The Dropbox Explainer

Dropbox focused viewer attention almost 100% on their 2-minute homepage explainer.  Aside from the video, there were few clickable options.  The simple, minimalist explainer communicated an immense amount of complexity in very little time.  The result was a 10% increase in signups, or 10 million additional users.  At a value of $4.80 per user, that’s an extra $48 million (while spending nothing on advertising).

Email and Marketing Automation Solutions

In most situations, you should make a small ask CTA that pays off big in the long run. Examples include, “Download our free ebook”; or, “Sign up for our newsletter.” Make a point of grabbing email addresses during this process. Once you have addresses, you can serve your audience helpful content and get them to purchase.  Email and marketing automation solutions, like the following, will streamline this process.

• aWeber
• MailChimp
• Hubspot
• Vidyard

Video Landing Page

Viewers should not have to debate about what to do next.  To make a clear CTA, use an in-video overlay.  If you don’t want to fiddle with that, then just place a big shiny button alongside your play box.  Here’s an excellent landing page in action from Panorama 9.

Keyword Research Tools

When it comes to your marketing strategy, however, roughing out your keywords is a valuable exercise.  KW research will inform how your audience converses about your niche and the products and services surrounding it.  Your research will put you in touch with your users’ needs, challenges, and desires.  Later on, your findings will inform your message and script.

Google Keyword Planner
A tool designed for Adwords marketers, the planner is essential because it will tell you the traffic for whatever term you search.  Google now requires you to set up an Adwords campaign before accessing the planner.  You can get around this by setting up a campaign and putting it on pause permanently, with a budget of zero.  This is an annoying hoop, but it’s worth it.

Buzzsumo
A product from Appsumo, it measures the relative impact of different posts based on the keywords you search.  It measures performance by social media shares.  You can narrow results by focusing on a particular site or demographic.

Quora
A sophisticated question and answer site, this is one of my favorites.  By searching for a few intuitive industry keywords, you’ll discover a ton of questions and issues your potential customers are experiencing.  This resource will inspire great ideas.

Google Trends
Once you have keywords listed out, you can compare competing phrases in Google Trends.  For example, I might compare “product video” and “explainer video”.  Google draws from its all-encompassing index to show which term is more popular.  A newer feature allows you to zoom in on certain channels, like YouTube.

Testimonial Videos – About.me for MessageBus

Testimonials are valuable because, at the end of the day, we listen to our friends, family, and colleagues. In fact, it’s often said that half of all buying decisions are driven by word of mouth, but few companies act on this phenomenon. Testimonials are the closest you can get to creating your own word of mouth marketing.

Message Bus’s testimonial from their client, About.me showcases the customer’s entire journey. Message Bus chose to focus on one particular experience, which gave them leeway to go into detail and tell About.me’s story.

Culture Videos

When it comes to the most iconic companies of our time, culture inspires and attracts talent as well as customers. You can observe this phenomenon with Google, Apple, and a plethora of other hip startups. While achieving Googleian cultural perception might be overly ambitious, you can reach for the stars with the help of a culture video.

Walkthroughs and Tutorials

This format lives further down your funnel.  These formats will move your leads to the eve of customer-hood.  They offer more leeway for a longer runtime because your audience is more engaged than a new visitor.  They typically run from 1 to 30 minutes.

Hubspot

Wufoo

IdeaRocket Results

At IdeaRocket, there was a period in our early days when we did not practice what we preached.  At the beginning of 2012, we had no explainer video on our homepage.  After finally adding one enjoyed a 46% lead increase.  For context, we were getting most of our traffic from Google AdWords, and we did almost zero additional marketing when we put up the video.  The increase came from the homepage explainer alone.

YouTube – Creating Descriptions

A huge benefit of a detailed description is that it will let you rank for long-tail keywords.  As defined by WordStream, long-tail keywords are longer and more specific phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase.  Since they’re less common, there’s less competition in the search engine.  As a result, your product will appear at or near the top of search results when a user searches for those keywords.  For example, “video marketing” would be a primary keyword, but “video marketing for startups” or “video marketing on a limited budget” might be the long-tails.  To inspire these phrases, check out SEO Chat’s Google Keyword Suggest tool.

YouTube KPI’s

Phil Nottingham of Distilled.net provides a helpful process for calculating the number of engaged users in your demographic.  As he notes, views alone aren’t worth much without understanding context: who was viewing, how long they viewed, bounce rate, and other factors.  Learn more in his article, ““Metrics to Measure YouTube Marketing”.

Transcriptions

To take transcriptions to the next level, you should use them as an accompanying blog post.  In addition to the communication benefits, this will aid viewers who might prefer text over audio and visuals; some will be out and about, or in noisy environments.  Incorporating your transcript into a blog post below the fold will let you cater to all viewing situations.

Click here to see Moz.com’s Whiteboard Friday series in action.

Vidyard Email Blast

55% of marketers report higher click-through rates from emails sent with video than without.  If you have a list of subscribers, video can be a great way to move them toward a desired action.

A common question is: “Can you stream video in email?”  The answer: Sort of.  Some email services allow streaming, and others don’t. Outlook and Gmail, two of the biggest, do not.  With that in mind, you have to be creative and simulate streaming without actually doing it.

Example from Vidyard.  Learn more from them here.

Cold Email Resources

If you’re doing lead generation or sales for a B2B product or service, video is an excellent hook. That said, it all starts with a great cold email. For inspiration, here is library of 101 templates from Attach.io.  As these examples will demonstrate, it’s better to go for short and conversational instead of a lengthy sales pitch.

Individual Email Blasters

Using a mail merge platform, you can fill in the custom fields with spreadsheet information, and send hundreds of customized emails.

Mandrill from MailChimp

Mail Merge (Google Docs and Gmail)

Piggybacking

The thought leaders in your industry are probably more accessible than you think, especially if you offer them value. At IdeaRocket, we wanted to build awareness with our target audience of tech startups.  So we teamed up with relevant celebrities in our field, based on the topics we found interesting, which we knew would resonate with startups.  Check em’ out!

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