How to Create Video Content That Converts

Do you ever wonder why some videos go viral and others die on the vine? What if you spend significant time and resources creating a great concept, and even better content, and nothing happens? Understanding what makes a video convert is critical, and we have some pointers to share:

CONTEXT

Before you set out to create your video, think about your target audience. Think about what they like to do, how they work, and how they play. Consider what they watch, not just the content, but also their device and time of day preferences. Once you know your audience, it’s so much easier to create content that will resonate.

During the second-to-last episode of the Daily Show, Arby’s took the opportunity to say goodbye (#JonVoyage), with a 60-second montage of Jon Stewart’s best jokes about the brand during his 16-year run. While self-deprecation is something most marketers would never do, this mocking montage is timely and shows the Daily Show audience that it, too, has personality.

BE CONCISE

While video lets you tell a full-featured narrative, it’s important to remember how people consume information. The average person’s attention span is only 8 seconds, rivaling that of a goldfish! Effective video content is crisp and to the point.

The first 5 seconds of a video ad are crucial—if you don’t hook people then, you’ll lose them. GEICO understands this, putting an emphasis on those first few seconds of its newest digital ads while poking a little fun at preroll ads in the process.

CONNECTION

Engagement is the action a consumer takes after exposure to an advertisement; in other words, a consumer that is engaged is a consumer who converts. Good video needs to do two things to drive conversion: generate curiosity, or the interest to interact with a video, and create an emotional connection that compels viewers to share.

Bridget O’Brien, VP of Brand Communications at Vistaprint, aimed to create this emotional connection in Vistaprint’s first-ever brand campaign: “We created an original song to convey the emotion and then used our products, rather than dialogue, to communicate the story. To be truly global, we knew we needed to tap into a universal truth that would resonate with people around the world. Relationships, especially multi-generational bonds, are a common thread that all the small business owners we talk to value, and speak to a truth small business owners experience in a way unique to them.”

CALLS TO ACTION

The final element necessary for conversion is a call to action. You’ve delivered compelling content, so tell your viewer what to do next, whether it’s viewing another video, clicking to a landing page for a coupon or trial, guiding them to a survey to gather immediate insight, or driving them to a web page with more information. Given the importance of the call to action, it’s worth testing – try two offers or different landing pages to see which yields a higher conversion.

In addition to share icons and a custom call to action message, Tempur-Pedic leveraged a sentiment study at the end of its video to gauge consumer perceptions of its brand after watching its newest campaign.

The takeaway: you’ve invested time and effort in creating a great video, and making sure it gets seen is just part of the challenge. The video should drive viewers to engage with your brand, and ultimately, develop a connection with your brand that drives conversion.

For more information on creating video content that converts, download our white paper:

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5 Ways To Flood Your Blog With Traffic Using Pinterest

Do you ever feel like you’re missing out?

You’re active on Facebook and Twitter, and they are sending some nice traffic to your blog.

But every now and then you hear a whisper.

A whisper about a social network that is growing faster than any other, and taking all of your prospective readers with it.

The whisper is getting louder and louder…

Soon you won’t be able to ignore it.

That nagging little whisper is Pinterest.

And if you haven’t figured it out already, you may be missing a trick by not using the world’s most visual social network.

Pinterest was founded in 2010 and has attracted lots of attention.

Here are some things that you need to know about Pinterest:

• 88% of people purchase what they pin
• Pinterest has over 70 million users
• Those 70 millions users have sent a combined total of over 30 million pins
• 80% of pins are re-pins (Just like re-Tweets)

Pinterest is a thriving social network that is here to stay, and can bring a surprising amount of traffic to your blog.

Here are 5 ways to flood your blog with traffic using Pinterest.

#1: Participate in group boards

The problem with just starting out on Pinterest is that you don’t have an audience.

It is possible to get thousands of Pinterest followers, but when you first start out – how do you put your blog posts in front of a large audience?

The answer is participating in group boards.

Many people who organize group boards want as many contributors as possible.

Why?

The more contributors a group board has, the more pins it gets.

Group board organizers want their group boards to constantly get updated with more pins so they rank better on Pinterest’s search engine and generate more engagement.

Many contributors will invite you to pin on their group boards regardless of how old or new your account is.

All you have to do is polish your Pinterest account to make it appealing.

Here are some tips for polishing up your account;

• Write an enticing bio
• Choose a good avatar
• Have a few boards with at least 10 pins to start

Once you have your Pinterest account polished up, look for popular group boards in your niche with numerous contributors.

Then, ask the owner of the group board to invite you as a contributor.

