Refeshing key factors of video SEO strategy
I have just disconnected from my first live webinar on video SEO strategy, organized by Reel SEO, Truveo and Ooyala. The experience itself was good, I connected through a site called Go2Webinar to follow the presentation; I started Skype, dialed a number and entered my personal code. Image was ok, sound was fine. So that’s for the webinar experience.
The content itself was a bit commercial (especially the Ooyala part) but nevertheless there were interesting points worth sharing with you:
1. Video search engines and general search engines work different.
2. 85% of all video search traffic goes through YouTube. So if you like it or not, think if you can affort not to be there. If you compete there, consider that YouTube values the following ranking factors:
- Views, ratings, shares, comments, suscribers, embeds and inbound links. The community factor counts, so make sure you also suscribe to other relevant users.
- Consider manual upload (vs. API upload) because it allows you to take full advantage of the text fields.
3. Create optimized video landing pages: Make sure every video has its own page and above all its own URL.
4. Avoid Javascript, it won’t get indexed.
5. Minimal page load times are super important for the user experience.
6. Spend time to optimize meta data, that’s the text that describes the content of your video: title, general description, tags, brand name, close captures or even an entire transcription of the video content.
7. Try to get videos into search engines, don’t wait for them to crawl for your content. Reel SEO recommends MRSS feeds and XML sitemaps.
8. Choose eye-catching and relevant thumbnails: the right thumbnail is important; make sure you include a relevant and appropriate representation of your video content. They are key to trigger the “click-to-play”.
How video players could (or should) look like to deliver great user experience.
Video works for e-retailers. In 2010, we already know that landing pages and product sites with video convert better than those without. But the mayority of thoses sites follow a simple presentation formula: product pages including a (more or less sophisticated) video player that reproduces relevant content about the product in question.
In the service sector (banking, education, telecoms, etc.) we are starting to see different techniques of integrating video, with navigation concepts entirely based on and around video content. That means that the core elements of the site’s architecture is audiovisual content and animation (mostly in flash) that cover most part of the page but without using the “standard click-to-play video player” we are used to from video sharing sites or most of the e-retailer product pages.
Let’s see a first good example from the banking sector: Chase Blueprint, a personal financial tracking&tracing service offered to Chase clients.
Kaplan Academy of California also uses video hosts that cover more than 50% of the homepage to help different target users to navigate through the site.
AT&T’s video host explains the advantages of the 3G MicroCell wifi modem right from the living room. The format chosen is a kind of video catalogue that guides the user through the product’s features and advantages.
In my opinion, these sort of video integration makes special sense for home and landing pages. Videos become a “natural” part of the online navigation and it is an effective way to focuses the user’s attention to the main features on the site, simplifying the navigation and reducing the number of clicks to get to key contents.
Nevertheless, there are a few important things to consider using videos that don’t come in standard players.
1) Costs: production costs for these videos are likely to be higher. To look great they need to be shot in a studio, with perfect lightening, a croma key or an infinite white box; it also requires a professional postproduction to combine the human presenters with the rest of the elements and the animation.
2) Autoplay or press to play? Don’t forget that the user needs to be in control of the reproduction; that includes a play, stop and a sound-off option; one option is to autoplay the video when the user first comes to the page and make it “press-to-play” when the user returns.
3) Include triggers. Make sure the user knows how and where to start the video. Be as direct as possible and avoid a simple “play video”; try to reveal what’s behind the content; scroll up to the Kaplan example and you will know what I mean.
4) Don’t forget your Call To Action.
Set up Blueprint (example Chase), Request more information (example Kaplan) , Availability Checker (example AT&T) are effective examples to include Calls For Action. If the goal of the video is to convert, the clip needs persuasive Calls For Action, clearly visible throughout the running time of the clip.
2010: not without video marketing (Part 2.)
Part 2 of what I think will be happening in the field of video marketing in 2010.
6. Live streaming and live video presentations online.
- Live streaming of company’s events and online product launches will become part of digital marketing and communication strategies.
