Video: The New Visual Paradigm

Fortunately, the video has been changing a lot over the past year, and then I'm going to do a few kind of very tangible tips of what we've learned from our pilot customers over the last year, and how all this stuff is not only about the challenge of what we need to adapt to but also huge opportunities for all of us as marketers and as video marketers. So video is this kind of format that's been around for 100 years but certainly for 60 years in terms of this television thing. So in one way it's an extremely profound way of actually bringing people into a room when they're not in a room. We're doing a 360 camera thing here. It's a very different way of bringing people into a room. But even with somebody talking on camera, it is a very profound way of extracting kind of communication and conversations and human relationships over time, and that's something that's been adopted by TV and by advertising for 60 or 70 years in a way that's been profound and has really kind of changed all of our societies. But what has been happening with web and with the web age is kind of the Instagramification or the visual sharingification of all things visual because all of us are getting to a point where we are extremely literate in communicating visually. And it brings this kind of opportunity and this kind of challenge to what video can do for us as kind of companies, as marketers, in how we bring authenticity into how we communicate our brands and our messages. And that's kind of the full kind of profoundness of what video in the digital age is able to bring us. And if anyone is in doubt that we are living in a visual age, I brought two specific numbers because this is not about how many people are watching videos and how many hours are people watching on Netflix. The two very specific things is this year alone, four billion cameras will be sold in this world. This is not something that's happening 10 years from now. This year, you will buy or all of us will buy four billion cameras. And I mean, I'm at least carrying two of them right now, three of them counting my computer and then talk about cars and fridges and all that other kind of stuff, right? Second bit is that 45% of all social sharing is visual. So it's all about photos and videos and all that kind of stuff. So these two things kind of combine into this huge opportunity of how we actually start the communication that is qualitatively different because video is different in very specific ways. This is something that, I mean, it has been very clear if not for 60 years, then certainly since 2005 when people started using YouTube on the web, that video does something. Video is a great kind of storytelling device. It is a way of bringing in different kinds of relationships into web communication. And it is something that drives engagement in a very different way. So this is one of my favorite stats. This is from our own webpage. If people are on the webpage and watch a video, they're there for four minutes. If not, they're there for 30 seconds. So this is basically video. It drives engagement. It drives interest in a way that's very different. So what has changed the last year, maybe 18 months, this number doesn't really matter. This number is wholly meaningless if you don't actually figure out what you do in those four minutes. So the second bit of what video is, that video is different in a qualitative way. We can tell different stories. We can relate to each other differently as humans. We can establish different kinds of memes and kind of communication. The second bit though is something that is rapidly changing. And this is something that is really happening, if not in 2016, then 2015 and 2016 combined. So that's where marketing comes into it. Because suddenly we're able to drive video through data in a different way. We're able to drive it through social in a different way. And we're able to think about video not as being plays, but as being a way of doing lead generation, as a way of actually optimizing our tools. So this presents a lot of opportunities, I guess, because all of us can kind of feel that, okay, so video can do something different. It can keep people on a page longer. And we can start to say that actually what happens in the span of four minutes while I'm telling a different story about my brand or while people are on YouTube getting the story about what my company does or how my product works or how to assemble this specific piece of furniture or whatever it is down the line, we can also attach this kind of idea of result driven marketing to it. We can actually put this into a video funnel and talk about segmenting and how we actually drive value from it as marketeers. So this brings up opportunities and challenges. And I'm basically going to list four specific changes that have come along within the span of a very short time and that probably none of us have really wrapped our hands around how we start to do well. At least that's what we're seeing from our pilot customers, that they're kind of interested in all of these trends but really trying to figure out how do we actually bridge the gap, how do we attain this kind of sweet spot of video and marketing combined. So the first thing is kind of fragmentation in the sense that it used to be a YouTube world where everyone was kind of happy just to have a video and we would put it on YouTube and if you search YouTube or search Google for a specific term you will