The big brains in the Conversion Sciences lab have been working around the clock to bring you an interactive ebook about the science behind business video. Business Video Through the Eyes of Your Prospects is a must read for any business looking to invest in video.
The guys in the lab coats have taken their pile of data on business video and created an ebook that is not only chock full of information, but stocked with over 30 minutes of video examples. Let’s be honest; when it comes to video, seeing is believing. And the best way to show what works (and what doesn’t) is through actual video.
While we can’t promise that this book will tell your future, make your hair thicker, or cure the common cold, we can promise the following:
* An explanation of how video works in the brain
* Results of our split test to maximize conversion
* Results of a post test to measure comprehension
* Over 30 minutes of video so you can see for yourself
* And so much more!
To make a long story short (too late!), you will absolutely want a copy of this book. Before you invest in business video, read this book, watch the videos, and create a video strategy based on what will really work. Get the most out of your video budget by focusing on the video that’s going to have the best ROI.
Everyone is excited about “whiteboard” video, in which concepts are drawn at super-high speed on a whiteboard to explain or sell what you offer. But Whiteboard video is not cheap, and the geek scientists here a Conversion Sciences wanted to learn if whiteboard video was worth the extra price.
First, we used an eye-tracking camera to see how people watch whiteboard video. Watch the incredible video we made that tracks viewers’ eyes as the watch whiteboard video right in the interactive eBook. But, we didn’t stop there.
We did the same for “talking head” video and for “webinar” or “slide” video. These are the three most common forms of business video.
You’re going to be surprised at what we discovered.
We also did a split test of these kinds of videos to see which would generate the most conversions in a business setting.
Don’t invest in video until you’ve read Business Video Through the Eyes of Your Prospects. This interactive PDF book includes all of the eye-tracking videos and more.
* An explanation of how video works in the brain
* Results of our split test to maximize conversion
* Results of a post test to measure comprehension
* Over 30 minutes of video so you can see for yourself
This extraordinary ebook will save you from investing $5000, $10,000 or more in the wrong video. Get instant access to the Business Video Through the Eyes of Your Prospects.
Video can significantly improve your conversion rates and revenue. The wrong video can do the opposite. Avoid expensive video pitfalls with this interactive eBook.
@smexaminer While images are important for social media to help break through the noise, they are also very important on our landing pages, home pages and other web pages.
Unfortunately, we often resort to what I call “business porn” in my book. Business porn includes stock photos of multi-racial smiling people, of graphs going up and to the right, and of cheerful women with headsets.
So if you are struggling with what to use for visuals on your site or in your emails, here are 26 excellent ideas. – Brian Massey
In this video, four experts give free website advice to the owners of one website: Brian Massey, Andrew Davis, Josh Miles, and Todd Wheatland.
Unsolicited Advice is a short, high-energy video series in which we evaluate websites, giving tips on how to make them work.
The Conversion Sciences Lab requires long hours of focused attention. Needless to say, we have to keep ourselves in shape to do good work. I keep my svelte shape in part by performing some physiological experiments on myself at Lifetime Fitness. The things I do would make me laugh if I was watching.
As part of Lifetime my membership, I am graced with the monthly magazine Experience L!fe. The March issue featured the article “A Plan for Happiness.”
Finally! A plan.
The plan for happiness begins with some convincing proof, citing a study by a PhD on some three-thousand people. Based on this research, the good doctor found that, “If you can prevent stress from happening by planning, you’re going to be much better off.” He offered three steps:
Make a List before you go to bed each night
Prioritize and tackle the first two or three things immediately
Break down big tasks into 15-minute chunks.
Now, if you are like me and some three-fourths of the population, you will find this list laughable. This kind of disciplined and controlled regimen works for one kind of person, but not for most of us.
Now imagine that your online business was paid based on the happiness achieved by its visitors. This one recipe would not be a very profitable, because it only appeals to one personality “mode.” Based on Myers-Briggs research, there are at least four major personality modes, or temperaments, and I discuss them in my most recent Search Engine Land column.
How would we write our happiness recipe to appeal to each of the four personality types and why do you care? First of all, you care because the job of your website is to make your visitors happy. That is when they buy from you.
The list provided by our eager PhD is ideal for the Competitive types, who are often found to be on a mission to improve their life. They are goal-oriented and disciplined.
However, our Spontaneous visitors live for impulse and action. Their plan for happiness might be:
Make a list — if you go to bed. Make your list with an Etch-a-sketch or Lite-Brite to make it fun.