7. Video SEM and SEO will become relevant disciplines.
- This year marketers will discover the relevance of video SEM and SEO as part of their overall strategy since video contents helps to get better page rankings results.
8. Evolution of video user experience.
- We will see an evolution of what we called “player”, video content will be integrated naturally into websites, optimizing navigation and user experience. (PD: check out my next post here).
9. Widgets, widgets, widgets.
- Widgets will help make video content more attractive for e-retailers, helping to push conversion rates. Check out the tools offered by Qoof (just to name one) for example.
10. Video and mobile marketing.
- Although a few weeks ago I predicted that the 2010 won’t be the year of mobile video commerce - mainly due to technical problems and the lack of generally adopted mobile payment platforms - I think we will talk a lot about it and hopefully see some leaps forward. Especially now that Google (= YouTube, which is converting into a video based transactional shopping site) has its own device and many programmers waiting to create apps for the Android platform.
2010: not without video marketing (Part 1.)
2009 was a good year for practitioners of video marketing. We saw some really encouraging results -better performance of landing and product pages that include video than those that don’t- especially from e-retailers, like e-bags, Zappos or Pool Tables .
I am looking forward to 2010 because as video marketing gets mainstream for commercial websites we will hear more success stories and we will have more metrics to analyze and to compare, most important how do sites that use video content perform compared to those who don’t in terms of conversion rate and ROI.
This is what I think will happen in 2010.
1. Video use and consumption will rise again.
- Some users, especially “generation Y users” will be more likely to abandon certain sites if they don’t provide video content.
2. Video will become the dominating content format across most industries.
- Especially FMCG and service brands will include video as key elements to communicate with their users and clients.
3. Video is nothing without interaction.
- We will see how conventional players (play, stop, share) will convert into widget-based visualization. It’s not enough to substitute text or photo based content by moving images, it’s the widget you can add to the video player that will make the difference.
4. Video will become a commodity.
- The real value will be to think about a sustainable video content strategy not in how to produce the content itself. What e-retailers need is a decent mid-term video marketing strategy. Production has become affordable and can be highly standardized.
5. E-mail marketing gets another chance.
- Including video in e-mail communication and newsletters can increase click-through rates up to 50%, compared to e-mails that just include text or pictures.
Trends for 2010. Video-based geolocalization: yes. Mobile video commerce: not yet.
Reading through European and North American blogs about digital marketing these days, one gets a rough idea where marketing budgets and efforts will go to next year. Most experts share the opinion that two areas will see a huge growth: 1. mobile marketing, pushed by the rapid adaptation of smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry and cell phones that run on Android, including Google’s Nexus One) especially in Europe and 2. geolocalization.
(For more info on 2010 digital marketing trends I recommend reading “Where Digital Marketing Is Heading in 2010 (Part 1)” published at Advertising Age).
So what does that mean for video marketing and video commerce?
I think that in general mobile commerce is still in a premature phase and it’s too early still to speak about “mobile video marketing” (the use of video content in mobile marketing). Just think about watching a video on your cell phone… While Apple (57 million iPhones have been sold worldwide) and Google (Android) have made sure that YouTube videos can be viewed on their devices, reproducing a video on a Blackberry is still quite a painful if not impossible user experience. In general, it will take more technical effort and time until e-marketers provide relevant web content for mobile users (at least that’s what I predict for the European market), let alone video integration for mobile navigation or mobile video commerce applications.
Having said that, let’s look on the possibilities of video and geolocalization. Actually, it makes a lot of sense to combine content mapping or geolocalization -one of the killer applications on the web- and video content.
Look at Trip TV, “The Hotel Video Guide”, a site that sells hotel rooms around the world. For me it is one of the best e-commerce sites when it comes to integrating video-based geolocalization. The idea is really simple: optimize the user experience by providing the necessary information for holiday travelers. Users can browse the site using a Google Maps interface that includes videos of listed hotels.
