A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.   For any company selling to business buyers, the marketing (MQL) to sales (SQL) handoff can easily cause failure despite individually having good marketing and good sales execution. Marketing and sales are teaming to leverage video during that crucial handoff period when the sales person first engages.

We are seeing organizations use a personalized Sales Follow-up video app to help foster a trusted relationship.  They provide relevant and authentic video content to help the prospect evaluate the offering.  The nature of good short “business casual” video content is that it communicates a lot of information in a short amount of time, making it much easier to consume.  Here is an example from Alejandro at Attivio:

Why is this handoff so perilous?    As Nigel Edelshain (CEO of Sales 2.0 LLC) stated so well in a guest blog post on Hubspot – this is the time when all the Inbound Marketing moves to “outbound land”.  The sales person now needs to engage with the prospect and make that outbound call.    Culturally most people ’s natural instinct is to avoid sales people, especially when they have no personal relationship.

In old school face-to-face selling, sales people engaged with the prospect much earlier, beginning the process of trust building.  In today’s Inbound Marketing world sales people enter the cycle much later and often have no relationship with the prospect.

What techniques and strategies are you using to help make the sales person successful at the time of handoff?

With the introduction of easy-to-use video cameras like the Flip, Kodak Zi8, and smartphones like the iPhone 4, high quality videos are being made every day by people who never would have shot video before.  Sure, there were camcorders back in the day, but they were such a pain to use that parents would only break them out on Billie’s birthday or on Janie’s first dance recital.  These days, the amount of video being shot is growing and Cisco projects it will be 90% of consumer internet traffic by 2013.

Along with the growth of consumer usage of these cameras, we’re experiencing a rise in business usage as well.  A testament to the interest level is that two of our most popular blog posts have been Business Casual Video and Produce Video Without The Producer.  90% of our customers use either the Flip or the Kodak Zi8 to capture the video clips for the Video Apps they make with our software.

You’d think that this movement would be very positive for video production companies.  After all, if video is more pervasive, then that means more demand for professional video producers.  Based on my interactions with producers over the past year and posts I’ve read in message boards around the web,  producers generally seem scared that their craft is going to disappear.  Here’s an interesting excerpt from a post on CreativeCow:

Forget the Flip for a moment, it’s just a symptom, the underlying problem is that video is becoming a commodity to them and the Flip allows them to exercise that theory. It’s no longer the arcane alchemy art/voodoo of ex-hippies and artists, it is something they think (I said “they”) anybody can now do, since after all, “they” are proving to themselves anyone can do it.

Like any disruptive innovation, there is a chance that these new video cameras along with innovative software will eventually kill the art of business video production.  I don’t think that will be the case.  Instead, the new technology is opening up more opportunities to use video than ever before.  Who would have though of doing a video blog in the 90′s?  Who would have thought of hiring a video production firm to promote a webinar?  Nobody would.  It was too hard and way too expensive.

What we’re finding is that by using video in new and innovative ways on their website, in sales interactions, and in customer support, our customers are getting “over the hump” with video.  They are learning the lingo and how to use the equipment.  In addition, they are getting an appetite for more video.  A number of our customers have followed a similar pattern:

1. Video was an enigma to them.  They thought video was hard.  They were afraid to try it.
2. Using our software along with our coaching, they made a few marketing and/or sales videos that were successful
3. Do-it-yourself video quickly became a key part of their marketing and sales lifecycle
4. After several months of doing this, they ask us to help them to find an accomplished professional producer to help them with their “Homepage Video”

In the long term, I believe that innovations in technology and software are good for professional video producers, as long as they are willing to adapt their business models appropriately.  Sure, some of them will go out of business, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Interested in DIY Business Video?  Download our eBook Best Practices For Using Video To Convert Visitors To Leads

Photo Credit: Jon Gos

At VisibleGains, we’re constantly conceptualizing new product features and website updates.  We used to do much of this work on the whiteboard, but the whiteboard doesn’t allow us to validate these concepts with prospects or customers.  To satisfy this need, we began using a product called  Balsamiq last year and we couldn’t be happier.

