Conversion Optimization Overview
When you create a video, it’s not something that you do for entertainment; it’s something that should do a job for you. The great news is, a good video producer can make a video that is very good at doing its job. Most of the time, the job you want your video to do is to gain more conversions. Is your video hitting the mark?
Think of your video as a salesperson who never sleeps, who is always on the job 24/7, and whose performance never slacks due to tiredness, distraction, or boredom. If you had an underperforming salesperson on your payroll, you’d look for a better one. The same thing holds true for your video. If you’ve had a video on your site for a few months, and you can’t point to the results it has brought you, it probably wasn’t optimized correctly for conversions.
Best Practices
Ask yourself the following questions in order to get on the right track with a video that doesn’t just attempt, but succeeds, in getting people to take action, buy your product, make a phone call to your sales team, or sign up for your service.
- Who is my ideal customer?
- What problem or difficulty do they have that causes them to want my product or service?
- Is my video drumming up that pain point and highlighting their need in language that they understand?
- Does my video offer a clear and compelling solution to their need, problem, or pain? Does it paint a beautiful picture of the transformation that they stand to gain if they become my client?
- What action do I want people to take after seeing my video?
- Is it clear to the typical viewer what their next step should be?
- Have I measured and tested whether or not people are going on to take that desired action?
If you answer these seven questions, it can take you a long way towards identifying whether your video was created with conversion optimization in mind.
If your current visual assets are falling short of getting results for your business, it’s time to get them done right. You’ll gain more attention, inform your customers, and sell more products when your video team has the skill to create videos that do their jobs.
Contact us to get started with video creation today.
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Keep reading to learn one secret of making your customers buy more or buy sooner.
Solving your customer’s unanswered questions makes them buy more
At the end of the day, you need video production that brings results, and that’s why knowing about conversion optimization is important. In the hunt to optimize your product messaging to increase sales and boost conversions, here’s one simple tip that can help your customers to buy more, buy sooner, or both.
That tip is to solve your customers’ unanswered questions.
Here’s how it works:
- First, learn what their questions are.
- Then, answer each question comprehensively in an engaging video.
- Watch sales happen sooner, with less effort on your part.
Think about your own thought process when you’re about to buy an unfamiliar product. You have a running narrative in your head, asking questions to yourself.
- Will this work for me?
- Will this product solve my issue?
- How long is this going to last? Is it going to fall apart after I use it once or twice?
- What will I look like to others when I buy or use this item?
- Can I do without this? What are the risks to me if I go without this solution?
Depending on the product or service in question, you might have a ton of questions that you need answers to before you can pull the trigger to make the purchase. So naturally, you’ll go looking, and when you do, where do you turn first? You search online.
That’s exactly what your customers are doing, too. The only question is, will your video appear in the search results with the exact answer they’re looking for?
Here’s how you can get in front of the hottest leads, right at the moment that they’re asking questions related to your product.
1. Learn what their questions are.
How do you learn what people are asking about your product? Here are some tips for how to do it.
- Ask people. Survey your customers or even talk to strangers. See what they want to know.
- Go to answerthepublic.com and type in your keyword or product name. You’ll get tons of results of questions that people are typing into google about that thing.
- Visit forums related to your industry and search for the keywords that have to do with your product. Learn what people are asking (and also discover what they are complaining or ranting about).
Go to Amazon and look for similar products for sale. Read the customer questions and the reviews to extract what qualities are important to people.
2. Answer each question comprehensively in an engaging video
Creating a video to answer your customer questions is a great idea for several reasons. First, Google tends to give video results a place closer to the top of the search results. Second, people find video more engaging than a wall of text. Third, you’ll have a chance to visually demonstrate your product or service in action, rather than relying on people’s ability to visualize it for themselves. You’ll also have a chance to incorporate your brand colors, logo, and slogans in an unforgettable way in the video.
Tips for your video:
- Make the video title an exact match for the wording that people are most likely to be searching for. Think about how your customers would ask the question to Google or Siri in a voice search. Make that the title of the video.
- Keep the video short. The exact length of the video will vary depending on the complexity of the answer, but a 30-second video will get more views than a 3-minute video.
- Create a professional, engaging video that reflects well on your brand. It should be creative and entertaining while answering the question completely.