Here are some ways you can ask a group board owner to invite you as a contributor:

• Comment on one of the owner’s pins asking if you can become a contributor
• Email the owner of the group board
• Send a private message to the owner on Pinterest

There are plenty of group boards with over 10,000 followers that would all be great places for you to promote your blog posts.

Once you become a contributor for a popular group board, look at how other people pin so you know what is expected.

Then, send a pin of your blog post.

While it is okay to pin your own blog posts on someone else’s board, you don’t want to over promote yourself because the owner of the group won’t be happy.

As you would with any social network, promote other people’s content as well as your own.

#2: Optimize your images to get more re-pins

The image you put up on Pinterest has a big impact on how far your pin spreads.

The more optimized your image, the more re-pins it will get – spreading your reach.

Here are some facts from a Curalate infographic on optimizing your pins for more re-pins:

• Images that are reddish-orange get roughly twice as many re-pins than images that are blue
• Images with multiple dominant colors have 3.25 times more re-pins than single dominant color images
• Images with medium lightness are re-pinned 20 times more than very dark images
• Images that are 50% saturated have 10 times more re-pins than very desaturated images
• Vertical images with an aspect ratio between 2:3 and 4:5 get 60% more re-pins than very tall images
• Images with less than 10% background receive 2-4 times more re-pins than images with more than 40% background
• Images with a smooth texture are re-pinned 17 times more than images with a rough texture
• Brand images without faces receive 23% more re-pins than images with faces

Not only can you optimize your existing images, but you can also create your own images and optimize them in the process.

Out of all of the types of images that get put on Pinterest, cool infographics tend to get a massive amount of re-pins and likes.

Take a look at this infographic’s engagement.

You can create an infographic containing information from your one of your blog posts – or start from scratch.

The choice is yours.

#3: Include a call-to-action in the pin description

Want more people to go straight to your blog from your pin?

Tell them to click on the image.

By including a call-to-action you will increase the number of clicks your image gets, and as a result, send more people to your blog.

At the end of my pin descriptions, I include a short call-to-action that asks people to click on the image.

Including the call-to-action has led to an increase in clicks and comments from other users, and it barely takes up any space in my pin’s description.

All you have to do in your call-to-action is tell people to click on the image above and the benefit (for mine, the benefit is to learn how to can write 10,000 words every day).

#4: Schedule your pins with ViralWoot

One reason why businesses prefer to use Facebook and Twitter is because of the available tools – such as Hootsuite and SocialOomph.

Pinterest was a different story – until ViralWoot emerged.

ViralWoot makes it easy to schedule pins in advance and provides you with multiple options for more efficient scheduling, such as;

• Free bookmarklet—go to any website and click on this bookmarklet. You get to choose which picture you put in the pin. When clicked on, the picture will lead people to the website you were on when you used the Pin Scheduler bookmarklet.

• Upload files from your computer or Facebook – if have a unique image that you took and want to put it on Pinterest this feature makes it possible.
• Google Image Search—this feature makes it easy for you to get images from Google and schedule them. You don’t have to upload a Google image to your computer and then upload the file to ViralWoot, it skips that step for you.

After you choose the image, you will come to the ViralWoot dashboard where you can schedule your pin.

The final step is to choose the date and time that the pin will be published and then click “Schedule Now.”

ViralWoot lets you schedule up to 100 pins for free every month, if you want more you’ll have to pay.

Scheduling pins at different times gives you the power to promote your blog posts on Pinterest even when you’re not at your computer.

As you build your audience on Pinterest, you should start to schedule 10-15 pins per day so you can reach your audience more often.

#5: Grow a targeted audience

Your audience is the most important determinant of whether Pinterest drives traffic to your blog or not.

If your audience appreciates your content, they will visit your boards and engage with your pins regularly.

All of this engagement will lead to more exposure for your blog.

The secret to building an engaged audience on Pinterest is to target people who are active in your niche.

There are two main ways to build a targeted audience on Pinterest;

• Look for successful people and brands in your niche and follow their followers
• Look for successful boards related to your niche and follow their followers

For example, I look for successful Pinterest accounts in digital marketing with a high number of followers but also a good amount of engagement for their pins.

For instance, I would follow some of Social Media Today’s followers – with over 80,000 followers and lots of engagement.

If I wanted to get more specific, I could look for their top boards about digital marketing and exclusively follow the people who follow those boards.

Following the followers of ideal accounts and boards is a key part of growing a targeted audience on Pinterest.

What do you think?

What tactics have you used to drive traffic to your blog from Pinterest?

What tactic is your favorite?

Please share your thoughts and advice in the comments below.

