5 Rules for Using Video on Landing Pages – and Examples of How to Bend Them

Bending and stretching is great. Not just for your body (who doesn’t want a Jennifer Aniston-like yoga-toned body?!), but for your creative and effective marketing efforts. Here’s what I mean: You know that video is an incredibly engaging and converting medium. You use it on your website, campaign emails, and you probably know it’s great for landing pages too; after all, video on landing pages can increase conversion by over 80%! And of course there are guidelines and best practices, like putting the video above the fold, keeping your video short, choosing an engaging thumbnail, and of course, including a CTA in the video to drive conversion (for details and more best practices, check out this post). But sometimes, rules are meant to be, well, bent. That’s how you can get a fresh perspective, and give your audience a fresh experience.

Want to see what I mean? Let’s check out a few different examples to help inspire you.

Example 1: Use a good thumbnail…but what’s a good thumbnail?

As I’ve said before, videos have to be tempting enough to be clicked on, so a thumbnail is your first big step to engaging and converting your audience. What do you think of when you think of a thumbnail? A static image from your video with a big play button overlaid (if you go this route, don’t forget to A/B test your thumbnails to see which image works best with your audience)? A thumbnail doesn’t have to be what you would expect.

Check out this creative landing page—the ‘thumbnail’ is a looping video that immediately helps engage your audience and draws them into the story.

Example 2: Put a video above the fold…but no one said there couldn’t be more videos below the fold!

You know your most engaging content should be placed above the fold of your landing page. Typically that means your video should be front and center, tempting people to click, be engaged, and convert. It’s also true that landing pages are generally meant for simple messaging and simple design so you don’t overwhelm your audience or confuse them. But that doesn’t mean that you can have only one video on a landing page! Yes, you should have one “hero” video consisting of your most important message, but you can further the experience and deepen the understanding of your message by providing even more videos throughout the rest of the page.

Want to see what I mean? Check out this page for Saleforce’s Dreamforce conference. The hero ‘highlights’ video gives the viewer a taste of everything the conference has to offer, and once the viewer is enticed by the content and interested in the conference, they can further explore more video below that offers a deeper look into past conference sessions.

Example 3: Keep your video meaty enough to be valuable for your whole audience…but specific enough to be valuable for one viewer

Is your face like “Whaaa??” right now? Let me explain. No one likes wasting even a few minutes of their day on filler content that doesn’t teach them anything or make their day better or easier. So it’s important to make sure your video’s content is meaty enough to back up, explain, or give more detail about your landing page’s key message. You want to make sure it’s useful enough content for everyone who lands on the page.

But you know what else it could be? The video on your landing page could be directed to one viewer only. Take a look at this event landing page video to see what I mean. Is there a more engaging experience than that? Personalized Video is a stunning way to build trust, enhance your credibility, and more easily convert your viewer because they feel like you’re talking directly to them and no one else.

Example 4: Video is a powerful experience—but it doesn’t need to be a standalone experience

Okay so by now you might be totally sold that video is the way to go for every message, every audience, every content type, etc, etc. Good for you for embracing video…but that doesn’t mean it has to be the only experience your audience gets. Some might want to read a bit, some might want to watch video, and some might like to do both. Keep that in mind when you’re creating your landing pages. This way you can offer an experience that appeals to all sorts of audiences. For example, if your video consists of vital information, put that information in text format nearby on the page as well. Or, if your video is simply meant to be a creative and fun way to introduce your content, you should still make sure the concept or theme of the video is carried consistently throughout the text on the page.

Want to see what I mean? Well with this landing page, if the text didn’t include a tie-in to the creative concept, then the background video would feel very random and out of place—page visitors might wonder why someone is crying in the looping video.

Now, in this example, the text is tied right into the video, so you can listen to it, enjoy the motion, feel swept away in the story, and also read along!

Example 5: Size your video so it gets noticed…but that doesn’t mean it has to scream and demand attention

If you’re going to use video on a landing page, you probably want it it stand out and get noticed. But that doesn’t mean every video on the page should fill up the whole screen, and drown out all other content. Size each video appropriately for the value it offers the audience.

Want to know what I mean? Look at this landing page for Space Camp, the video marketing summit. The page offers visitors a taste of what the summit is all about. The first video on the page is the hero video, pumping up last year’s attendees and future attendees with highlights (including ‘meaty’ comments and reviews) of last year’s incredible event. And for those who want to know more about the event (perhaps they didn’t make it to last year’s summit), they can scroll down the page, check out the “About” section, and then, if they want to experience even more, they can view the smaller, subtler video in the About section.