- Include a call to action at the end of the video. What is the next step that the viewer is supposed to take? Make it easy to take this step.
3. Watch sales happen sooner, with less effort on your part
If unanswered questions are creating an obstacle to people making a purchase, then removing that obstacle will unblock those lost sales. Your customers will feel reassured now that their questions are answered. They’ll proceed forward in their journey towards a purchase, and sales will start flowing in.
Don’t miss out on this easy way to harness the power of the internet to make your sales cycle run smoother. Don’t give people an excuse to put off their purchase or buy less.
Create your videos answering all your customers’ questions with the expert team at JLB Media. Our video producers bring you the skill and talent that allows your video production efforts to look professional and engaging, and you’ll find the whole video creation process to be easy and straightforward. Contact us to get the process started.
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Keep reading to learn a surefire way to increase your click rate and time on page
Increase your click rate and time on page with this simple tip
Have you ever wondered how you can persuade your website visitors to spend a bit more time on your site?
Have you been frustrated by your Google Analytics results that show (1) an enduring bounce rate, (2) a too-low click-through rate, and (3) a mediocre time on site?
There is a simple way to solve all three of those problems in one quick step.
When you’re in the process of marketing your business, you know it’s a fight to get people to stay on your website.
Getting them to land on your page, stay longer, click around to other pages, and ultimately respond to your offer is a difficult thing to do.
However, if you succeed, you not only boost your bottom line, you also boost your website’s SEO. Google is looking at metrics like click-through rate, bounce rate, and dwell time, and it rewards the pages that have better numbers. After all, Google is in the business of giving web searchers the results that are exactly what they are looking for, and they have great incentive to offer the pages that people are most likely to click on and stay on. Those are signals that tell Google, “This is a great page. It meets my needs. I’ve found what I’m looking for right here.”
So what’s the one tactic that can help with all three of these metrics at once?
Video.
When you record a video about your product, your service or your company, you’ve just created something that people want to engage with.
While they might consider it a form of mild punishment to have to read a wall of text, they’ll consider it a delight and a relief to absorb that same information in video form. Video creates allure. It draws people in. It attracts their attention to linger. All these things are very good for your website.
How a single video can boost three metrics
1. Click-through rate
Your website’s click-through rate is the percentage of people who see your website in the list of google results and actually click on it. You can boost your page’s click-through rate by writing a title tag for the page that includes the term, “video.” When someone knows that there will be a video on the page, they’ll be more likely to want that result. Also, depending on how you embed the video, the thumbnail may appears to the left of the text in the search results. Having a video thumbnail will also increase your click-through rate.
2. Dwell time
Your website’s dwell time is the amount of seconds of minutes that the average visitor stays on the page. Is your dwell time hovering around 20 seconds and you’d like to boost it up? Try adding a one-minute video and watch the results naturally increase. People will stay longer on your page to watch the video, and even if they don’t finish the video, they’ll absorb more information because of seeing your video than if they had simply glanced around the page.
3. Bounce rate
A video that’s well-done will always have a call to action at the end, something that gives the viewer a clear next step of what they ought to do. Bounce rate on your site is the metric that tells how many people visited your page and then left without clicking on any other page on the site. If you can get people to click even one time, that will send your bounce rate plummeting, which is a very good thing. Adding a video to the page is a great way to drum up the excitement in your viewers that will make them want to click to go to the next step.
What are you waiting for? A video might not be all your website needs, but it will surely form a strong part of a strategy that will make your site stronger, more compelling, and more effective at getting sales.
The team at JLB Media has the skill, the passion, and the knowledge about video creation that will take your website to the next level. Get in touch with us today to get the process started.
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Keep reading to discover a simple way to instantly boost your customers’ engagement.
Are your customers bored? How to instantly boost their engagement
- Have you ever wondered if your customers are tuning you out?
- Are people simply indifferent to your product or service?
- Do you work in a boring industry where it’s hard to generate excitement?
- Have you puzzled over how to turn your customers’ boredom into engagement?
In this section, we’ll cover the simple tip that allows you to boost your customers’ engagement and smash their boredom to smithereens, even if you’re in a boring industry.
The challenge
We live in an age where people no longer primarily communicate through reading and writing. Our society is still literate, but there is a big difference between the amount that you can grab people’s attention through written language and photographs alone.
