3 Steps for Better Video CALL TO ACTIONS

As more of you expand your efforts invideo content marketing, you undoubtedly know (and have been told) that a call to action (CTA) is an absolute must have. That all-important prompt encourages someone to actually dosomething and it offers an opportunity to evaluate your video’s effectiveness.

Advice on how to weave an engaging and tightly integrated CTA into your video is much less decisive. Create a funny and personal or slick-motion graphic? Incorporate in video or description? The fact is that there is no single answer. The secrets to crafting a great CTA depend on your unique circumstances.

This guide focuses on YouTube because the CTA design is more direct and easier to measure than on other platforms. (Vimeo, for example, is a popular tool because of its visual clarity and compression for crowd-funded campaigns like Kickstarter, but those initiatives often have different goals.) In a medium where there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, access to information is key for successful content marketing.

Step 1: Assess your goals

Your CTA is the nudge you give viewers so that they will do something. So what do you want them to do? Take stock of your business goals in both abstract and specific terms: 

• What do you want to achieve with this video? Be broad. Evaluate how the video is designed to contribute to your goals. Do you want viewers to buy a product, install an app, or subscribe to your channel?

• How can your CTA support those goals? Be specific. If you want someone to purchase a product, does the CTA allow them to click through to the sales funnel? If you want more YouTube followers, does it encourage them to subscribe to your channel? If you want viewers to visit an affiliate, is the affiliate identified with a clear link?

After you’ve nailed down exactly what you want your CTA to achieve, your next task is to create something that meets these goals as effectively as possible.

Step 2: Identify the best options

At this point you have two decisions to make: How should you craft your CTA stylistically and which tools can help you meet the goals.

• How does your CTA fit with the video content? Think thematically. Let’s use Dove’sReal Beauty Sketches as an example. The video is pensive, introspective, and emotionally charged. As such, the CTA on the screen at the video’s end is thoughtful, restrained, and unobtrusive. Dove didn’t use brightly colored annotations or loud noises. In its description, Dove simply included a hashtag and link.

Now look at Cartoon Hangover’s Bravest Warriors episodic cartoon’s CTA end card. It’s busy, colorful and energetic, just like the video.

Its visible description focuses on the episode and doesn’t include a CTA, and the full description reads like closing credits for a show.

Both Dove and Cartoon Hangover understood their videos — they matched the CTA to the video, and more importantly, they matched the CTA to their goals. For a B2C like Dove, its primary objective was to encourage viewers to further their experience with the brand, while Cartoon Hangover’s primary objective was to inform viewers about the show.

What tools will effectively communicate your CTA?

• Annotations: These pop-up messages on the video don’t have to detract from the viewing experience, but if they show up in the meatier content they can. The upside is that users can interact with your CTA immediately within the video experience. The downside is that annotations have a tendency to make users bounce, and annotations don’t appear on mobile or set-top boxes. Annotations in end cards? Totally cool.

• Descriptions: A video description offers two-fold viewing — a few sentences on the first screen underneath the video and an expanded version after the viewer clicks “show more.” Including CTA links in descriptions is both better and worse than annotations because they don’t distract the viewer from the video experience. They’re more versatile than annotations and engaged viewers will naturally check your description for more information. But be careful about how you use your real estate: The first three lines of your description are a critical part of YouTube SEO (YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine), and the first lines are all that appear on the first screen.

• Verbal (speaker mentions) vs. (direct host): A CTA during the video that comes from the narrator or host can carry more emotional weight than an end-card CTA. It also requires you to lock into a single CTA, so make sure the CTA is sufficiently attractive or powerful to engage viewers. Unlike an end card, which can be changed and updated easily, a speaker mention cannot be changed without significant production overhead. Many Kickstarter videos use this technique because viewers are likely already on the campaign page, making the next step obvious.

In addition, if your videos involve multiple speakers or subjects, the person speaking may not be in a position to deliver a meaningful CTA. In those cases, consider filming a separate end card with a familiar host that can be shot and edited separately.

• Other in-video CTAs: In-video CTAs can be more effective because they can be delivered before viewers fall off. (Visible Measures reports one-third stop before the timer hits 30 seconds.)

In this edition of its Ripple Effect videos, Red Bull opens the video with its general web address then uses Red Bull.com/Surfing on the opening credit slide. The CTA returns 14 minutes 30 seconds later in the end credits. Note the lack of annotations in the video, though.