Author: “Marc Guberti is a teenager entrepreneur, digital marketing expert, and author. He is the co-founder of Teenager Entrepreneur  a movement that educates and empowers teens worldwide with the knowledge they need to become successful entrepreneurs.

Podcasting provided by Odovox.com

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Social Media is Not Enough: Why Every Small Business Needs a (Good) Website

About a year ago I had lunch with an acquaintance who runs a successful clothing business, on Facebook. At one point in the conversation she asked me if she should create a website. I was surprised to hear this question — to me, having a website for a business has been Marketing 101, for the last decade. When I inquired why she didn’t already have a website, with an eCommerce component, she replied simply “I don’t really need one”. This was right at the beginning of Facebook’s major crackdown on organic reach by professional Facebook pages. I urged her to look into getting a website as soon as possible. Every business needs a (good) website, and here’s why:

Why Social Media Alone is Not Enough

Only using social media as a marketing channel is a lot like picking only the best selling product in your shop and getting rid of all of the other products. What happens if the cost of that product goes up? What happens if consumer trends change?

I think you get the point. The number one rule of investing is to diversify, and it’s the same for marketing. Just because Facebook or [insert social media channel here] is carrying your business now doesn’t mean it won’t change completely by the same time next year.

The Difference Between Using Social Media and a Website for Your Business Hub

Social media is dynamic, it changes all the time. This is what makes it a great marketing channel, but also one of the most volatile ones. A website is a “static” marketing channel, over which you have 90% control. You may not control the host, but – if your website was created correctly – you have the domain, the code and the content. As long as you continue paying your domain registrar and your hosting provider, your website will continue to exist. This is stability.

Websites haven’t changed “much” in the last decade. Yes, many business owners had to make a change to mobile responsiveness, but much like a brick and mortar business, websites need maintenance, upkeep and occasional upgrades. The basic structure of a website, as an information hub, hasn’t changed.

A Website Helps Your Business Get Found

In the 90’s, a Yellow Pages listing was an absolutely must-have for business owners. Google is new Yellow Pages. Unlike the static Yellow Pages, however, search engines are dynamic, they mold and adapt to trends. Because search engines are evolving with the internet, they will likely continue to be around for an extended period of time, in one form or another. Search engines are how most consumers conduct research online, before making a purchasing decision. A good business website provides the means to create relevant content which can be found by consumers looking for your product or service.

Social Media is Not Where Most Consumers Search for Products or Services

Most consumers don’t go to Facebook to look for your product or service. Consumers are on Facebook to be entertained, primarily, and in some cases to inquire about a product or service from their friends. In fact, most consumers are probably not researching products or services on any social media platforms.

Your catchy Facebook post isn’t showing up on search results pages. Guess what is? Any page on your website! At this point, many popular social networks are pay-to-play, meaning you have to spend ad dollars for consumers to see the content you’ve already spent resources to create. While  having a good social presence is imperative, to keep your brand top of mind, and to establish dialogue with consumers, social media is not a substitute for a good website.

Why Some Businesses Still Don’t Have a Website

So, why then do intelligent business owners still not have a website, even if they have a social media presence? Everyone is not a programmer. The allure of social media is, a lot of the time it doesn’t take much, if any, technical knowledge to set up and manage a social media page or a few. The good news is, with a user friendly content management system (CMS), like WordPress, setting up a website has never been easier.

The Simplified Process of Setting up a Basic Website

Decide on a URL/domain > register domain > find a hosting provider & secure hosting > one-click install WordPress > point domain name to your new website

For someone experienced in doing this, the whole process takes about 30 minutes or so, and typically costs around $240, which is around $10/month for a domain name for a year and around $10/month for hosting for a year. You typically pay upfront for both. Most people should be able to handle this process on their own.

Where things get a bit more challenging is the actual set-up and design of the website. This process can be labor-intensive, depending on how complex you want your website to be and how much content you plan on putting in place, but typically does not warrant much additional cost if the person setting this up has the time to research information, all of which is widely available for free on Google.

With this all said, there is really no reason a business owner should not have at least a very basic one-page website set up.

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Improve Conversions on Your Social Media Ads With Landing Pages

Landing pages are an inseparable part of the web browsing experience: we have all visited one at some point, whether or not we were conscious of the fact. Whenever you click on an online ad, register for a webinar, download a survey or a white paper, it’s likely that a landing page facilitated your experience. It’s not surprising, then, that these types of pages are an essential tool for a marketer, as they help move the potential lead down the sales funnel, converting a visitor into a customer.

What is a landing page?