Prioritize. Then ignore the prioritization and tackle the first two or three things that grab your interest in the morning.
Break down big tasks into… “Squirrel!”
Humanists, on the other hand make decisions based relationships and how something makes them feel. Their stress relief formula might be:
Make a list before you go to bed of the people you wish were snuggling with you. Text them goodnight.
Prioritize the first two or three things on someone else’s list. Tackle these for them.
Break down big tasks and have a task party with each of your friends.
Finally, our Methodicals are going to be suspicious that three steps is sufficient to solve a problem like happiness. They need information, data and detail.
Make a list before you go to bed each night.
Do a gap analysis of this list against the previous night’s list. On weekends, include a trend analysis.
Prioritize the list, but do not tackle yet.
QA the prioritized list using the list prioritization guidelines.
Complete a task requirements document (TRD) for each.
Identify resources required and procure missing materials.
Execute.
Have 15-minute progress reviews to ensure there has been no task scope creep.
Sandra Niehaus and Sara Sturtevant of Closed Loop Marketing offer three methods for getting inside your visitor’s heads to design an online experience that persuades and converts.
Engaging the visiting mind is a key challenge of Conversion Scientists. It is also a key capability of video. However, there is something magnetic about drawn video. It is unclear exactly why.
Is it the symbolic nature that keeps our attention?
Is it the emergent nature of drawings as they are drawn?
Is it just that this format is unique?
Here is just eighteen seconds of drawn video I did for TEDx Austin reflecting their 2012 theme “Beyond Measure.”
Steve Krug gave an inspiring and enlightening Keynote presentation at Conversion Conference NY 2011, and we captured his wisdom using Instagraph technology for your viewing pleasure.
Now, if you’re interested at all in website conversion, I should know that you don’t wake up at night saying, “Wow! I need to accelerate my online business!”
You certainly don’t spend your day in a cold sweat, wondering how to “optimize for buyer personas.”
So, why did I name a webinar “Accelerating Your Online Business by Optimizing for Buyer Personas!?”
Because sometimes I make the same mistakes you are making in your marketing. I’m trying to come up with titles and headlines and copy that appeal to everyone, when I should be focusing on you, a real business with real conversion concerns.
So here’s my promise: I’m going to tell you who should be part of this webinar, straight up, and you can go about your business if it isn’t you.
If you want to know what color your Add to Cart button should be, you’re going to hate this webinar.
If you want to know how to get your team to stop writing titles like “Accelerating Your Online Business by Optimizing for Buyer Personas,” you’re in the right place.
If you’re looking for ten steps toward better landing pages, you’re going to be disappointed (but you will be entertained).
If you’re frustrated that your website isn’t doing better, and you’re not afraid of change, you should be here.
If you like presentations named “Accelerating Your Online Business by Optimizing for Buyer Personas”, you’re not going to like Accelerating Your Online Business by Optimizing for Buyer Personas.
We’re going to have more fun than that title suggests.
We’re going to talk about personas, which I know is very conceptual for many of you. You are dismissed.
For the rest of you, I offer a clarity of direction and purpose that few website teams can claim.
And we’re going to see if you learned anything, by finishing up with “What to Test: The Conversion Quiz.”
Yes, online marketing should be fun.
So, please ignore the title and come if you want to learn:
An easy way to model your best visitors into four “Modes of Research”
The limits of demographics and how to overcome them
How to use analytics to uncover persona behavior
The Conversion Quiz: Test your ability to apply personas to on-page tests
Pretend we named the webinar something more interesting.
Here is a guide to how your blog can draw qualified traffic to your website via search, social media and email.
Does your blog squirt or erupt?
I got some inspiration from an unlikely place for my column on content marketing: the American Museum of Natural History in New York I was drawn there because I thought they were having an exhibit all about me. It turns out that the exhibit was called “Introducing the Brain,” not “Introducing Brian.” The exhibit did not have anything to say on what part of the brain causes dyslexia.
But, scientists love museums, and so I looked around. There was an entire room dedicated to the earth, from it’s heat-formed rocks to it’s carbon-choked atmosphere.
My next thought was “this is just like content marketing.” I’m sure you would have had the same thought. If you didn’t, you’ll soon understand.
Read my complete thoughts on the matter over at ClickZ to understand how a blog-cano can generate copious amounts of search, social media and email goodness for your business.
What does a geologist know about online marketing? Probably not much, but a geologist can give us a handy model for a content marketing strategy that is easy to implement and potentially explosive.
How is a Blog Like a Volcano?