Balsamiq might not replace your spec-level wireframes, but it will help you to quickly define a website or product concept for others to look at.  Also, the desktop version allows you to make clickable mockups so you can get an understanding of the user experience and overall flow.  Take a look at the mockup I made below of a concept for the next version of our Video App builder.  I did this in about 10 minutes.  If you’ve tried our product, you will recognize the look & feel, and I didn’t have to write any code.   It doesn’t get much easier than that.

We’re about to begin a series of usability testing using both on-site testers as well as UserTesting.com.  In addition to testing the software as the developers release it, we’re planning on using the clickable versions of Balsamiq mockups to test new concepts.  I’ll write a follow-up post letting you know how it turns out.

A great feature on the iPhone 4 is the ability to record HD video, and now with the iMovie App you can edit videos right on your phone!  Take a look at the application below for a peek into iMovie on the iPhone.

With the ability to record and edit HD video on such a mobile device and without requiring any other equipment you can pretty much produce your own video anywhere.  Imagine being able to send a personalized follow up video minutes after meeting someone!   This is a great way to get people to engage with you.  You don’t need to be a professional to record video, and now all you need is your phone.

If you’re planning on recording with the iPhone, here are a few tips and tricks to consider when recording:

• Only the camera on the back is an HD camera.  The front facing camera is not HD and is not widescreen.
• There is an LED flash you can turn on when recording video with the rear camera.  Great for low light areas or finding your keys under the couch.
• There is no stabilization feature.  Try placing it on something sturdy or holding it with your hand placed on something solid.
• The microphone is on the bottom.  If you are holding the phone from the bottom when recording you may be covering the mic and in turn muffling your audio.
• You will need a computer to pull the HD footage off the phone.  Email, MMS, and Mobile Me uploading will compress the video.
• You can add your own music when editing as long as it’s not Rights Protected.
• Remember to have fun.  You’re going to make mistakes, everyone does, and no one gets it right the first time.  Stay positive so when you do get it right you look positive and wont send the wrong message to the people watching your video.

Your Comments Are Welcome……SO COMMENT!

This is Part 3 of a series of posts on Tuning Video aimed at helping companies get more mileage from the videos on their website (Part 1 on Getting People to Launch Your Video is available here and Part 2 which starts to focus on Keeping Them In Your Video is here).  Typically, sites can expect to achieve 20–200% increase in conversion through the application of the techniques across this series of posts.

What video lengths and structures work well?

In the early web days, companies would fund websites that were simply well produced creatively and now they demand that the website looks good and it generates leads.  In order to achieve the second part, a huge optimization process was employed around site navigation and the introduction of calls to action that were seen by some as squeezing the creative process.  The ultimate result was that we all learned what the right balance was and where creativity could really have an impact.

Percentage of Audience that Drops Off with Video Length

Similarly, video is just starting this process.  Here are some initial techniques that we evolved while working with customers on over 200 videos in the last 12 months:

• Keep video segments short and snackable.  As you can see in the chart above, the audience starts to drop off significantly between 1 and 2 minutes.  I would focus on 60 seconds as a good target and if you go a bit long than that’s fine.  If you are doing a longer format (like a webinar), then offer the user a short teaser and then allow them to Opt-In to a longer video.
• Use the sandwich technique for opening and closing scenes around a core video which is the “sandwich meat”.  For example, a 10 second on-camera welcome followed by a 1 minute screen demo that closes with a 10 second on-camera summary with a suggested next step works very well.  If your video is longer, then you can alternate being on-camera and showing a demo to keep it interesting.
• Focus on making the video conversational and avoid heavy marketing language.  Another way to think about this writing for the ear rather than writing for the eye.  To test a script, try reading it out loud and timing it before you even get near the camera.  Anything that feels weird or is hard to say should be simplified until it feels like something you might say to someone across the table.
• Be very careful with transitions (fades to black, music interludes) and summarization language.  These are very dangerous points for user drop-off as they signal “it may be time to change the channel.”  Instead use teasers and calls to action to carry users through those juncture points.

