Jason Hsiao

I'm Jason Hsiao. I'm the Chief Video Officer & Co-Founder of Animoto. We're basically an online video creation tool to help enable small businesses to create videos for social media. Basically, in my talk where I'm coming from, for me what's astounding is it's pretty much universally accepted now that video is really important. Video is everywhere. But when you think about who's actually actively creating video, it's still a small, small percentage of the 30 million businesses in the US or the 125 million businesses in the world. What I'm really excited about is how do we get not just that small fraction of people, big companies using videos, but how do we get the rest of all these companies, medium and smaller sized companies using video and able to benefit from the power of video. In my talk, I was really just trying to connect the dots with what businesses are already familiar with so we can reduce the anxiety level and increase the confidence level that they can just get started with video. Once they get started, I think they start to really see the power, the impact that it has in trying to communicate with their community. Well, I think the primary reason video is taking off. Mark Zuckerberg calls it a mega trend and he compares it to how quickly mobile took off. There are some people that are actually saying that it's taking hold faster than mobile, which is kind of crazy. I think it's just because of the inherent in the medium, video is just, I believe it's the most compelling and effective form of communicating what's important. There's so many dimensions to video that a blog post or a landing page or email can't capture. You have sound, you have music, you have people, you have colors, you have visuals. There's just so many different elements packed into it. It's just that much more engaging. It's not just something I believe. There's thousands of statistics now and studies that just show that when you include video, everything goes up. Your engagement, your conversions, your time on your page, everything just improves because people prefer to consume information with video. Because of that, marketers are responding to saying, I need to be communicating in a way that my consumers prefer to consume information and if they prefer video, I need to be using video. I think it's as simple as that. Part of the message that I've been trying to deliver at conferences like this is that video shouldn't be thought of this one-off checklist item on your marketing to-do list. It's a form of communication. We say businesses need to learn to speak video because it's something that you need to regularly do to communicate what's important to your audience. When we think about translating that into a framework that businesses are comfortable with or that they can resonate with, the two simplest ways I talk about how to organize the world of video because it can get complicated really fast is you can create videos to create interest or create leads and you can create videos to convert interest or convert leads. I think where video has come up recently, in the recent past, is the first place people think that they need video is on their website, which is true. You've got to have a video on your homepage or your landing page or anywhere that you're talking about your product because that's where you're trying to convert your interest. But when you think about it, by the time they get to your website, they've already actually somehow shown interest and got to your website. That's already many steps ahead in the funnel. Now what's emerged is this wider world, mostly on social media, where this is where people are actually hanging out. Before they've actually taken the steps to get to your site, how do you tap into their interests? That's where social media has really played a big part in the last year or two and it's probably going to continue to explode. This is where the conversation is happening. Now I can use video in certain ways to create interest and see topics or conversations they're interested in and then pull them into my universe. Hopefully to my website where I can then convert them into a customer. That's just the simplest way, I think, is how do we create interest out there in the world and then once they've shown some interest, how do we convert them into customers? Let's start with convert leads. Use video to convert leads because that's probably the most intuitive. If you think of the videos that you might have on your website, by the time they've gotten to your website, they're showing some interest. They found out about your company, somehow they're checking you out. Really the types of videos you need, if you think about what you need on your homepage, you need to just explain in a pretty succinct fashion and hopefully in an interesting way what your company is all about. What do you offer? What product or service do you offer? What do you stand for? How are you different? You could call that a company overview or a product overview. That's pretty important. I think once you start getting a little bit deeper into your site or down below on your page, people are starting to lean in more saying, okay, I kind of get this. I want to know a little bit more about what it is you offer to see if I'm interested. You might need something like a product overview or maybe a product demo. People actually want to see how it works or they want to see what the end product of the service looks like. Then from there, it can get into a lot of different facets. You can drill into specific commonly asked questions. You can use video to show off a bit about your brand or your culture, have some interviews with some of the folks on your team, or give even a tour of your office, something like that. You're trying to create interest in your product, in your brand, in your service so people ultimately will choose to try your product or sign up. Now, if you think about how do we get people there in the first place and what type of things are going to be interesting out in the world of social media where you're putting these videos, that's a bit of a different art, right? Because people don't want