The video player has all the state-of-the-art features necessary to guarantee a great user experience: in video thumbnails to go from chapter to chapter, a more info button on the hotel, a photo gallery and related video (similar hotels) button, sharing options and a “see on map” option.
Click on “Rooms” and you will get short videos of everything the hotel offers.
You got the idea: mash up video content and maps to optimize user experience. The online travel industry shows the way. I wonder why so few retailers are using this simple combination to stand out in map-based search engine marketing. Something to think about for 2010!
Zappos.com: the biggest video retailer in 2010?
Online shoe and fashion accessory retailer Zappos has started to integrate Overlay.tv’s video technology, a simple and user-friendly “clickable” video interface that allows the user to interact with the content, widely referred to as video widgets.
Here a few impressive statistics on Zappos’ online video use:
- In 2010 Zappos plans to offer some 50,000 product videos on their website which will make it the biggest video retailer on the web!
- Zappos’ existing video content on product pages has been able to increase sales (compared to product sites without video) by between 6 to 30%!
- The Las Vegas-based online retailer currently counts with 6 video studios to produce their own content and is planning to run 4 more studios by the end of 2010.
That’s makes them the innovation champion in video retailing 2009-2010, and that’s why
Most watched at YouTube in 2009: Evian Roller Babies in the top 5 list!
Only 10 more days to go and 2009 will be history: high time for reviews and previews. Let’s start these last 2 weeks of the year with an interesting review. The YouTube Blog has published this year’s Most Watched and Most Seached For worldwide, and here are the results:
Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1. Susan Boyle - Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)
All top 5 ranking videos are clearly entertainment content, that’s what people come to watch for at YouTube, they look for short, fun to watch clips that have natural viral potential. Which leads us to the second thing people love to do with these videos: they love to share the stuff they like.
And here is the interesting news: Even if pure e-commerce contents, company videos or product demos do not show up in the best of 2009 ranking, YouTube is still the best media platform to do online video marketing… if you only know how to do it.
There are 2 clips with a commercial character and a clear online strategy that made it into the 2009 top 5 list: The New Moon movie trailer and the crazy dancing babies of Evian, part of the Evian online campaign “Live Young” . The French mineral water brand’s YouTube channel has some 14,000 subscribers, their international version of the “Rapper’s Delight” video counts some 6,800 comments and almost 20,000 users have ranked the clip. Those numbers are not too bad in terms of user engagement for a low involvement product like bottled water. And if we take the FMCG sector, Roller Babies is this year’s best global online branding campaign on YouTube and I think other FMCG brands can draw the following lessons:
1. If YouTube is your single most important distributing platform, content has to be highly entertaining. That’s what people look for.
2. The YouTube interface is highly customizable - take advantage of it and make your branded content recognizable so it stands out form the rest.
3. If you are able to produce a good viral (some say that starts at 150,000 views), make sure all the rest of your content is integrated naturally into the YouTube environment; see for example, the series of interviews with Paul Smith, the design guru who conceived the limited edition bottle for Evian.
For the future of video marketing and video-based e-commerce it would be interesting and useful if YouTube also openly published metrics on the traffic generated from YouTube to Evian’s other sites. It would provide all online marketers with a great tool to start investing more into video branding and communication. Let’s see what 2010 holds…
“Videos we’re loving” - Lonely Planet’s video email marketing strategy.
The volume of email and newsletter marketing is soaring during the current Christmas season and we are seeing good examples of video and rich media implementations from retailers and online shops.
Take Lonely Planet, the most popular travel guide, for example. A couple of years ago they already started to use video on their website; they also started experimenting in a very early stage with user-generated video content allowing travelers to share their amateur clips with other users, integrating these videos very naturally in the community section of the web. Today, professional video content is a key to promote almost any destination at Lonely Planet’s sites.
The brand also understood that short videos help to curb relatively low conversion rates of email and newsletter campaigns, a format that has become less attractive, for some users even intrusive, especially in times when users prefer pull marketing in form of RSS subscription or social recommendations via Facebook or Twitter.