What special things should you do if you are using interactive video?

Simply put, interactive video is video that employs interactive elements such as overlays, calls to action, or branching.  When working with these capabilities, think about the video as a video microsite when you are tuning.  Some key considerations:

• Don’t offer competing calls to action.  Any good video experience should direct the user to take a single next step whether that is to download a whitepaper, sign-up for a webinar, or choose from a set of additional materials.
• It is good to offer similar calls to action in multiple places.  For example, a call to action in the middle of the video offering a link to useful content could be followed a differently worded call to action at the end of the video that fulfills the same goal.  The other benefit of doing this is that first call to action tells the user they are in an interactive video and the second one is more likely to get clicked.
• If you are doing branching video, don’t exceed 1-2 levels of navigation.  Deeper is too confusing and not likely to be navigated.
• Don’t be afraid to offer multiple choices that lead to the same video.  You can learn a lot about how topics should be described to get the most clicks.

Summary

Keep these things in mind as you create and tune your videos and you can get higher engagement time which further educates your audience and prepares them for taking the next step with you.  In the final part of this blog series, I will talk about approaches for Driving Follow-Up Actions in your videos.

Traveling in circles with parents of college aged kids and recent graduates, there is inevitably discussion about the majors their children selected and how will it lead to gainful employment.  For those who remember Mrs. Robinson – Dustin Hoffman was let in on the secret that the hot field was “Plastics”.  For those who loved the movie here is the clip .

I am here to tell you, especially those that are worried about their children who elected to be a liberal arts major, that those young adults are being well trained for one of the fastest growing fields – “Content”.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s), who have seen the success of Inbound Marketing, following Ardath Albee, David Meerman Scott and our friends at Hubspot, know the need for contagious content is unending.  Let me make the case for hiring these wonderfully talented people, who will super charge your content machine.

Here are three skills that are required to be a great creator of engaging, thoughtful content and my ideas as to why liberal arts grads skills are dead on.

1. Write Well: For four years liberal arts students crank out paper after paper and are constantly being pushed to improve the way they communicate. They are trained by the world’s best writers and read all forms of great writing. Who better to do your company’s writing?
2. Think fast, keep it brief: If you have ever sat in on a liberal arts seminar you know that class discussions involve taking hundreds of pages of reading and transforming them into a pithy, economic, and insightful comment on a professors command.
3. Make connections to the things you see around you: Liberal Arts students are constantly forced to apply academic theories to the problems around them. They are bred as critical thinkers who connect government theory to problems in the Obama Administration and are always looking for ways to apply their knowledge to the outside world.
4. Comfortable with using all media – text, pictures, sound and video – to communicate a message.

As an added bonus, being of the Facebook generation these young grads are also natural communicators. They are used to being transparent and are able to handle tons of incoming and outgoing information with ease. All of which will clearly serve them well as content creators.

David Meerman Scott suggests we all hire journalists and I suggest every marketing department hires a liberal arts graduate to be one of the workhorses at the center of the content creation revolution.

Have you hired a recent college graduate to create content?  Are you a recent graduate who joined a marketing department and are doing content?  Share your story and thoughts with us.

Whether you are getting started with making a business video or you’re an expert, it is important that you know how to measure your success.  Every video solution and almost every website analytics solution has some flavor of video measurement, but there are few standards.  In this post, I’ll try to cut through the noise and provide 3 simple tips for measuring.

We like think about video measurement similar to how you think about website measurement.  How many people came to your site, what did they do while they were there, and did they take one of actions that you wanted (i.e. signed up for a webinar, took a free trial, downloaded a white paper, etc.)?