In the realms of marketing and advertising, landing pages are the web pages which are accessible exclusively through a link or a button, and built to serve a specific objective. Social media landing pages, which we will focus on in this post, are commonly accessible by call-to-action buttons on paid social advertising, among other times of digital ads.

Elements of landing pages include a brief description of the offer, a call to action, and a preview of the product or service. In an ideal landing page, both the copy and the page design converge on a single purpose: to drive the customer to a specific action, such as downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar.

Almost as important as knowing the definition of a landing page is knowing what the landing page is not. A landing page should not just be the homepage of your website—there are too many buttons to click, options to choose from, and products and services offered. If the goal of your social ad is to increase traffic to your domain, consider other options and leave landing pages for what they do best—help acquire sales leads.

Why does my social media ad need a landing page?

It might seem like a lot of work: first, you have to toil away at your social media advertising strategy, and now it turns out that’s not enough? In fact, landing pages can help you support the customer experience in areas that ads often fall short: they provide more context for the value add of the initial offer, capture more information about your customers, and allow you to zero in on a specific product or offer.

Landing pages help businesses increase conversions on the social media ads by honing in on the juicy details of the offer. This helps make the ads more effective, since most of them are limited by character and image size on the host social network—the landing page helps elaborate more on the value of the initially advertised offer. It also segments the value proposition into several easy-to-understand parts: for example, your social ad may contain a call-to-action button that simply says “Learn more,” which takes the user to a landing page with an added offer of a free trial. However, it’s important to be consistent with your offers across the advertisements and landing pages, even if the offer is segmented into two or three parts.

Landing pages also provide a better social advertising user experience: a user who noticed your ad while browsing their Facebook News Feed will have a dozen distractions—friends’ updates, photos, birthday and event notifications, etc. By taking the user to a dedicated page, you are removing all the extra noise and helping them focus exclusively on your offer.

Another advantage of using landing pages for social media ads is their increased capacity to capture leads. Major social media networks offer ad analytics for businesses, which include the user’s location, gender, and age group. But capturing the specifics, such as their name, occupation, and email address is a different story. This is where landing pages come in: most of them include a lead capture form that encourages users to fill out their first and last names, email address, company they work for, and their job title. Not only does this help marketers get a better picture of their potential customers, but it also presents an opportunity to contact these customers with similar offers in the future. However, be careful about how much you ask of your customers—the general consensus among conversion experts is that the more information you ask to disclose, the lower your conversion rate will be.

9 tips on using landing pages for your social ads

There are many elements to a landing page, and the best way to find out what helps your business achieve the best conversion rates is to test, test and test. Keep this in mind when you consider implementing any of the following tips—these practices have been effective for other businesses, but your product or service may call for something completely different. Don’t be afraid to trust your instinct, but make sure it’s always backed by conversion data.

1. Keep your copy consistent across ads and landing pages

The last thing you want to do is mislead a potential customer with inconsistent offers. Since the landing page works best as an extension of your advertising, make sure the copy is consistent in both the ad and the landing page. For example, if you’re drawing people in with a 2-for-1 offer in the social media ad, your landing page should give more details on how the customer can get the 2 items for the price of 1.

This social media ad popped up in my News Feed, and lead me to the shop’s homepage—but the offer is site-wide, which makes one of the few exceptions to the “no homepages as landing pages” rule.

2. Acknowledge the social media referral on the landing page

The way brands communicate with customers on social media is often different from any other communication line—there’s room to show off personality, have a sense of humour, and stray off the beaten path for different approaches to interaction. Thus, it’s advantageous for brands to address the referral source on the landing page, especially if you know the customer will be arriving there from a social network. This can be done by including the brand’s official Twitter handle or Facebook page in the body of the landing page copy, or simply open with a line that mentions the network.

This is especially helpful for brands involved in social media marketing or e-commerce, since they know their customers will also likely to look for profit from social channels. Take a look at the way Shopify frames their landing page originating from a Facebook ad:

Shopify’s Facebook ad

Shopify’s landing page originating from the Facebook ad

In addition to directly addressing the way the Shopify app can be helpful for Facebook marketing, the landing page also contains clever design cues that tailor it to the network. The page’s colour palette is congruent with Facebook’s colour, and the header is designed to look similar to a Facebook search bar.

3. Place essential page elements above the fold

The central part of the landing page is the call to action button—whether you’re encouraging the customer to start a trial, download an asset, or sign up for a webinar, all the design and copy are designed with the single purpose of driving the user to click the button. In order to accomplish this, design your page to have all important elements “above the fold,” or in the portion of the page that is visible in a browser window when the page first loads. If you’re not sure if your landing page presents the information right away, look at the portion above the fold and ask the following questions, from a user’s perspective:

• Where am I? What’s the purpose of this page?
• Do I know what they’re offering?
• Does this page explain what I have to do in order to get the offer?