All week, Lonely Planet newsletters include at least 2-3 short video clips, like these from their latest newsletter on top Christmas travel destinations for example.
If you have video content think about if and how it could be used in your email and online promotion strategy because it it can help to make a good old newsletter look attractive again. A study of MarketingSherpa said already back in June 2008 that embedded video in emails have the potential to increase conversion rates up to 50%!
Tags: video email marketing
Smart video-based online advertising examples
We are starting to see some really well implemented entirely video-based online advertising campaigns that cleverly combine the advantages of video as a storytelling tool and video as effective web 2.0 content. That is a real progress in the sense that advertisers and their agencies finally realize the great potential of video based content to address demographic specific issues, something that is rare and difficult to archive in mass market TV advertising.
The first great example is from the UK and it’s a video-based micro-site by the auto brand Smart. It’s called “Truth of Smart” and the overall communication objective of the video-based micro-site is to do away with the 4 existing main prejudices against the smallest (non-electrical) car on the market: 1. it’s not safe because it has no protective zone; 2. it’s uncomfortable because it’s small, 3. it doesn’t have storage space in the back and 4. it’s not fuel-efficient.
All these issues are addressed through a interactive video-based interface that allow users to discover the “Truth about Smart” by themselves.
This is an effective example of how to use video based content (or call it rich media content) to give concrete answers to concrete questions about the product or service you try to sell based a segmentation that aims to respond to the main prejudice about the product.
The second example for smart online video use is the current global campaign of the beer brand Heineken focused on the important issue of responsible drinking, called “Know the Signs”.
Through a series of characters - defined during an extensive phase of interview-based qualitative market research - the user witnesses different embarrassing moments, when somebody has one too many drinks. There are tragically funny video episodes about how your friends can tranform into the “typical” drunk crier, groper, sleeper, flirter, etc., all representing realistic characters we know from real night life.
Again, a great work of content segmentation to reach different demographics and make them aware of the sometimes devastating and always embarrassing side effects of that last drink you shouldn’t have had.
Burn it, smash it, blend it: really simple product videos that put it to the extreme.
Product videos account for a large part of commercial video content on the web. Most of these videos are part of the product site or description and at best they are informative but never too entertaining, right? But that’s ok because their key function is to be relevant and useful for users who needs to get a better understanding of the characteristics of the product or service offered. But that’s also why only a very small part of those videos make it out to the web and go viral.
A “good” viral product video should produce more than a fleeting spike in views on YouTube. It should be able to create a certain (desired) brand effect and in the best case drive traffic to the brand’s or product’s site, raising online conversion rate.
Here are 3 great and extreme examples of how brands from different industries have been able to raise brand / product awareness through very simple viral videos.
1. The chemical group DuPont presents a new fire fighter protection suit that beats everything else on the market and gives almost 100% burn protection for fire fighters in extreme conditions. The spectacular clip went viral after video blogger Amanda Congdo put it on her favorite video list. Click on the image to go to the video.
2. Another great example is “catapulting chairs” stress test video that shows the indestructible design of Emeco aluminum chairs. The test object, Emeco navy chair, is catapulted against a brick wall. See what happens to the chair:
3. You might remember the launch of the IOSafe Drive at this year’s CES in Las Vegas. The video of the burning and drowning but disaster-proof data case of its hard drive made it around the globe. IOSafe kindly remarks, “Don’t try this at home with your normal hard drive!”
If you think about producing a product video for the web make sure you are able to visualize the unique value proposition of your product first. What is it that makes your product or service really different from all the others? What’s the best way to prove this to your prospective customers? After thinking about the characteristics of your product, you may consider using a video that puts the product through extreme testing - remember the simple but effective video campaign by “Will It Blend?”
Still, one should never forget that extreme footage isn’t for every product. Don’t force the “extreme” element into your videos just because it’s sensational. Such approaches can damage the brand, and when this style is forced onto a product that doesn’t fit the “extreme” mold, it actually can turn potential clients away.