It’s universal that someone’s preferred means of communication is the one that best reaches their heart, and the preferred means of communication today is definitely video. This is increasingly true the younger your target audience is, but don’t make the mistake that older people aren’t also drawn in by video as the most engaging format available.
If your website is relying heavily on written text to communicate with your audience, they’re going to be bored. They’re going to struggle to absorb your message. They’re going to take away much less than you intended them to.
The answer
How do you get around this communication gap? How do you reach the hearts and emotions of your customers? How to you awaken their interest and cause their minds to come alive when they interact with your messages?
The answer is simple: Video production.
Here’s the truth: the way people interact with other people in real-time, face-to-face interaction is through live, audio-visual methods. Video is the format that comes the closest to delivering that. It doesn’t matter if you’re a visual learner or an auditory learner; video mimics the way that humans communicate with each other, and that makes it the most powerful method available.
It doesn’t matter how boring people used to think your offering was. All that is about to change. With a little bit of creativity and a lot of video production skill, whatever you are trying to tell people can be transformed into something that they’ll resonate with, react to, and genuinely enjoy.
Case in point:
There’s almost no one more bored than a high schooler sitting through yet another class. And yet, the folks behind the Standard Deviants series of videos found a way to create videos that were compelling, hilarious, entertaining, and memorable (in their cheesy, exaggerated way) that caused solid learning to take place and concepts to stick, on topics from biology to Shakespeare.
If video can do that for high schoolers, it can do that for your product or service. All you need is the right team to help you to accomplish that.
The video production team at JLB Media works with clients nationwide to produce the videos that highlight you in the best possible light while being engaging, creative, entertaining, and well-made. Any video you make reflects something about your company, either in a positive or negative light, so it’s important to know that you have the right team behind your videos.
Watch as your customers suddenly sit up straighter, take notice, and suddenly engage with your product or service. When you can get someone’s eyes to light up and jaw to drop, you can also get them to open up their wallets. Suddenly, purchases will start flowing in, simply because you’ve grabbed people’s attention in a meaningful way, resonated with them, and made your message memorable.
Get in touch with us today to discuss your video project, and discover how easy it is to make your clients interested.
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Read on for video creation tips for the beginning of your conversion funnel.
Video creation tips for the beginning of your conversion funnel
- How many people know about your product?
- What efforts are you making to attract the attention of people who have never heard of you?
- Are your marketing efforts good at bringing in new leads to your sales team?
The top of your marketing funnel is where you create awareness, get people’s attention, and generate leads. This is where you have to do the hard work of moving people from the place where they’ve never heard of you to the place where they recognize your name and know that your product exists.
How are you doing at marketing to the people in the first stage of your funnel?
Video is a great way to help your prospective customers move into the funnel and progress seamlessly down through the stages until they make a purchase.
However, there are different strategies for what the video should contain, depending on the stage of the funnel that it supports. The performance of your marketing efforts will vary based on how effective you are at creating the right kind of content for each stage of the funnel. The goal is always to reach your audience right where they are and then move them gently to the next step. Here are some tips from our corporate video production company for you to optimize your video’s content for the top of the funnel.
The top of the funnel = Lead generation
When your goal is to generate leads, you need to approach people with the high-level, global, broad-brush picture of who you are and what you do. No nitty-gritty details for the top of the funnel. That will come later.
Imagine that you’re at the local chamber of commerce at a meet-and-greet event. A stranger walks up to you and says, “So, what do you do?” The two-sentence summary that comes out of your mouth is probably the message that you want to deliver to your top-of-the-funnel audience.
Your video strategy for people who are just entering your funnel should take this into account.
Answer these basic questions
For people who are just finding out about you, your video should draw them in with a very engaging, interesting overview that answers these basic, high-level questions.
- What is it?
- What is it for?
- Who is it for?
- Why should I care?
Get better results when you differentiate your content for the right stage of the funnel
Too often, videos aren’t designed to be a precise match to the stage of the funnel that they were developed to support.
When a prospective customer has just entered the awareness stage of the funnel, your next step is to get that person to show interest in the product. However, what many people do is mistakenly try to jump from the beginning of the funnel straight to the end. “Hi, you just heard of this for the first time, and you should buy it now!” While that might work for certain small-ticket items, you’ll get better results if you focus on progressing people gently through the stages of the funnel.