• End cards: CTAs on the end cards can work, but it’s a risky move given that a good portion of your audience may not still be viewing. That means you should explore all CTA options, but don’t give up on end cards. The 40+ percent of your audience that may still be watching is probably interested and looking for more information.

As we’ve seen, there are pros and cons to every tool and stylistic decision you make, but this can be mitigated by combining CTA styles. Make sure they all support your goals so that you don’t risk overcomplicating your pool of results and possibilities.

Step 3: Test, measure, and iterate

After you implement your CTAs, the evaluation begins. What happens with your CTAs? How you measure your CTA depends on what goals you’re trying to hit, but since many marketers are ultimately trying to push YouTube viewers off site and into their own funnels, we’ll focus on three critical measurements:

• Measure in-video CTA viewership: If you click on Audience Retention in YouTube Analytics, you can see at which points viewers are dropping off, and this information can be used in multiple ways. For example, a significant drop-off that coincides with an annotation is a good sign that viewers do not think the CTA is too disruptive to the experience. Perhaps more importantly, these analytics allow you to see what percentage of users even makes it to your CTA. You can calculate a CTA viewership number by multiplying the number of total views by the percentage that made it to the point in the video with a CTA.

• Measure click-throughs: Other than clicking the universal “X” in the right corner of a page to cease viewing, there are only two ways to click out of YouTube – through annotations to your verified website (known in YouTube parlance as Associate Website Annotations) or through links in the description.

Ultimately, you want to extrapolate the conversion rate of your CTA by dividing the number of views by the number of out-bound clicks. This CTA conversion rate is a really handy way to compare variations in your execution.

Tip: Further track your CTAs by using custom links through shortened-URL sites like Bit.ly, which can bring in demographic and easy-tracking data for each CTA.

• Measure your annotations: You can see how well an annotation is performing by visiting the Annotations page under Engagement Reports in YouTube Analytics. Enter the name of your video and not only will you get your number of clicks, but also the close rate (the number of times a viewer closed the video when the annotation appeared).

Conclusion

This three-step video CTA process can help you create a goal-oriented CTA, pick the right delivery avenues, gauge each CTA’s effectiveness, and adjust and use analytics to evaluate what you should continue, change, or stop. It will likely take a few tries before you’ve developed an effective style, but once done, you will have a systematic approach to engaging your audience, increasing retention, and in turn, boosting the number of people responding to your CTA. 

Courtesy :Evan Rodgers

Evan Rodgers

Evan Rodgers

Evan Rodgers

4 Principles To Improve Your Social Video Strategy

Finding a way to unleash the power of video in social can be essential to your brand's long-term success. In fact, according to Cisco, social video will account for 69% of consumer Internet traffic by 2017.

However, cracking the code to video success on social networks can be mind-boggling: from allocating budgets to measuring results, to finding the right audience on the right platforms.

So what might be helpful for you to know before your next campaign? Here are some tips to help you win in one of the most competitive advertising landscapes.

Apply traditional planning principles. With more than 1.3 billion Facebook and 271 million Twitter users globally, social can deliver as much scale as traditional reach channels. Combined with industry-standard audience insight, this provides brands with the unique opportunity to effectively distribute their video content and connect with potential new customers.  Planning your social campaigns on reach & frequency (as you would in other channels) will ensure cost-efficient delivery vs. traditional video channels.  

Go native. The ultimate driver of your video advertising should be to deliver the best possible experience to your audience. The new Facebook and Twitter video solutions provide high-impact premium video experiences in native environments.  As a result, advertisers that use native video formats are seeing campaign performance up to 5X better then many leading VOD channels. 

Personalize content. As marketers and advertisers place more and more emphasis on how to engage with their audiences, a one-size-fits-all communication strategy is convenient, but not always effective. Instead of sending out just one video to a broad audience, experiment with bespoke messaging for specific audience groups. Test lessons provide scope for future creative and targeting strategies.

Tell a story. A brand’s narrative is not limited to 15” or 30” video spots, and social video solutions allow for improved storytelling through depth of content and lasting customer experiences.  Engaging content and use of sequential messaging delivers best results.

The combination of sight, sound and motion, with the addressability, measurement, and scale of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, means social media has the potential to be the most powerful brand-building medium yet, delivering as much scale and performance as any other traditional reach channels. 

courtesy : Ruth Aber

Stop chasing clients and start attracting them

One of the most critical components of your Advisory Marketing plan is to stop chasing clients and start attracting them. 

Today, we will show you a simple 3 step strategy on how to do just that.

There are two types of consultants and advisers : attractors and chasers.