stuff shoved out. They don't want commercials. They don't want a bunch of promotional videos shoved in their face. It's a little bit of a different tactic. Probably the typical umbrella term that we've heard over the last few years is content marketing. It's pretty simple. It's what kind of interesting educational content can you put out there that matches the interests of your company and what your prospects might be interested in? Specifically, the type of videos might be a how-to video on something related to your company or a piece of or a testimonial of sorts about how one of your customers managed to find success and sharing his or her story. It could be a piece of thought leadership about your perspective on how the industry is changing. Anything that might just get people to lean in a bit, they're like, oh yeah, I'm interested in that general area of topic or topics. Then you see that you've started to create some interest and then you can start pulling them into your funnel. In terms of measuring success, it's really becoming a bit of an art and a bit of a science. The art is what goes into a video. There's no necessarily one-size-fits-all formula. There's different things that would work with different companies to capture interest or convert interest. What's happening now is with those videos, there's an explosion of data that's happening associated with that video. I think we're still at the tip of the iceberg of what you can really understand with video viewing behavior. At a high level, when you're talking about creating videos to create interest, at a highest level, it's about views. Views is a bit of a vanity metric. There are certainly different aspects of a view. If you think about on my phone, if I'm just flipping through, if I stop for a second or two, sometimes some of these social media platforms will count that quick one or two second view as a view. But that's not, is that really a view? I don't know. More typical now is to be able to really understand how much of a video has someone watched. One second is a lot different from five seconds, which is a lot different from ten seconds, which is a lot different from your entire video. For a lot of folks who are operating in the world of inbound marketing and leads, they think a lot about quality scoring. That's where a lot of this data becomes really, really important because for companies to become effective in converting these people showing interest into customers, they need to really understand who has kind of the highest probability of converting into a customer because that's where I want to spend most of my energy and resources. Otherwise, I'm just wasting money. I'm just spending lots of money, spending lots of time and just hoping that something kind of sticks, right? So with video, you have some really interesting pieces of information that you're starting to get that kind of other traditional forms of marketing can't give you. So specifically, you get to see how much of a video people are actually watching and you can see where they stop. You can see how many types of videos they watch. You can see what type of videos they've watched and that should start to give you some indication of not just how interested are they in what you might have to offer, but even what variations of your products or services they might be interested in. Or if you're even more sophisticated, you might even start to realize, oh, they seem to gravitate towards these types of videos versus these types of videos. So I'll give you one example. Sometimes in our company, we have a debate like, should we do kind of more feel good videos that are really like aspiration emotion that draw the emotion out of you? Or should we kind of do the ones that are like bullet point? Like people just want to know exactly, you know, they're kind of like when they buy something, they want to know what does it include? How does it work? I want to see what it looks like. The truth is that there are both types of people in the world. Some people really love those emotional, inspirational, feel good videos and they're drawn and they will make purchases based on how they feel. And there are people who they think that's garbage and they need to know exactly what the back of the box, you know, what's included, how does it work, how much does it cost, and compare it to other products. But you won't know until you try both. So that's kind of one interesting way where when you start to see what type of videos people are watching, you could develop a strategy that starts to follow your understanding of what type of person they are and how they're wired. So the first step for most companies is just creating their first video, getting it out there and just starting to experiment and see kind of what works with certain videos. Once companies start seeing the power and success and cost efficiency that video can provide them, then inevitably companies want to do more and they want to do more. And what we're seeing is that it's often not, like I said before, it's often not one video, one magic video that you put out there and suddenly generates all these customers. It's following a customer along their journey of awareness and understanding and consideration and then trying your product and then buying it. And there's kind of different types of communication that happen all along the way. And there might even be, like we said, different types of kind of behavior. Some come and are immediately ready to purchase. Some need some nurturing. Some need some bullet point facts about your product service. Some need more human interaction, you know, whatever it is. But different customers have different journeys that they need to get through. And when you start multiplying the number of different types of videos you might need to follow a customer along their journey, times the number of prospects you might actually have out there in the world, multiply that by the different time that people might start that journey. It can get really complex really fast. And on top of that, you're just trying to understand overall about what's working and what's not so you can kind of keep