find a video from a brand. But that is fragmenting into a point where there's YouTube, there's Twitter, there's Facebook, there's certainly inbound pages, there's embedding and there's mobile apps. So as marketeers we're suddenly kind of in a world where there are at least kind of six different channels that we need to adopt to but also six different ways of running our content. So this is a huge opportunity if we're able to know what is the content that's relevant on mobile as opposed to when we do embedding and seeding strategies as opposed to on Facebook and even differently from YouTube. But it's also a huge challenge because it brings a lot of fragmentation. That fragmentation leads us into this weird way where video is on all platforms but not necessarily on our web pages. So on our web pages we're still only doing kind of embedding and then there's a fragmentation where you have some videos that are running on Facebook, some that might be running on YouTube, maybe none on Twitter. You have some embeds but you don't really have control of those embeds because they're running some YouTube stuff where you don't have the tracking and you certainly don't have the ability to do segmenting, conversion lead generation or even something very simple as kind of tagging for remarketing based on those segments. So what we're seeing the really kind of smart digital marketers that are really starting to adopt the format of video is that they're realizing that they've already got 300 videos or 600 videos or a lot of videos that are kind of out there in this fragmented landscape but there's also this opportunity to start bringing this video back to their own pages because this is the second tier of video that's inbound marketing has suddenly become relevant in a way where you get with all the videos that you're already producing a lot of inbound pages or a lot of landing pages really. And this obviously couples with a lot of other kind of social objects that kind of work with video in the sense of having embeddable spots on your web pages, having live events and webinars or even full on video hops or video sections where stuff becomes searchable and where the difference in engagement is pretty staggering because you get to recommend videos that are in your own sphere. Third change is this old number. So YouTube introduced a single metric in 2005 around plays and we've all been optimizing for plays for a long, long time. It's not different from what we've been doing for Facebook for a few years. We were optimizing for how many likes did I get on Facebook and how many plays do my videos have on YouTube. That's interesting to understand in the sense that it obviously counts some kind of volume. But in most cases what we're really interested in is actually this idea of how many people do I have, how many addressable people do I have in my marketing funnel that I can sell something to, that I can communicate to, that I can relate to. So this is actually the main shift in terms of how the marketing tool stack is evolving. That we're getting from a point where we might have a lot of email addresses that we could send out to an email mailing list to a point where we suddenly have marketing automation where we're doing lead scoring, where this is hooking into the CRM system, and this also needs to happen around the tools for video. So something that we're really seeing the really good people start to do is having this sense of what are the videos that I'm using to do lead gen. What does lead gen mean? Does it mean adding it to a mailing list? Does it actually mean to schedule a demo? Does it mean that I'm actually buying a piece of merchandise directly from the video or the video player? How do I do viewer profiling in a way where I'm not actually interested in how many plays did I get, but how many specific views did I get from this specific person that is interested in my products? In Screening Freeland, if people are on our web pages and watching a video of somebody giving a talk at a marketing conference, that's very different from somebody watching a video of how to do live streaming with our iPhone app. If people are in our help center watching a video on how to use the product, they're a much better target for how to actually convert and actually sell something to them. So this is something that we're really, really starting to double down on in terms of funneling, in terms of segmentation. And then live. I mean, you've heard a lot about Facebook Live, but this is also something that's happening for YouTube Live. And live is very much not about changing our behavior. It's about how we up our literacy in terms of video. So it's going from this idea of the pros doing editing and scripts and producing a video that might be ready in a few weeks to really reestablishing what the value of video is. So we're reestablishing this idea of what is offensive communication, what is immediate communication, and what is simple communication. And live converts much, much better than on demand as well, because it has this idea of being real and being offensive and being now. So what we're seeing is that if we get 40% conversion rates on on-demand videos, we get 80% and 90% on live events. So it's also a very good marketing device to do lead gen. So that's kind of the difference between what used to happen and what is happening now around live, around data, around this idea of really getting to add that second tier to what video