21 hours per month (up 47 percent from 2012) watching more than 200 content videos (up 20 percent from 2012). Americans’ growing interest in long-form video content is evident from the fact that the average length of an online content video is now a full 5.6 minutes (comScore Video Metrix®; March 2013 U.S. Online Video Rankings). The Web supports both short-form video in the page and long-form video that can be viewed as a full-screen, broadcast-quality experience. The market is moving more toward catering to the digital generation’s attention span—quick videos that are aimed to inspire, provoke, or excite. Short-form videos are here to stay and can lay the foundation for long-form content. So think about your strategy now. When it comes to deploying video clips, it’s important to create context. Video clips work better when there is some frame of reference for the video on the page. You can create context in many ways: Integrate the video into an article about the same topic.
Publish the video and brief accompanying text on a blog.
Put the video on pages that include descriptive content.
Link to the video from pages with other related content.
Allow comments and ratings so users can create their own context about the video.
Discovery Networks International operates one of the most extensive international television businesses in the media industry, delivering quality content designed to inform, entertain, and inspire the world. Reaching more than 1.3 billion cumulative subscribers in 217 countries and territories, Discovery delivers global appeal and local relevance, connecting with diverse audiences by providing context for the ever-changing world. The Discovery Channel was able to increase their viewership of video streams by 123% using SEO best practices. (Discovery Digital Media, 2010).
3. Tag it, Tag it, and Tag it: Make the Most of Your Metadata The success of online video is due in large part to effective organization. Create custom tags for each of your video clips highlighting the educational aspect and the product if one is featured. Visitors can browse your video library or pull up playlists of instructional videos using a keyword search. Keywords help with search engine optimization (SEO) as well, adding information about videos that can be picked up when search engines crawl the web. This approach will allow your website visitors to find the educational content that best meets their specific needs. Use this educational outreach in conjunction with strong calls to action, and you’ll be directing viewers towards the products and services that will help them achieve their objectives. Metadata tags also allow you to suggest content that is relevant to a particular video segment. You can include information about any product featured with each clip, but also offer recommendations for further exploration through topic-specific tags.
4. Share and Share Alike: Pay Attention to Your URLs The Hallmark Channel is the quintessential 24-hour television destination for family-friendly programming and a leader in the production of original movies. One of the fastest-growing major ad-supported cable networks since its launch in 2001, and reaching more than 87 million U.S. homes, Hallmark Channel delivers on a 100-year legacy and a brand promise that resonates with viewers. Checkout how The Hallmark Channel creates specialized landing pages and URLs for key movies and videos.
“Shareability” is one of video’s biggest strengths. Give each video clip its own specific URL so that links lead directly to video playback, and not to a page where users have to search for the video they want. These individual URLs also improve SEO by creating more links back to your website. Secondly, offer readily identifiable buttons to share each video via email, link, embed code, Facebook, and Twitter. Through these integrations, you are encouraging your visitors not only to make one-time use of your video content, but also to spread the information about your videos with others.
5. Make Your Mark: Brand Your Video Player Because video is meant to be shared, it’s critical for marketers to brand the experience in as many visual ways as possible. This includes branding the video player itself so that when it’s embedded in other sites, viewers still associate the content with you. Skin your own video player by using company-specific colors and incorporating your logo into the “play” button. The result is that users get a unified brand experience on your site, but will also tie the video content to your brand when viewing it on another site.
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The National Football League (NFL) is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. Check out how the NFL keeps its brand integrity with a fully branded video player, even when licensing content to third-party sites.