improving your conversion machine. So that's where automation comes in because it's almost not humanly possible to manage that craziness, right? So yeah, exponentially we're talking, it was like five different dimensions all right there. And so it can get crazy pretty quickly. So that's where automation becomes really important because what marketer or the business owner, what they need to be focused on is the higher level value proposition or message of what really is, what message is really connecting with my customer, right? And in terms of managing, you know, when those videos get posted or, you know, compiling the analytics or really understanding what's working with all that can be automated and should be automated so that they can spend their time doing the most important aspects of marketing and running their business. Probably the number one challenge of most businesses, regardless of size, is deciding how, where and when to apply their limited resources and time. Because it doesn't matter how smart the people are, how talented the people are in your company, if they're spending time in the wrong places, you're just wasting time and money, right? So the whole idea of lead nurture and quality scoring becomes really important because you might be getting tons of leads, but they're not all created equal, right? So if you start developing a system by which, you know, certain videos contribute to, you know, certain scores more than others, and however you're developing your scoring system, you want to be focusing most of your effort on the higher quality, the higher quality prospects to convert them. And that doesn't mean that, you know, you can't kind of focus on the lower quality prospects, but that's where automation becomes really helpful is that you can have very kind of low cost efficient ways by which you can be nurturing them or following them along and possibly moving up that kind of score spectrum. But in terms of where you're really going to focus your precious, you know, human time, if you have a sales force, that's a very precious time, you want to be focusing on the higher prospects. So quality scoring is kind of the necessary ingredient, you know, for tapping into the potential of kind of a lead nurture program. So I think I'll give a couple pieces of advice. I often see marketers trying to create videos that just don't really seem to have any relevance to either what the company is actually offering, or what their brand stands for. So and it's I think sometimes because they're trying to kind of copy certain styles of other videos they see. A great example is, I often hear that that marketers think they need to create funny videos, because, you know, people send them funny videos and like, oh, the most successful videos are all funny. So they try to do and most people who try to do funny videos are not funny. Even for even professionals who spend millions of dollars, like how many Super Bowl commercials that try to be funny are actually funny. Like some are, but even, you know, when you spend lots of money and you hire professional funny people, it's not always funny. It's really hard to create funny videos. So I always say, first and foremost, authenticity is more important than hilarity. Unless it's truly part of your brand and you know you're funny, don't try to be funny if that's not what your brand stands for. And the second thing I say is, if you're trying to figure out what types of videos to create, start with what you have and what works. So think about what message already resonates with your audience. Think about what you actually have. Do you have images? Do you have visuals? Do you have images? Do you have video clips? Do you have talking points that already work? Create videos around those visuals, around those talking points. Start with what works. If you start there, you really can't go wrong. I think in some ways, even though video is everywhere and everyone knows they need to be kind of embracing video, I still actually think that this wave is, we're still kind of at the early part of the wave. So I think just one big trend is seeing more companies actually using video and those that are using video actually using it more often. Like I said, video being a form of communication, not just something that you do once a year or for a special kind of ad campaign or something like that. It's a regular form of communication. But into kind of more specifics, I mean, when you look at all these various companies' earnings reports like Facebook and Google, YouTube, it's video that's driving a lot of these companies' growth. And so you're seeing more and more of these social platforms gravitating to video because they know that that's what is driving the growth of all these other companies. So more and more, all these social platforms are really turning into video platforms. Even if they're not social platforms, everything is kind of just becoming video. So it's just this continued trend of video being everywhere. I think specifically for marketers, some trends are going to be, you know, we're certainly starting to see square videos more and more. So quite specifically, you know, square videos are outperforming landscape videos, probably just by nature. They take up 78% more screen real estate than landscape videos. But then the next logical question is, well, what about vertical videos? And I know that a lot of companies, I mean, there are already some certain companies, you know, like Snap and stuff that are all about vertical videos, but more and more, you're going to see, you know, Facebook and YouTube and others kind of adapting to the kind of a full screen video. So it's not necessarily something that's easy to do today. But every video producer, every agency out there is having to think about ways that they can easily go into a production shoot, not just thinking about that one video at the end of my kind of my production cycle, but what are all the different types of videos I can produce, you know, after my after my shoot. So I think just that proliferation of formats is probably going to be one of the biggest trends and challenges, I think, in the coming year.