Feeling bendy now? Hopefully those examples will inspire you to use video on your own landing pages in creative and new twists on tried-and-true standards. Your audiences already love video, and they’ll love the fresh experience you can offer! (Still wanting to bend something? There’s probably a yoga class about to start nearby…)

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Podcast: Getting Personal with Video in an Impersonal World

The B2B Nation Podcast is made up of expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in B2B sales and marketing today. Recently, Jeff Gadway, the Director of Product Marketing at Vidyard, was a guest on our podcast.

In this episode, we discuss where the need for personalized video content arises, why it is important for marketers, whether marketers are underutilizing video for lead generation, MarketingSherpa Summit, and more!

Below are my key takeaways from the conversation.

Personalized video allows you to engage your audience on a one-to-one level, but at mass scale.

If you think about it, the sound of a person’s name is the sweetest word in the human language. It was Dale Carnegie who said that a long time ago. We all want to be treated as individuals. We want to be identified, respected, acknowledged as individuals, and personalized video allows you to talk to somebody on a one-to-one level, but at a scale of 10s or 1000s in one mass email campaign. It allows you to go very broad but also get really targeted and treat people as people. As Jeff explained, “We recognize people as individuals, and we’re seeing some amazing results that indicate that this is in fact working, and that it’s making a huge impact on the effectiveness of email campaigns.”

There are a number of different places that personalized video can be used.

Outbound email campaigns are definitely a great place to start. Including a video thumbnail in an email campaign increases click-through rates by 2x. When you add a personalized element, including the recipient’s name or company name or job title in that personalized thumbnail image in the email itself, the click-through rates skyrocket through the roof. That’s one of the simplest ways to implement a personalized video. You can also use it for inbound campaigns as well.

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7 Ways to Create Hyper-Personalized Marketing Experiences with Video

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You can put a personalized video on a campaign landing page, so when a person arrives on that landing page, they might fill in some information and then be sent a personalized video as a follow-up. Jeff shared, “We’ve seen customers that are using personalized video to do product demos for recruiting purposes. We’ve even got a couple of customers that are in the education space that are using it to recruit high-potential students that they’re looking to bring to their university.”

The results that Vidyard’s customers are seeing are really phenomenal.

“We recently worked with a number of customers on some holiday campaigns back in December, and we got them to share some of their results with us. Tradeshift is one of the customers we’ve been working with. What they shared is that their click-through rates are typically around 1% on their email campaigns, which is pretty average for marketers today. When they ran this personalized video campaign, they saw their click-through rates sky rocket to over 10.75% which is a pretty phenomenal increase in click-through. We saw Cetera Financial see similar types of increases, 600% increases in their click-through rates.”

Act-On saw 30% more people watching personalized videos right until the end.

“Typically speaking, just under 50% of viewers of Act-On’s videos would watch all the way to the end, and with personalized video, that number increased to approximately 80%. What we’re seeing typically is increases in click-through rates, increases in click-to-open rates, longer time spent on page, longer engagement with the videos themselves, and more downloads … in addition to fewer unsubscribes than people are typically used to.”

What marketers are saying about video and what marketers are actually doing about video, are two very different things.

About 75% of marketers would say that video is the most important content medium that they have. However, only about 15% of them are actually capturing actionable data about their viewers that they can use to score leads, segment customers, build more effective nurture programs and do things that would allow them to demonstrate the value of their video strategy and show the ROI on their video.

“Marketers definitely are under-utilizing video; not that they don’t understand that video is a powerful medium. They get that it allows them to capture the minds and hearts of their audience, but they don’t have the tools to be able to actually translate those views into actionable insights that allow them to move their business forward, generate revenue, and show results.”

—

This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company looking to help buyers find marketing automation software, CRM systems, and more.

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The Non-Artist’s Guide To Storyboarding Marketing Videos

We’ve all been there before.

You’ve got a great idea.  This lead gen video is going to be the next Dropbox success story.

You talk to your video team.  You write the script.  Everyone is excited.  You shoot the video.  World-domination, an IPO and/or a promotion are mere frames away.  You launch the video.  That upload click has never felt so good.

…

Then the crickets start.  And when you watch the video you realize… “this is nothing like what I had in mind!!”

What gives?

Shoulda made a storyboard.

Some people think a storyboard has got to be a Pixar-level work of art in and of itself.  Or that you’ve got to be able to draw or be creative to make a good storyboard.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here’s a simple process we use to make storyboards so there’s less of a chance of botching production.