When Words Won’t Do, Show Your Story
6. It’s 12am; Do You Know What Your Customers Are Watching? Capture Key Analytics The best video publishers learn from audience behaviors and refine their content accordingly. They insert ads and promotional copy at just the right moment to maximize engagement. They capture the data on video views to determine which video clips are the most engaging, and which products and demos are most interesting to customers. Data analysis includes not just how many hits each video receives, but also how long viewers stick with each video, where they drop off, and which types of content—educational videos versus product introduction videos—perform best. This data can be compiled directly from your video player, and from integrated application acceleration technology that monitors network conditions and dynamically delivers the highest quality playback experience. Understanding the effectiveness of website video is critical for ongoing content development, but beyond that, viewer engagement data is valuable for defining and segmenting customer audiences. That, in turn, helps with everything from marketing and sales efforts to product development strategy. By optimizing video content and delivery, you can expand your company’s reach and increase customer and partner satisfaction. These lessons can be applied across the Web for businesses looking to improve site engagement and drive marketing success. Oh, and by the way, what are some of the numbers for video? How about a 400% increase in viewer engagement1; a tenfold increase in click-throughs2; a 100% improvement in visitor retention3; and a whopping 560% increase in site visitation rates4. Not bad, huh?
7. Round Up the Roamers: Capture Your Mobile Audience According to The International Telecommunication Union, there are 6.8 billion mobile subscribers worldwide5. As this number continues to grow, the potential for reaching this demographic expands. Pushing content out to mobile devices broadens the range of customers a company is able to reach. But, mobile can stink too. Well, not being able to watch content on it can. Seeing an HD video on a tablet or smartphone is pretty awesome. But it can stink when you are the one responsible for getting it there. Why? Because all of these devices seem to require something different. Want to get to the iPad? Well that’s different than delivering to Windows-powered Nokia phones and different than delivering to older Android devices in India. Even if you become the master of mobile video, you’ll soon realize that there are other complexities, which will make you want to tear your hair out. Like managing individual URLs for each video format and device. Look for a way to enable mobile viewing via a single URL. Your ability to automate time-consuming processes like transcoding, formatting, and delivering to different devices is more than a headache-prevention strategy. It’s a wise investment decision that lets you redirect attention to the engagement-boosting, audience-pleasing, brand-supercharging tasks that drive results.
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F limp.net: Fuse IQ Video Statistics, June 2012: http://www.fuseiq.com/video-statistics This comes from #22 101 Online Video Statistics for 2012 [The REELMARKETER shared that Google sees an average clickthrough rate of nearly .9% for in-stream video which is almost 10x higher than the average for flash display (.09%) M arketingSherpa, Content Marketing, December 2011, http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/videos-attract-300-more-traffic# MarketingProfs The World in 2013: ICT Facts & Figures: http://www.itu.int/en/ITUD/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013.PDF
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When Words Won’t Do, Show Your Story
Last Thoughts Whether they show how your products work, entertain the world, or prove how much everyone loves your company, videos infuse your digital story with the energy it needs to keep above the noise. For yesterday’s digital storyteller, using video was bringing out the big guns. For today’s, it’s an expected part of any good story. How does your video story stack up? Will it lead to skyrocketing customer acquisition rates and truly help your business take off?
About LLNW Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq:LLNW) is a global leader in Digital Presence Management. Limelight’s Orchestrate Digital Presence Platform is an integrated suite of cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, which allows organizations to optimize all aspects of their online digital presence across web, mobile, social, and large screen channels. Orchestrate leverages Limelight’s scalable, high-performance global network to offer advanced features for: web content management; website personalization; content targeting; online video publishing; mobile enablement and monetization; content delivery; transcoding; and cloud storage—combined with social media integration and powerful analytics. Limelight’s team of digital presence experts helps organizations streamline processes and optimize business results across all customer interaction channels to deliver exceptional multi-screen experiences, improve brand awareness, drive revenue, and enhance their customer relationships—all while reducing costs. For more information, please visit www.limelight.com, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/llnw.
Want to learn more? Contact us for more information about Limelight Networks and our services: Limelight Networks, Inc. 222 South Mill Avenue Tempe, AZ 85281 United States 866-200-5463 +1 602-850-5050
solutions@llnw.com
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