1. Start by measuring the number of views

This is the most popular metric and also one of the most important.  Obviously, if you post a video on your site and you are getting very few views, there could be a problem.  Is it below the fold?  Is the call to action not strong enough?  Or, does the topic of the video not work in the context of that page?  For example, we see very few views of the customer testimonial video at the bottom of our homepage.  The biggest reason for this is that it is a customer testimonial and website visitors landing on our homepage are problem not ready for a testimonial quite yet.  When we’ve embedded testimonials on our pricing page, the number of views were much higher.

In the VisibleGains product, we measure number of views, but also the “Opt-In” rate which is a simple calculation of # video views/# page views.  This basic metric helps our customers to understand whether they are getting better over time or with different placements of the video.  If you use YouTube and Google Analytics on your site, the opt in rate can be calculated pretty easily using the number of video views from YouTube and the number of page views from Google Analytics.

2. Measure your viewers’ engagement with the video

Depending on your video solution, you will likely have a unique way of measuring engagement with your video.  They all pretty much do the same thing, but have different names and look & feel.  YouTube, for example, has the Hot Spots feature which show the most interesting (hottest) parts of your video.  Another visual is that a lot of the web analytics systems have an engagement graph where you can see where viewers are dropping off.

I believe these are interesting tools to use, but they are more complicated than needed for most business video amateurs.  We suggest you start out by simply measuring the average amount of time viewers are spending in your video.  With this metric, you can get a pretty solid understanding if the video is interesting.  Once you get some experience, it might help to dig into the Hot Spots or drop-off charts to further optimize, but we do not recommend them for most early customers due to their complexity.

3. Measure the success your video has on your website conversions

At VisibleGains, we always coach our customers to start with a video to help increase conversion.  The first time you make a video, it can be daunting, so we want to make sure that you can easily see if the video worked.  When video achieves a goal, it makes it easy to justify doing it again, both to yourself and your management team.

If you use VisibleGains or another video solution that has built-in calls-to-action and lead capture forms in the video, you should measure how many video views lead to a click on the call to action or to the lead capture event.  If your solution doesn’t include those features, then you can write custom reports in your website analytics solution to correlate conversions to video views.

Conclusion

Depending on your video solution, you will likely be overwhelmed by the options for measuring video on your website.  When you get more experienced, you can dig into all of the advanced features, but when you are just starting out, it is important to keep an eye on the simple metrics above.  For a good example of these metrics in action, check out this video on a landing page promoting an upcoming webinar.  This was a very easy to make and also had a very short life-cycle.  This made it easy to quickly understand the impact video could have on the customer’s key metrics.

P.S. If you are interested in some of the more advanced topics in this post, let me know in the comments and I will write an advanced video analytics blog post in the coming weeks.  Thanks!

This is Part 2 of a series of posts on Tuning Video aimed at helping companies get more mileage from the videos on their website (Part 1 is available here).  Typically, sites can expect to achieve 20–200% increase in conversion through the application of the techniques across this series of posts.

As discussed last time, there are 3 stages to tuning:

1. Getting People to Launch Your Video
2. Keeping Them In Your Video
3. Driving Follow-Up Actions

This post focuses on Keeping Them In Your Video.  The key questions that I am going to answer are:

• What is the mindset of the viewer that you need to connect with?
• How should videos start to avoid the dreaded bounce?
• What video lengths and structures work well?
• What special things should you do if you are doing an interactive video?

Given the depth of the information, I will cover the first 2 questions in this installment…

What is the mindset of the viewer that you need to connect with?

I believe that most online video viewing behaviors today are strongly biased by a visitor’s prior experience with watching YouTube videos, watching short video segments in the TV news, and using a traditional remote control to channel surf.  This leads to a few important tenets:

• Engage your audience quickly or you lose them
• Keep the material easily digestible, ideally in clear segments and sound bites
• Realize that visitors will naturally “lean back” when watching your video and if you are using interactivity, you will need to make it clear that they can “lean forward” and take control

How should videos start to avoid the dreaded bounce?