The first question might seem a bit silly, but you’d be surprised at how many landing pages fail to identify their brand association. Whether it’s a logo, recognizable brand colours, or a headline that mentions your company, your ownership of the page should be explicit. Take a look at the ‘above the fold’ portion of the landing page for our latest white paper on Social Governments:

Once the page first loads, I can see that this is a Hootsuite property, I know it’s about social media strategies for government bodies, I can glean that it offers a white paper from the little icon underneath the headline, and I can read the first couple of lines of its description. While I can’t see the call to action button, I see an arrow that shows me how I can access the advertised resource, and the top of the lead capture form. These directional cues are a great trick to draw the user’s eyes to the important elements, even if they end up below the fold.

4. Don’t reuse copy for multiple ads or landing pages

Since landing pages are such an important part of the lead conversion process, your company needs to pay special attention to the text on the page—which can be a challenge if you don’t have a dedicated copywriter. Thankfully, there are plenty of online resources that can help you optimize copy for the purposes of your landing page. Plus, if done right, your word count for landing page copy shouldn’t be that high anyway.

The main thing to remember is to tailor each landing page to the value prop of social media ads that refer to it, as well as the offer. Don’t reuse copy from other landing pages, even if the chances of the same customers seeing the copy twice are low. Not only does it appear lazy, but it can also hurt your conversion rates, especially if the copy is inconsistent with the offer from the social media ad.

5. Focus your landing page on the value add for the customer

The purpose of landing pages is to gather more leads, but all elements of the page need to focus solely on how the offer can help the visitor, not your business. As such, it’s important to highlight the value of the asset or the offer every step of the way—whether it’s done by cleaning up the copy and removing any jargon-heavy parts, using more possessive pronouns, or including customer testimony. James Scherer of Wishpond advises marketers to “[h]ome in on what the visitor gets, not what they should do.”

For example, if you are designing a CTA button for an offer concerning a cleaning product, encourage customers to “Clean up my kitchen!” instead of “Buy now.”

6. Optimize your call to action button

The CTA button is the crown jewel of your landing page: it’s what the user will be looking for when they first arrive on the page, because it’s what gets them the asset or offer promised in the social media ad. So make sure your CTA button is clearly visible, ideally above the fold, and the copy is consistent with the offer. For example, if the purpose of the landing page is to get users to download a white paper, your CTA button copy should have a variation of “Download now” or “Read now.”

When it comes to the landing page’s CTA buttons, the testing rule is more important than anywhere else on the page. Test the colours of the button, the font of the letters, the actual call to action text, and directional cues around the button itself. You might be surprised what gets you that three-digit spike in conversions—sometimes, it’s something as little as changing a possessive pronoun!

7. Consider trust badges

If the conditions of receiving an offer ask the user to disclose personal information, it’s important that the customer feels safe to do so. In landing page design, this means including trust badges and displaying them in a prominent spot. Ideally, you want these badges to be close to the call to action button, so the customer is reminded of your trustworthiness as a final motivation to consider your offer.

You can also mention your partners or clients that belong to an industry that may be similar to the visitor’s occupation (especially if you target your social advertising to a certain demographic), as a way to show off recommendations from professionals in that field.

Be aware of the design of these badges: you want to follow brand standards of security brands, as well as your clients and partners, but avoid piling in too many logos or conflicting colours. This might actually take away from the overall impression of your landing page, and that’s the opposite of the effect you want to achieve.

8. Optimize your design assets

In the same vein as the text on the landing page, all design assets should show off your offer in the best light without being too excessive. Follow a simple colour palette, don’t add too many images or videos, and don’t overdo it on the directional cues. With landing pages, less is more—try to include as little extra elements as possible, but make sure all of them contribute to the main purpose of the landing page.

9. Test, test, test

Remember how I said that testing is the most effective strategy to increase conversion rates? Before you implements changes based on any of the tips above, run an A/B test to see if these factors actually influence conversion on your brand’s landing pages. At the very least, test two different versions of the landing page to see how the different changes affect your numbers. However, according to WordStream founder and CTO Larry Kim, if you want to break the top 10% of winning landing pages, the more pages you test, the better are your chances of drastically increasing conversion rates. Kim recommends testing ten (!) landing pages with different offers, messaging and flow to find the winning combination for your business. So, suffice to say, designing landing pages is not for the faint of heart—but if it helps you gather more high-quality leads, these efforts will surely pay off.

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