Attractors do things differently than chasers and as a result, have a boat load of ideal clients in their lead generation funnel. Not surprising, they almost always make more money than advisors who follow the chaser model.  Chasers spend the majority of their time on the hunt for new clients. They are often desperate for their next deal. Even though they spend the majority of their time chasing clients and attempting to close the deal, their closing rates are rarely better than their counter parts who use an attractor model.  The chaser business model is like a roller coaster business – going from feast to famine and back again to repeat the never ending cycle.

But don’t worry, these 3 simple steps will show you how to stop chasing clients and start attracting them.

Step #1: Become an Attractor-

To become an attractor, you need to create a business that attracts your ideal prospects and clients.  First, you need to find out what your ideal prospects and clients want, need, value and even fear.  Once you find out what your ideal client wants, you simply need to deliver it.  Chasers, on the other hand, are too busy selling or trying to sell that they don’t have the time to find out what their ideal clients want.  Chasers generally believe they do not have the time to find out what their clients and prospects want, need, value or fear-  nothing could be further from the truth.  If they knew just how valuable it is to find out what their clients and prospects want, they would find the time to start asking questions.

Step #2: Find the Answer-

One of the biggest insights shared by Socrates was to never assume or tell but to ask, ask, ask.  By asking your clients, prospects, centers of influence and reciprocal referral partners exactly what they want, you will know exactly what you need to do and offer to have a boat load of clients lined up wanting to do business with you.  The best news about asking anyone and everyone who has knowledge of your ideal client, is that they are almost always willing to help you out by answering a few questions.

Some great questions include:

What keeps you up at night?

What is your top objective?

What has to happen in 1, 3, 5 years for you to be ecstatic about your financial situation?

What do you love about your current advisor (if they have one)?

What would you like your advisor to do differently, if anything?

How do you want to be remembered?

Do you have a plan to ensure that will happen in your estate plan?

Before you begin asking questions, take some time to create a questionnaire that includes all the questions you need to know to best serve your ideal client.

Step #3: Deliver it-

Once you have interviewed the people tied to your ideal client, you need to create a plan to deliver it.  Your plan ideally includes the inner game, game plan and outer game.  From your 12 month plan, identify the to-dos from most important to least important.  Then determine who will complete each action.  If you do not have the staff to ensure you complete the plan, hire another part or full time employee who can assist you execute the plan.  The worst thing you can do is to start a plan and then stop it because you are too busy to execute it.  To ensure you follow through on your plan, you need to plan for contingencies and do the upfront work to make it a reality.

The best advice is to understand that our actions produce our results.  Consistent, right action produces consistent, right results just as inconsistent action produces inconsistent results. To ensure our actions are consistent, take the time to create a plan and do what is necessary to complete the plan to ensure you get the results you desire.

How to Make Ecommerce Product Videos That Sell

Lights! Camera! Action! To get the most from your ecommerce product videos, it's important to make them engaging. Take a look at these important tips to help your online business boost conversions with your product videos. 

It’s time to pull out your director’s chair and make some killer product videos for your ecommerce site. Regardless of your experience or access to technology, follow these tips to make your videos a selling machine.

Happy selling!

Today we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success,  we’re going to focus on tips and tricks to make your product videos engaging and effective.

1. keep your videos short. No one wants to sit and watch an epic telenovela about why your products are so amazing. Keep it less than two minutes and try to make it flashy.
2. Demo your product. Remember, you’re trying to sell with these product videos. The goal here is to essentially turn your product description into an interactive and engaging video. Thus, make sure that you’re showing off what the product can do and why customers should purchase.
3. Along the same lines, it’s important to show the benefits of the product within your video. Don’t sit there and go through a laundry list of technical features. Instead, explain why those features are beneficial to the user and put them into a lifestyle perspective so customers can see how it will enhance their lives.
4. Include product close-ups. Have you seen those restaurant commercials on TV where they have extreme close-ups of the food? You know, the ones where they splash the lemon juice that makes everything fantastic? Your job is to do the same thing – your product video will complement your product images, so make sure that you zoom in and show your products in a good light.
5. Last but not least, always, always optimize your product videos when you post them to YouTube or distribute them elsewhere. Make sure you have a keyword-rich, engagin headline. Also be certain to include your tags and relevant keywords. Following these steps will help your videos appear higher in organic search results and help more people find them.

Hopefully this is helpful in making your ecommerce product videos a selling machine! If you have any questions, we’re always happy to help.

From me to you, happy selling!