When you look at engagement profiles for video, you almost always see a chunk of the audience abandon within the first 15 seconds (see example done below).  This is just like a bounce rate that you might measure on a web page in Google Analytics and represents how well you did at engaging the visitor.  To reduce this impact to an acceptable level (5% bounce in 20 secs is a good target), here are some techniques:

• Do not open with a long musical fade in.  Unless you have chosen the perfect song for your target audience, they are not likely to hang in there.
• Use branding and promotional elements very sparingly at this point in the video.  The last thing you want is for the visitor to leave because they believe that the whole video is full of sales or marketing material that will waste their time.
• Get to the main point of the video as quickly as possible and make sure it is consistent with the promise you made in the call to action that launched the video.
• Use a real person looking into the camera to start an authentic conversation with the visitor (ideally they are an authority on the subject being discussed).  They don’t need to stay on camera long, but humans react to humans so get in there and connect with your visitor.
• Focus on educating your audience, not selling to them

Let’s look at an example:

• Here is a BAD experience for the visitor:
  • You offer a call to action for the video of “Learn more about how to do Fly Fishing”
  • The video opens with a logo from a fishing rod company and a 15 sec sequence showing the product in action on a river
  • A mysterious voice-over starts at 15 secs talking about the long history of fishing and the importance of having the right equipment…
  • The bounce for this video would be enormous and conversion would be limited
• Here is a GOOD experience for the visitor:
  • You offer a call to action for the video of “Learn more about how to do Fly Fishing”
  • The video opens with an expert fly fisherman looking into the camera and immediately saying “Hello, I’m so-and-so and I’ve been fly fishing for 20 years.  We are going to talk today about how to land your first fish.  Let’s jump into it…”
  • Later in the video, the product can be featured and the “host” can plug the product but not until after the viewer has got some value

Ok, my WordPress is beating my up about length so I will stop it there.  The next installment, Part 3 covers the remaining questions and is available here.

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and feedback.  This is a rapidly evolving space and there is so much to learn and share…

Whether someone is new to video or they have been doing it for some time, figuring out where to use what types of video effectively can be a challenge.  There are endless ways to use video and not all lead to increases in visitor engagement, lead conversion, or deal closure.

The graphic below shows different ways to use video in conjunction with common Marketing & Sales tactics.  Each use is colored by level of effort where Green=Low, Blue=Medium, and Red=High.

Here is further detail on these different ways to use video:

1. Post A Topic – These are short, authentic videos provided by real employees that convey an opinion, identify a trend, or describe a thought leadership topic.  They are a great way to build brand awareness and generate demand.
2. Promote Educational Materials – These are action-oriented videos that encourage visitors to sign-up for or download webinars, events,  e-books and white papers.  They can be a very effective way to increase the conversion rate of a lead generation campaign.
3. Promote An Offering – These videos focus on benefits and special offers targeted at a particular audience recruited as part of a campaign.  While promising for some businesses, it can be tricky to get the messaging correct for companies that have more complex offerings.
4. Provide An Overview – This is the expanded elevator pitch for a company, product, or service.  While this can have a very positive impact on a visitor, it can also be the most difficult format to produce due to challenges in messaging, logistics, and costs.
5. Demo An Offering – Whether your selling products or services, there is no better way for someone to understand what you do then to see it in action.  Be careful to provide enough explanation so people don’t get lost in the details of your offering.
6. Share A Testimonial – Customers and partners can be your most effective advocates and these videos will help build trust while addressing buyer anxiety as they approach deal closure.  Plan sufficient time to handle logistics and receive approvals.
7. Provide Educational Digests – Webinars and Events are great sources of raw video content.  By segmenting these longer forms of content into chapters and key summary clips, viewers can watch the part of the content that they are interested in.
8. Answer A Question – This is the simplest way to use a video and can usually be leveraged in many different ways.  To maximize impact, get the passionate expert on the topic to provide a short authentic answer.
9. Make A Connection – Whether you are leveraging your network to start a conversation or you are requesting a meeting from someone you don’t know, using a quick video to introduce yourself helps break the ice.  As part of this personal communication, other videos and content assets can be offered to provide value.
10. Send Follow-Ups – Instead of just sending Next Steps email, try attaching some videos that provide more detail on areas that the prospect may want to better understand.  By providing better education, sales cycles can be accelerated for qualified opportunities.
11. Show A Solution – For companies that offer robust and customized solutions, this can be a great way for your prospect to share your solution within their organization without additional meetings on your part.  This is especially effective for reaching executives that are part of the decision making process, but didn’t attend the meeting.
12. Send A Proposal – In situations where there is a competitive bidding process for business, this is a great way to differentiate your submission and make a more personal connection despite what might be a rigorous procurement process.

