Great Job By David Tonight!
Fantastic job by David Rose from MagneTVideo.com tonight at our Internet Marketing Meetup on video marketing.

Video Secrets Meeting Summary on ScentTrail

Summary of  tonight’s MEETUP at Atlantic BT is on ScentTrail. Will post a link to David’s presentation.

Martin’s Story
Imagine you are on a beach. Suddenly water moves swiftly away. Fish flop and dance naked in early morning sun. “Tsunami,” we think involuntarily. We live online, via CNN and in a global village so we know a big wave is coming. Internet marketers stand on just such a beach. We face a coming web video marketing Tsunami.

“This is better,” I thought before testing a 3 minute video on the home page of the $6M site I managed as a Director of Ecommerce (before joining Atlantic BT as Director Marketing). “Run it,” I said watching our metrics nervously. Never test in production without a B option you can easily roll back too. Good news this day was I’d learned the “rollback” lesson. In four hours site conversions tanked by a full point (about $3K). “Kill it,” was my next command before the site walked into a end of summer weekend with such a conversion train wreck.

“What happened,” my boss asked me. Ever wish you could jump in a time machine and go back a few years traveling with the knowledge you have now to just such a moment? Here is what I know now that would have helped then:

• Read vs. Video = VIDEO
• 3 Minutes is an eternity online (1 minute or less now).
• Video on the home page is TOUGH (lots of views but converting traffic can easily be lost never to be heard from or converted again)
• Too polished doesn’t work well online – rough edges establish immediacy, authenticity and authority (strangely enough)
• Videos create VERY HOT spots immediately below them, so include a Call To Action (CTA) in the video that mirrors a CTA immediately below the video (or, if video is on product page keep it far enough away from the MAGIC BUY button as to NOT create confusion)
• Videos are EMOTIONAL and that is a good thing
• Videos “SEO” well, pop nice on YouTube, can spring legs and walk around the web (via embed codes) and are easier to get top listing on than text (LOTS EASIER but getting harder as I write this)

This list could get longer, but you get the idea. A quick note about video and SEO. Spiders can’t “see” video so tagging, linking and surrounding text can be very important. I learned another video SEO secret today from David but won’t spoil his January 24th presentation. Want to know a very cool video SEO secret that is EASY and POWERFUL you will need to join us for pizza in a few weeks.

What I know without any doubt is VIDEO is a powerful Internet marketing tool. Powerful enough Atlantic BT is working with David Rose and MagneTVideo.com to learn how to provide video marketing services. The end of my story is we finally figured out a winning video formula (less than 2 minutes, on the product page, make the product the hero and pull in wisdom of crowds reviews). Pays to have a good team, a patient and trusting boss and a B option.

The net of our tests was conversions on product pages with videos quadrupled. New products already on a roll set new records. Older products starting to wane got a new lease on life. How many failures before finding the winning formula? My team created about ten different videos before we found the winner. Who has that kind of time confronted with social search, the real time web and Internet marketing as we know it today? A: No one, thus asking David and MagneTVideo to share “inside baseball” secrets so Atlantic BT can offer easy to buy, effective web video marketing.

There are many great video marketing providers including friends at Atlantic Creative, Big Fat Film and RHEDPixel (they did the work mentioned here). I also have a good friend who runs a cool company called mailVU in Charlotte. We are working with David and MagneTVideo to combine Atlantic BT’s web development and Internet marketing power, learn cool video marketing secrets to share with customers and potential customers and surf the monster video marketing wave coming in the web’s direction.

Hope you can join us for our monthly Internet Marketing Relativity Meetup on Tuesday, January 24 (Join Raleigh Internet Marketing Meetup Here).

Martin

PS. Lifted image at the top from an excellent article “Why Use Video Marketing” by Sneh on Buzzom.com.