Manley Creative Team

Here’s Your Awesome New Video. Now Don’t Screw it Up.

August 23, 2016

Sometimes, clients make common mistakes when they first start using video content to market their businesses.

We can’t emphasize this enough: If you are creating video content, you must devote resources to promoting it to the right audience and analyzing the results. Why? Because we want your investment in video to get maximum ROI. There are many ways to accomplish this and that’s why we’ are devoting the next several blog posts to this topic for those of you just at the beginning of learning this process. We’d love your feedback and suggestions!

In the words of our director, Jim Manley, when sending his crew out into the world to complete new productions (literally, the world, as two Manley crew members just lifted off for Lithuania and Bulgaria):

“DON’T SCREW IT UP!”

There are a lot of moving parts to any marketing program, so let’s start with one of the most important ways we know to create conversions from a video marketing campaign and track results.

TODAY’S TIP: IF YOU ARE CREATING A VIDEO TO GET RESULTS, KNOW WHAT THOSE RESULTS ARE AND BE PREPARED TO TRACK THEM.

This requires three things: a strong call-to-action (CTA), an irresistible offer and a landing page. If you work with us you know that we are insistent on a strong CTA for marketing videos. The vast majority of the videos we create for clients are intended to motivate an action (i.e., donate, call for an estimate, follow us on social media, write your congressperson, etc.) Ending with “visit our website” is a very soft and hard to measure CTA, and we worry when clients default to this because they aren’t sure what action they want to prompt. “We want website traffic” or “We need new clients” is an outcome, it isn’t a CTA and it won’t help you justify the expense of creating video content if you can’t demonstrate the video actually moved the needle. We know you can do better than that.

If you’re trying to generate new business, It’s just not enough to put new video content on your company YouTube Channel and tell people where to find it. Instead, send them exactly where you want them to go, make it easy for them to follow through with an action, and then reward them for it.

Let’s reframe the desired outcome into a simple 3-step process.

  1. Establish your authority with a swell new video that send a message.
  2. Include an offer that makes every viewer want to engage with you (that’s your CTA).
  3. Send viewers to a landing page that captures their data, records the interaction, and nabs you an opportunity to create a new customer.

A landing page efficiently captures the viewer’s personal information (so you can follow up) and allows visitors to take action immediately. From a url in your video (which you will track in Google analytics) viewers visit a landing page where they follow-through with the action you desire (taking you up on your offer). You can also include a follow up video on the landing page to further engage the visitor and boost conversions up to 80%.

This is the internet equivalent of getting a new business prospect to answer your phone calls. By simply creating a compelling offer in the CTA and sending traffic to a landing page you will learn if your offer is resonating with the audience and if your video accomplishes what you want to accomplish.

If you aren’t getting conversions from visits to the landing page, then evaluate your offer. Is it compelling enough? Is it what you promised? There is much to learn from content that doesn’t work the way you want it to work. We’ll take a look at that concept in our next blog post. Stay tuned!

Are you one of our valued clients? We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a review on our Facebook page.

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