Instead of ending your top-of-funnel video with a call to action to make a purchase, why not try a different method? End with a call to action to move to the next stage of the funnel. Perhaps you invite the viewer to read more information, or perhaps to download an ebook, or to dive deeper into the product specs.
Measure everything
Whatever call to action you choose, measure the results and track people’s behavior. What happens if you tweak this or that? What can you do to increase the number of people who move deeper into your funnel? When you’re dealing with the people at the top of the funnel, if you switch from asking them to buy, and ask them instead to do something easy that takes them to the next part of your funnel, you’ll almost always see an uptick in response. However, you won’t know if you don’t measure, so keep close tabs on the performance of your campaign.
If people don’t know about you, show them with a video
Want to know one of the most powerful methods of grabbing people’s attention, creating awareness, and generating leads?
You guessed it!
Video will introduce your prospects to your company’s product or service in a way that surpasses other methods. The video that will reflect the best on your company and your brand is high-quality, skillfully-produced video. When you have the video team on your side from JLB Media, you’ll be able to target people at the exact stage of the funnel where they’re at. Talk to us today about getting your video project started.
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Keep reading to learn more about targeting your prospects right where they are. In our next segment, we’ll cover ways that you can optimize your video for conversions in the middle stage of your funnel.
Video creation tips for the middle stage of your conversion funnel
In our last segment, we covered some tips for creating content that’s targeted to the people at the top of your conversion funnel. But what if you have people who are already aware of your product or service, and you want them to guide them towards a purchase rather than lingering in the shadows?
The middle of the funnel = Lead Nurturing
Welcome to the middle stage of your conversion funnel. This is the stage where you’ll nurture your leads and coax them towards the beautiful land where they finally become a paying customer.
Characteristics of this stage
With the customers who are in the middle of your funnel, you’ll typically engage in the following activities:
Pique their interest
Get them to pause and consider
Seek to generate an intent to purchase
Video Strategy Tips
A video that’s geared toward speaking to the people in the middle of the funnel will be able to zoom in from the high-level view that you had in the awareness stage video. Your video strategy should flow out of a study of your customers and a deep understanding of what they’re thinking about when they’re at this stage. What you talk about shouldn’t just come off the top of your head, it should come from a knowledge of what kinds of things your customers are looking for. Try the following approaches for a video that’s geared toward the lead-nurturing stage of your funnel.
- Educate your customers
- Take a deeper dive into product specs and features
- Answer the questions they are asking
- Remove obstacles and barriers to their purchase
A great video for the middle stage of the funnel is one that’s informational, interesting, and full of solid facts, like statistics or case studies. The middle of the funnel is also a great time to follow up multiple times to make sure that your prospective customers stay engaged and don’t have the opportunity to forget about you, so it isn’t a bad idea to offer multiple videos about your product or service and send a new one out every so often to your prospects in this stage.
It goes without saying that the quality of your video matters. If you’re a small business who is on a budget but committed to displaying a professional image, you should consider the video production service from JLB media. We understand video production and marketing, so that you can market your business effectively without breaking the bank. Contact us today to get the ball rolling.
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Stay alert for our next segment! Our next update to this page will include tips for the end of your conversion funnel, which is the moment when the sale happens. Don’t miss out on reading that one!
Video creation tips for the end of your conversion funnel
Marketing your product or service is hard, but knowing what stage of the funnel your customers are in (and adjusting your marketing accordingly) is a great way for you to reap big rewards.
By now, you know that you should tailor your content to customers to meet them where they’re at. Once you’ve generated some leads and nurtured those leads, you’ll have a small pool of people who are ready to buy. So how do you connect with those people and get them to actually make a purchase?
The end of the funnel = Closing the Sale
An experienced salesperson knows that the final stage of the sales conversation is the part where you close the deal. You bring the prospective customer to the point of decision. Either they say yes and buy now, or they say no and walk away. If they say no, you may have lost them forever, so it’s imperative that you clinch this part of the conversation.
Here’s the power and beauty of video: Video is the form of media that most closely replicates a real-live human salesperson. Paying a sales force is expensive, and it’s not very scalable. In contrast, creating one, high-performing video might cost less than paying a salesperson for one month, but it can bring you results 24/7, and it won’t ever ask you for a commission.