It’s Got To Start As An Outline

Storyboards (unfortunately) aren’t magic.  If you don’t know what you’re going to say, there’s no saving it.

There are a few common outlines you can use to get started.  Here are two every video marketer should have in their tool belt:

1. Hero’s Journey

Here’s a link to a free Google Doc template that spells this out.

Stories from Star Wars to Dropbox’s legendary explainer have harnessed this framework to make high-growth videos.

It goes like this:

1. Meet the Hero, Bob.
2. Bob has got a problem.
3. He tried this, that, and the other thing and they didn’t work.
4. Then he found the solution which works like this __________.
5. Bob got this sweet, positively emotional pay-off + call to action.

2. Problem, Agitate, Solve

Check out this link for the Google Doc template

Cheesy infomercials have made BILLIONS with this framework.

The idea is when there’s a pressing problem you don’t want to let up on the pain, but keep pressing forward so it’s clear how much they need your solution.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. Do you have this problem?
2. Here are the things making your problem worse.
3. This solution focuses explicitly on your big problem.
4. Customer testimonials or proof.
5. Benefit recap and call to action.

Choose Your Software

My software of choice is Google Presentation.  One because it’s free, but two because it’s familiar and has almost zero roadblocks to getting started.

If you’ve got some paper, a cell phone camera/scanner and a Google account you’re ready to go.

Here’s a helpful, free slide template you can use. Or if you like to do the pencil-to-paper method, here are a few printable word docs.

If you’re looking to get a bit more fancy you can take a look at StoryboardThat.

Highlight Your Critical Frames

Inside a two minute video you may not have a ton of scenes, but there will always be a few critical frames.

Every marketing storyboard should have frames for:

1. Opener
2. Problem Statement
3. How the Solution works ← Often the most critical to storyboard.
4. Call to action ← This is a close second in terms of storyboard need.

Frame 1 – The Opener

The main goal in the first frame is to create a sense of mystery.  If you’re working on a lead gen video, this is doubly important since a visitor is normally trading their contact info to scratch the itch of their curiosity.

Frame 2 – Problem Statement

This is the frame that should get your viewer’s head nodding (or qualify out the ones who shouldn’t be watching anyway).  If you have any dark or depressing frames, this is where they’ll go.

Frame 3 – How Your Solution Works

My favorite frame of all.  This is where your marketing chops come into play.  You can shave major time off an explanation with a well-thought-out solution frame.  Binge watch the explanation section of some late night infomercials to see this one done exceptionally well.

Frame 4 – Call To Action

Without this you might as well go home.  This is a nitty gritty frame, with the most important factor being clarity.  Is your URL easy to read?  Did viewers see where to click?  Does your info stay on screen long enough?

One important note: some frames are important to script well but don’t really need their own storyboard.  For example, benefit statements are critical to a script, but as long as your wording is right, your imagery may not be as essential.

Doodle Your Frames

Nearly every video I make starts as a doodle.  Ironically, I can’t draw but it doesn’t take complicated images to get the idea across.  My go-to images?  Stick figures for people, and labeled rectangles for objects.

Some of the keys you’re going for are:

• Positioning.  Show the artist or videographer how the scene needs to be setup.
• Timing.  Get across how the audio is going to be timed against the visual.
• Transitions.  How much info is too much in your scenes?  When should you cut?  Pay attention to how your scenes are flowing into each other or if it feels like they’re not changing for a long period of time.

Do A Dry Run

The main value of storyboards is being able to run through your script and feel how your video is going to go BEFORE you’ve spent the time and money on production.

So fire up your script, pull out your key frames and do a dry run.  This is the step where the heaviest tweaking and revisions will come in and by doing it at the storyboard stage you’ll be saving yourself time and money.

John Lasseter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer puts it well.

“I will never let something go into production unless it is working fantastic in that version with the still drawings. Because no matter all the great animation you can do will never save a bad story. We will work and rework and rework and rework these reels — sometimes thirty times before we let it go into production.”

Go Forth And Storyboard!

While it seems like a little more work upfront, dropping in a storyboard step can save major time in production.  

If you have any tips of your own, please share them below!

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Businesses See 500% Lift in Email Conversion with Personalized Video

Businesses See 500% Lift in Email Conversion with Personalized Video from Vidyard

Personalization helps Act-On, Cetera Financial Group, Lenovo and Tradeshift get – and keep – audience attention in crowded email inboxes

KITCHENER, Ontario – February 22, 2016 – Getting your audience to pay attention to marketing emails is difficult in this era of crowded inboxes, but businesses including Act-On, Cetera Financial Group, Lenovo and Tradeshift are standing out from the crowd by using personalized video from Vidyard, the video platform that helps businesses turn viewers into customers.

