This post is part of our series on progressive sales and marketing tactics.  Look for more posts like this one every Wednesday this month.

Much has been written about the conversion funnel, and this post is not going to rehash the basics.  Pretty much every analytics tool has some representation of the funnel, and most marketers we work with tend to know their funnel pretty well.  Even though it is the most common report that marketers use, there are some basic problems with it that cause problems for even the most seasoned CMO’s.

The funnel is a great tool to evaluate the success of a given campaign.  Look at the funnel for the example email campaign to the right.  Since an email campaign is a discrete event with a short lifespan, it is very effective to use a funnel to measure its success.  In this case, 250 out of 10,000 targets actually filled out the lead form on the landing page…pretty straightforward.

The funnel visualization starts to get complicated when you have a long conversion cycle between steps in the funnel.  It is not unusual for a B2B business to have a 180-day cycle time from the time that a lead is generated until the deal is closed.  Most companies use the standard Salesforce.com Leads -> Opportunities -> Customer funnel to measure their effectiveness across this cycle.  The problem with this funnel is that it becomes very difficult to understand the relative performance of your conversion rates over time.  You might not notice that you are closing less opportunities until it is too late.

One way to get a pulse on your conversion performance is by using cohort analysis.  The Wikipedia definition of a cohort is a group of people who share a common characteristic or experience within a defined period (e.g., are born, are exposed to a drug or a vaccine, etc.).  The most common cohort used by marketers is a campaign.  Using campaigns can be misleading because if you are getting different performance over time, you may attribute it to the specific campaign you are running rather than other factors that are contributing.  For example, say your company hired a rockstar sales engineer who developed a killer demo.  He brings in more sales, which in turn improves your overall funnel.  If you only look at the campaigns, you may get a false positive that your campaigns are working even though the sales engineer is the reason that those deals went through.  The same can be said for website updates, messaging changes, product improvements, etc.

The easiest way to get started with cohort analysis is to use date based cohorts.  In the example to the right, we are measuring a simple funnel but we also list key events that happened that month.  By doing so, we can look at previous months to see if there is a correlation with any of those changes to a change in performance.  In this case, you might realize that the new landing page designs set better expectations for the customer, which in turn helped the close rate.  If you were simply measuring campaigns, you wouldn’t have easily made that correlation.

Let’s look at the same graphic for the next month.  In this month, our overall leads to customers rate was the same, but we had less qualified opportunities.  The key events are that we had messaging changes that may have contributed to more leads, but we had our best sales rep resign.  From this analysis, we can hypothesize why we had less opportunities.  Was it the sales rep?  Was the messaging sending bad leads?  We are not 100% sure, but it is something we can easily test.

In conclusion, traditional funnel reports only tell you so much, especially when coupled with long sales cycles.  If you want to dig a little deeper into your funnel, it is helpful to use techniques such as cohort analysis to discover hypotheses on the movement of your leads through the funnel.  These hypotheses can be easily tested in future cycles and will help you to optimize your funnel over time.

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

BACKGROUND

Over the last 18 months we have worked closely with a number of customers to tune their videos for traffic volumes ranging from 1000′s to 1,000,000′s of visitors per month. Although audience behaviors varied, we have found that staying focused on a few simple areas is key…

The three different focus areas above are not rocket science and are quite similar to how web pages are tuned, but I have found that people think of video differently until it is translated for them.  So here are some high-level thoughts on the first area of focus that may help…

GETTING PEOPLE TO LAUNCH YOUR VIDEO

The goal here (user clicks on video) is similar to optimizing for links in email, web pages, and ads but with some twists.  I think the two key questions are Where and How should video be offered…

Where should I offer video?
Videos can be offered anywhere in the user journey, but the key is to offer the right type of video at the right stage of building a relationship with your visitor.  Here are some guidelines:

• On Landing Pages
  • Users are there for a quick and focused visit so short videos that are conversion focused work best.  You may not get much engagement with a long video demo, but a teaser that shows off a cool feature might move them to the next step in getting to know you.
• In Blogs
  • Very short educational videos that encourage comments or sharing are ideal.  Not many visitors want to “sold to” in your blog so avoid highly promotional content.
• On Home Pages
  • Users want to quickly understand what you do so overview videos are better here.  Related to this, having a customer testimonial on a home page may NOT get much action because visitors want to learn more on lower level pages before they want to hear what another customer thinks about you.
• In a Resource Section
  • I think it is a complete waste of good content unless you are doing a good job of linking to those videos from elsewhere on the site.  Basically, you should not assume your visitor will navigate and find items that could be buried here.
• Elsewhere on the site
  • You should offer links to videos that address the mindset of the current visitor on a given page.  For example, if you are talking about the benefits of your product or service, then that is a good place to offer a product demo or customer testimonial.  It may take time to figure this out so employ A/B testing to help.

How should I offer video?
This depends on your site design combined with your audience and their experience in consuming video.  While there are some basic best practices, you start with something simple and then optimize text and imagery over time to see what works best for your audience on your site.  Here are some plato start:

• For Text in Video Calls to Action
  • Using educational language rather than promotional language will often get more clicks.
  • Also, video-oriented verbs like “Watch” are important.
  • Examples include “Watch this overview to learn more” or “Click here to hear from a customer”
• For Imagery in Video Calls to Action
  • Consider thumbnails that indicate the type of video to the user with a play button superimposed.
  • Examples include showing a Customer headshot for a customer testimonial, while a screenshot would work better for a demo.
  • Avoid generic video icons as they don’t always perform well

SUMMARY

Apply some of these simple approaches to your video and see how it enhances your metrics.

In part 2 of this blog series, available here, I cover ways of Keeping Visitors in Your Video so that they can fulfill the actions that you want them to achieve.

We’ve seen video on landing pages and in blog posts (like this one!), but what about press releases? Apparently the PR folks are hopping on the online video bandwagon and yielding incredible results.

Joe Chernov from Eloqua discussed his experience with PR and video at a social media breakfast with VisibleGains, BusinessWire, and MediaMobz, where he served as a panelist:

The statistic speaks for itself; Chernov’s video press releases attracted 500% more views than exclusively text-based releases. This is no surprise when one considers that video is rapidly gaining momentum in nearly every field, and PR is no exception.

Marketers need to constantly innovate, and online video may just be the solution. Tell us what you think: is it time to do away with text-only press releases?