Closing the sale is hard, and it is often done wrong
You’ve seen cheesy, thinly-disguised video sales pitches where you stop the video as soon as they come to the “offer.” It’s a shame that many videos fail precisely right here due to poor construction and not following best practices.
This is why you need a video expert who also understands sales. Every video team knows how to hire actors, shoot footage and edit clips into a finished product, but do they have what it takes to sell? You need someone who is able to pitch your product in a way that leads your customers all the way down the path, pushes open the gate labeled “Buy,” and nudges them gently through.
Analogy to a human sales conversation
Imagine that you are selling your product face to face with a prospective customer. You watch them nod, smile, and light up at the things you’re saying. You hear them say, “Yes, I think this is what I’ve been looking for.”
Would you choose that moment to walk away?
Of course not!
A great salesperson would say, “Perfect! Let’s get you set up. All I need is your credit card number and we’ll get you all ready to go.”
And THEN the fun would begin.
Suddenly, your prospect would get a worried look on their face and they would hem and haw and make some excuse about why they’re not ready to decide just yet.
You would handle their objections. Remind them of the value of the product. Fix their eyes back onto the reason they came to you in the first place. Get them nodding and smiling again. Hear them agree with you that this decision is not only in their best interest, it’s what they actually want to do. And then you would ask for the sale again. And they would buy. Not everyone, but a significant number would.
What Video HAS to Do (And Where Most Sales Videos Get It Wrong)
Here’s where many videos get it wrong: In a video that’s created specifically for the bottom-of-the-funnel customer, you have to ask for the sale.
Otherwise, it’s like shaking that client’s hand right when they’re the most ripe to purchase and saying, “Well, glad you think it’ll work for you. See you later.”
However, in videos, many people choke at this stage. They get embarrassed. They get awkward. And because it feels uncomfortable, they never ask for the sale.
In effect, they’re leaving it to chance whether or not anyone will buy. They’re just waltzing along with their fingers crossed, hoping that people will make the decision on their own.
Here’s the problem. People don’t buy on their own.
You wouldn’t run the rest of your business by leaving things to chance. You don’t waltz through the meadow with your fingers crossed when it comes to making profits. You don’t just “hope and pray” that your business will stay afloat. So why would you take that approach in your video spots?
How much more business could you do if your corporate videos closed deals day after day, kept customers’ attention to the end, and stimulated them to act? Say hello to insane conversion rates when you follow these tips.
Video Best Practices for Pitching Your Offer and Closing the Deal
When you’re showing a video to the client who is at the brink of buying, you can and should make a clear offer and ask for the sale. You would amazed how much you can increase your conversion rates just by doing this.
We don’t have room on this page to go into detail on all the practical steps to implement this, but here are some hints to get you started.
- Keep the viewer’s interest. They can stop the video whenever they want.
- Describe your offer in clear language that a child could understand. Confused prospects don’t buy.
- Focus 80% of your script on the transformation and the benefit your client will obtain, and 20% on the deliverables.
- Foresee and address the biggest objections that people will have. Overcome these objections.
- If you have a money-back guarantee, don’t just say, “money-back guarantee.” Write your guarantee in a creative way. Make it clear that you’re shouldering all the risk on yourself. Let the customer feel like it’s a no-brainer to buy your product.
- Don’t be afraid to be assertive when addressing a person at this stage of readiness to buy. Stay on the side of confident optimism, and stay far away from the style of a sleazy used car salesman.
- Create urgency in your customer’s mind (more on this point in the next email).
- And of course, ask for the sale. Tell the customer exactly what to do to buy your product. “Click this button and enter your credit card number.” Asking for the sale is asking a customer to DO something, to take a very specific step. It should start with an active verb.
Streamline Your Implementation Of These Tips
Not sure how to create a video that will close deals and win sales? The easiest way to do it is to contact the video professionals at JLB Media. With a nationwide presence and a strong portfolio of video projects, we can create your bottom-of-the-funnel sales pitch or offer video from start to finish. Contact us today to get started.
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Creating urgency is one of the most powerful ways to ensure that your customers don’t hesitate or delay when buying. Keep your eyes open for our next segment on this page, where we’ll look at several ways that you can create urgency.