By using personalized videos within email and content marketing campaigns:

• Act-On increased video engagement by 182 percent and time-on-page by 62 percent
• Cetera Financial Group saw a 600-percent increase in email click-through rates
• Lenovo boosted click-through rates by 4.5 times and open rates by 400 percent while re-engaging cold, unresponsive leads within their funnel
• Tradeshift increased page views by 231 percent

In a recent holiday email campaign, PC maker Lenovo more than quadrupled click-through rates compared to previous campaigns. Even more impressive: in a campaign to contact inactive recipients – people who hadn’t responded to the company in more than six months – 5 times as many people opened the personalized video emails compared to those that weren’t personalized.

“We expected personalized video to improve the results, but we were amazed by how effective it was,” said Michael Ballard, senior manager for digital marketing at Lenovo. “Personalization makes a huge difference for getting noticed in a crowded market.”

Business users sent and received on average 121 emails a day in 2014, and that is expected to grow to 140 emails a day by 2018. As much as marketers rely on email to reach their audiences, email campaigns don’t have a high success rate. Just 18 percent of marketing emails get opened, and recipients only click through 2 percent of them.

Personalized videos are customized to each individual recipient by seamlessly weaving unique information about them or their company right into the video. That could be something as simple as featuring their name, company name or job title at different points throughout a video or an image like a company logo or a picture of their website. In addition to personalizing the video itself, each recipient receives a personalized thumbnail image to drive greater engagement.

“Today’s marketers and sales teams face stiff competition for their audiences’ limited attention span,” said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard. “Video by itself helps their messages get noticed. Personalized video compels action. It gets people to watch, keeps them watching longer and creates a memorable experience that builds brand affinity.”

For marketing automation provider Act-On, personalizing its videos resulted in more recipients actually viewing the content. Nearly twice as many people watched Act-On’s entire personalized video than typically watched other videos of similar length. Those viewers also spent 62 percent more time than average on Act-On’s campaign landing page.

“Our customer success team is in love with it,” said Linda West, director of digital marketing for Act-On. “Personalization helped lead to more conversions on our email campaign, but it also kept them engaged longer with the message we were trying to deliver, which is what really matters.”

Tradeshift, the leading global supplier collaboration platform, saw its click-through rate increase by a factor of 10 for its personalized 2015 holiday campaign, as compared to a similar campaign in the previous year that did not feature personalization. In turn, it led to a 231-percent jump in page views and an 88-percent increase in e-book downloads over the previous campaign.

“The results we have seen with Vidyard’s personalization capabilities have been remarkable,” said Denica Stoyanova, head of digital marketing and marketing operations at Tradeshift. “We understood it would have a positive impact on our engagement metrics, but the actual outcome was astonishing.”

Cetera Financial Group uses video content to capture the interest of new prospects and increase engagement in their lead nurturing programs. The rich video analytics provide new insights into customer behavior and their interest in Cetera’s services. During a recent email campaign featuring personalized videos, Cetera saw a 600-percent increase in email click-through rates.

“Besides the phenomenal metrics associated with personalized video, the technology is a real ‘surprise and delight’ for our customers that shows a level of sophistication associated with our brand,” said Eric Hansen, director of demand generation at Cetera Financial Group. “When you receive an email from a customer thanking you for making a video just for them, you know you’ve made a lasting impression.”

As with other Vidyard video offerings, Personalized Video integrates with leading marketing automation and CRM solutions including Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud and Act-On. Marketing and sales teams can easily track second-by-second video engagement data for each prospect and customer to improve lead scoring, segmentation and customer insights. Sales teams can generate personalized videos for targeted prospects and customers with the click of a button from right within Salesforce.

To learn more about Vidyard’s Personalized Video, visit here: http://ift.tt/1TzZoP3

About Vidyard

Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry’s leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.

Media Contact:

Brad Hem
Phone: (281) 543-0669
press@vidyard.com

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3 Reasons To Press Record at Your Next Event

You’ve printed your name tags, triple checked your conference bookings, and finally got all your slide decks in order. You’re ready to kick off the most memorable event of the year, right?

Totally! But the big question is, will your event live on beyond this week? Video is like a time machine for your event content—if you set up your event video strategy from the start, attendees can rewind and re-live the amazing experience from your event whenever they want. And future attendees can see what all the hype was about and plan their trip to next year’s event accordingly.