Whew, lots of different options.  Choosing the right combination of videos is about understanding your funnel and prioritizing where to apply the benefit of video.  If you don’t yet have a plan, we strongly recommend starting with something simple that has a low level of effort (Green).  This will allow you to get quick results and learn how to progress.

Over the last few years, the recession has shrunk marketing departments and budgets in almost every company in every industry.  Some of our customers in $100+ million businesses have a marketing department of two or three people.  Along with the shrinking departments has been an increase in the number of tools and products available to marketers.  Thanks to advancements in email marketing, social media, marketing automation, social CRM, and other industries, more and more B2B marketers are going the DIY route.  This obviously has hurt the agencies who have focused on B2B businesses, but has opened up the floodgates for new software companies catering to marketing teams.

Since the late 90′s the major advancements in DIY marketing have mostly come in the Marketing Automation and Email Marketing industries.  When you look at Email Marketing, there are dozens of players, with the most popular being Constant Contact for SMB’s, and companies like MailChimp chipping away across different sized companies.  It seems like there is a new marketing automation company popping up everyday to chase Eloqua, Marketo, and others to the marketer’s desktop.  In our own backyard, we have Hubspot, the “inbound marketing” company who is getting over 2 million pageviews a month, numbers most B2C sites would kill for.

These companies all do basically the same thing: help to interest, engage, and track the movement of visitors and customers through various stages of your funnel.  As the adoption of content marketing and inbound marketing has risen, B2B marketers are now starting to focus on converting more of those visitors when they get to your site.  Two companies in this space we’ve been following have just launched in the last few months: Performable & KISSMetrics.

Performable’s goal is to allow the DIY marketer to easily create, test, and measure landing pages without the help of anyone in the IT department.  I tested their product and we’re likely going to use it when we update our site in the next month.  It is easy to use and very simple to understand.  We recommend them to any customers of ours who do not have a landing page solution.  Also, check out their DIY marketing blog.  Great posts on many topics for the DIY marketer.

We were an early user in the Beta program of KISSMetrics and used it to understand our acquisition funnel as we were continually releasing.  They don’t help you create your landing pages, but they help you to drill down into your conversion funnel and understand what is happening pretty much every step of the way.  Another cool product they have is KISSInsights, which helps you to get feedback on your website or product in real time.  We especially like how the team at KISSMetrics has balanced the quantitative and qualitative analysis tools in their suite.  Nothing beats hearing from a real prospect or customer.  They recently launched a blog focusing on customer acquisition and marketing.  Check it out.

There is no doubt that more and more companies will pop up in the next year who focus solely on making the B2B marketer more equipped to deal with the shift of B2B buying to the web.  We’ve been a B2B focused company since day 1, and have been inspired by all of the above companies to make the process of making business video as easy as possible.  Keep a lookout for some new product features in the next few months that make it even easier.