can do to actually add it to being video marketing. So I'll do five quick tips of what we've learned as we've kind of piloted our way through this new world. First of all, there's no longer uploading and forgetting. It just doesn't work anymore. We can't just shoot a brand video and then let it live on YouTube for three years. It's a very common pattern, right? Like when we talk to to to my tears, it's often often kind of the case that we actually have some videos, but I'm not really sure they might be on YouTube. And I don't know how many plays they got. Data is readily available to know who's playing your videos when what are they converting into and how you keep optimizing them. When are people dropping off? How do I optimize it? How to take a longer clip and make that into three different clips that I'm seeing in different contexts. Obviously, it's a very fragmented world where you need to have different strategies for different platforms. Facebook and YouTube are quantitatively different in the sense that Facebook will show your content. If you're lucky for six hours, YouTube will show forever. But YouTube also cannibalizes on your SEO. So you kind of want to upload a few videos to YouTube and then you want to schedule a lot of videos to Facebook. Then you want to have inbound pages that are getting people back to the pages where you can actually do segment and following conversion and lead generation. And then there's a whole thing about how you're running embedding, how you're having neighboring content sites and different niches really kind of supercharge what the existing content is already doing for you. And yeah, I've said this a few times, but it's worth reiterating that the video is about lead generation. It's really about kind of challenging ourselves to not have this kind of lean back approach to what video can do. Because video is a very good device to kind of have somebody watch something for four minutes, eight minutes, or 20 minutes. But it doesn't really matter if we're not doing what we're doing for all other content. Sign up for a newsletter if you're interested. Learn more about the specific feature that we're showing in this video. Or even asking people to actually sign up to watch a piece of content. You all have people sign up to download a PDF or white paper. And this is not that different. It's all about kind of what are the tools that allow you to also then see what happens when people have signed up, what other videos are those people watching, when are they dropping off and how do you actually start scoring against all of that. So video is a very powerful tool when you kind of map the idea of the video timeline with this kind of profiling. Then there's the literacy of videos. Obviously, a lot of people are kind of like, oh, we don't have a video guy, so we have found this out to an agency. And that actually might be a great idea even if you have a video guy. Though it's all about kind of adding video literacy and the idea of what video can do. Video is not about production. Video is about storytelling. It's about lead generation. It's about data and it's about conversion and it's about actually matching all of this stuff into your marketing funnels, right? So it's all about figuring out what is the role that a CMO has in a video content strategy? What is the role that a growth hacker will add to the idea to make sure that are we actually doing tracking on all our videos? Are we doing remarketing based on segments? Are we actually optimizing how our brand is exposed? Are we actually seeding to the people that keep embedding our videos? And then finally, it's obviously about having the tools be in place and having them be connected to everything else. Because this is also a trend that has been prevalent over the past at least two or three years that people are starting to really know how do I run my email? How do I run my marketing automation? How do I run my analytics? How do I run my social? And this is something that hasn't really happened for video yet. And obviously kind of why we're in this space, right? That a lot of it is really a, figuring out how do I have a tool that allows me to run video marketing across all of these platforms in a meaningful fashion. But frankly also how does that connect to my marketing automation, my email marketing, my social and so on? So how does that tool actually connect so that whenever you have a lead that feeds into your CRM, whenever you have a drop off in a video that feeds into your web analytics so you can keep optimizing, and then you can rinse, repeat and go back to the idea of a video not living forever but keeping optimizing on what the video can do for your funnel. So that's five very quick tips and maybe I could come up with 50 of them because this is a sphere that's really kind of coming into play. So all of us are really learning from what actually works, what works on different social platforms, what works on different kind of neighboring platforms and what works on inbound and on our own pages. So that's also kind of why this idea of having a conversation is up here. Because this is something that is happening over the next few years and I think all of us in the room have this kind of weird opportunity to figure out either we're kind of letting a window slip by or we're really getting leaning into the idea of what video can do for marketing and not just for storytelling. So those are the words and thank you for listening.