Here’s why recording your event content is win-win for today and tomorrow:

Live Streaming and Episodic Content

Live streaming your event content is nothing new. Dreamforce has been streaming keynotes and major sessions for years and they report five-figure viewer numbers in addition to those in the audience watching live. The recorded videos also make for great episodic content to be released leading up to your next event.

Salesforce used footage from Dreamforce 2014 in the lead up to last year’s event, posting a weekly “Road to Dreamforce” update for three months before the big 2015 event. You can check them out here.

These videos included everything from what to expect at your first Dreamforce (featuring testimonials from first-time attendees at the 2014 event) to navigating the various keynote talks and finding the right content for you (featuring footage from 2014 keynotes and panel discussions). All of this helped build excitement for return attendees, but also presented Dreamforce 2015 to new attendees in an engaging, visually appealing way.

Live streaming your event content is an absolute must if you’re looking to increase the eyes on your keynotes and product presentations, but don’t forget to press record on that live steam. Using your existing event videos as episodic content leading up to your next event is a great way to drive more value from your past events, and build up the hype for your next one in equal measure.

Creating An Awesome Event Video Experience

If someone wants to watch your keynote video a week after your event, and they head over to your event site, will they find it? If they go to YouTube, they may find what they’re looking for, or they may find a grainy camera-phone version from someone in the audience. Not a great experience.

Video hubs aren’t just for showcasing your product content, they’re a great way to aggregate your event videos so that attendees (and future attendees) can easily find the sessions they want to re-watch, and share it with their colleagues. In addition to driving great pre-event video, Salesforce does an excellent job hosting their Dreamforce content on a hub, indexed by highlights, innovation keynotes and product keynotes. Check it out here.

We took a page out of Salesforce’s book for our own event, Space Camp, and set up a branded hub featuring all of the keynotes and session videos in an easily accessible format that can be shared with anyone. Take a look here.

When someone wants to re-live the Space Camp goodness, or see what next year’s event is going to be like, they can catch all of the important sessions and keynotes easily without having to turn to YouTube. The big lesson here? Don’t make interested viewers hunt for your content. If you’ve recorded all of your sessions, give your viewers an easy way to consume this content, and find more videos like it. You may help someone who’s interested in your product find the right info they need to move forward, and you may help someone interested in your next event justify the ticket price!

Using Today’s Content to Woo Tomorrow’s Attendee

Many events make use of pre-event video. We’ve talked about it more than once, and the results are astounding (especially when you personalize the video). But if you’ve already recorded a wealth of sessions from your last event, don’t reinvent the wheel.

Right after their 2015 event, Oracle quickly assembled the best talking points from James Franco, Jay Baer, Charlene Li, and other keynote speakers into a fantastic wrap-up video and trailer for their 2016 event:

If you were curious as to whether or not this event is relevant to your interests, this video gives you a quick and easy overview of what to expect from the keynotes, and the overall event atmosphere.

For follow-up content, it’s important to get this out as soon as you can so you stay top of mind with your attendees, but just like the Salesforce example from earlier, it’s never a bad idea to use your existing content to get future attendees on board. Recording all of your sessions gives you access to those perfect one-liners that define the entire atmosphere of your event, so it’s worth pressing record whenever you can!

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New from Forrester: Building a Predictable Lead-To-Revenue System

There was a time when marketing was considered a cost center. Unable to determine what impact their segment of the business was having on the bottom line, marketers fought hard to prove their worth.

Now, marketing has earned its spot at the table with more and more marketing execs committed to pipeline and revenue performance.

But with increased recognition comes increased pressure to deliver on specific results.

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Forrester Report: Understanding the Performance Levers in Your Lead-to-Revenue System

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“How can we double our SAL count by next year?” or “What will it take to increase marketing’s contribution to pipeline by 5%?”

B2B marketers need to understand the causes and effects of their marketing in order to accurately predict the outcome.

Forrester suggests that it is, in fact, feasible to accurately predict the outcome of your marketing efforts if you take an analytical approach to understanding the key performance drivers.

As Lori Wizdo, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester says “B2B CMOs must step up to building a standardized lead-to-revenue process because a well-designed and documented process enables scalability, roots out excess cost, improves marketing execution, and provides the basis for continuous incremental improvement.”

Dive in to this report to explore techniques from results-based management to help identify drivers of marketing results and determine marketing’s impact on each component of revenue performance: volume, velocity, and value.

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