How a Blog Is Like a Volcano
At the most basic level, a blog spews content like a volcano spews lava. The content typically emerges in pyroclastic flows fed from a content magma chamber deep inside.
It is the release of this magma – the content – that determines the pace at which the mountain grows. A mountain with a large magma chamber can be expected to erupt more frequently and more violently.
Like a blog, our volcanic mountain becomes more visible as it rises higher and higher into the top levels of the atmosphere. It can become visible very quickly to nearby villages, executive offices in neighboring cities…and to search engines.
Clearly, we can learn a few lessons from our geological friends. My question is, “How can we get our blog-cano to erupt more frequently and spread our content as far as possible?”
Have a Big Magma Chamber
You’ve got to have a plan for a steady flow of content. Your blog-cano is the heart of your content marketing strategy and can power your social marketing strategy, lead generation strategy, and search engine optimization.
The beauty of blogging is that it’s a more casual medium. Your blog content doesn’t have to be bibliographed articles. It doesn’t require your subject matter experts to be writing constantly. In fact, blog content can come from many sources: presentations, case studies, and even geology textbooks. Much blogging is simply commenting on others’ writing, which we call “curating content” for your audience.
I’m not saying that your posts don’t have to be valuable. Lava must be hot to flow. But, it must flow constantly or your blog-cano won’t grow fast enough and you won’t be able to implement some of the more explosive strategies I discuss here.
Bringing Tourists to the Slope of Mount Blogitubo
All a blog is really going to get you is an RSS feed. While your RSS feed is going to power some very helpful strategies, there aren’t going to be a lot of people reading your posts via feed reader.
Search engines, however, love blogs.
With a little geologic surveying, we can help the search engines find our naturally keyword-rich content. They will, in turn, send us tourists.
Choose a blogging platform that is search-engine friendly. Don’t just use the content management system that your corporate site is built on.
Definitely put your blog on the same domain as your corporate website so both benefit from the search engine “juice” you create.
If you have the resources, you can identify your most valuable keywords and purposefully incorporate them into your blog posts and titles. Search ClickZ for search engine optimization best practices.
Eruptions Are Worth Spreading
With a little technology, you can rain content down on people far and wide. Your Mount Blogsuveous is capable of powering engaging social media outreach, drawing qualified traffic, and growing your social networks. This can be largely automated with services like Ping.fm and Twitterfeed. Tools like HootSuite and Spredfast will help you share your content on the most popular social networks. (Disclosure: Spredfast provides its service to the author at no charge.)
Because these posts, tweets, and status updates contain a link back to your content, you can actually measure the clicks and conversions generated by your social media outreach, and this can justify production of more magma.
Spreading the Explosive Energy of Your Blogatoa
Tourists coming from social media and search are nice, but they always go back home. What if they could take a piece of the mountain home with them?
It turns out that well-qualified tourists will want to continue to receive your blava (blog-lava) and you can easily deliver that with e-mail. Ask visitors to give you an e-mail address and you can automatically power an e-mail newsletter with remarkable frequency.
Here is where your RSS feed really comes in handy. There are services that will monitor your blog for the new posts arising from your blogma (blog-magma) chamber. On a set schedule, these services will pull the content from the feed, wrap it in a nice template, and send it to your list by e-mail.
Ask your e-mail service provider (ESP) if they have an RSS-to-e-mail service. MailChimp andAWeber provide such a service. Consider FeedBurner or FeedBlitz if your ESP can’t help.
This strategy is great for considered purchases or any product or service in which the need is unpredictable. It keeps you front-and-center when it’s time for the tourists to pick their next destination.
Flow Over to Your Corporate Website
The final place on which you can rain your explosive content is on the corporate website. These sites are typically designed like a brochure, written in a “me,” “we,” and “us” style.
Blava content is generally more educational, informational, and entertaining. It’s created for the reader, and will really grab the attention of someone who is early in their decision-making process.
There are a variety of widgets available to display blog titles on your corporate site, and visitors will find this content more compelling than your recent press releases. Make sure that your blog gives them an obvious way to get back to the corporate site.
The Center of a Hub
Once these parts are in place, our blog-cano has become the center of a powerful, largely automated hub of influence. However, the system is only as powerful as our blog content. Post frequency is the best predictor of blog readership growth that I’ve seen. You should post at least once per week, in my opinion.
Remember that your editorial calendar is your magma chamber, the source of all blog-cano power. Find the resources to post helpful content frequently and you will empower search, social media, and e-mail to drive more business to your door.
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