0:05
Nina Zoukelman
Hi everyone and thank you for joining us for today's webinar. Unlocking social video for B2B marketing in three simple steps. I'm Nina, the Content marketing manager here at Oktopost. And in case this is your first time joining us, Oktopost is a social media management and employee advocacy platform for mid market and enterprise B2B companies. Oktopost. Our platform enables marketers to manage and schedule social content, engage with audiences at scale and measure the true ROI of social media. Now allow me to introduce my guests, two social video ninjas, Nick Liebman, Head of content marketing at PowToon, and Adam Davis, social media manager at PowToon. It's a pleasure to have you with us, guys.
0:47
Nick Liebman
Hey, hey. It's great to be here. Hey everybody. I'm Nick, head of content marketing for pound. PowToon is a platform for creating short videos and presentations. It's used by about 20 million users worldwide and they're using it for all sorts of things from marketing and social media to education, training and internal communications. We are super excited to be with you guys here today.
1:13
Adam Davis
Hi everyone, this is Adam. As Nina mentioned, I'm social media manager at Patchen. We're excited and we have a lot of great stuff to talk about.
1:20
Nick Liebman
About.
1:21
Nina Zoukelman
Great. So let's get started. Before we get started, please note that this webinar is being recorded and will be sent to you within the next few days. If you have any questions, feel free to use the chat box on your right and we'll answer them during our final Q and A. I think we can all agree that video is the hot trend of social media marketing. From IGTV to Facebook Live to LinkedIn videos, more and more B2B marketers are realizing the potential of social video. But how can you effectively integrate video into your overall social media strategy? In today's webinar, we will learn how identify the right video type for your social media goals and audience, promote your video across different social networks, and finally, measure and optimize your social video for maximum results. So let's get started with aligning the right video type with your goals and audience. While there's no silver bullet for video success, it's clear that one product explainer video won't cut it. The key is to build a strategy that aligns with your audience's needs at every stage of the journey. Looking at the funnel, we can see three the awareness stage, where you're trying to familiarize audiences with your company's qualities, product or service. The second stage is consideration where you should Clarify your value as your buyers, continue to evaluate competitors. And the last stage is decision where you need to persuade buyers that you're the best thing out there. Let's start with the awareness stage. This is a time to create videos that showcase who you are in order to establish trust and credibility among your audience. Awareness building videos tend to be short and digestible. Let's go through some examples. So our first example is brand videos. These are all about making people fall in love with your brand through the story of your company. You can do that by recapping your company's history in 30 seconds, explaining your core values or revealing what makes it unique. One example that I really like is IBM. They created a video which celebrates their work, culture and diversity presented by their employees. Another example is thought leadership videos. These offer a good opportunity to share interesting topics and trends in your industry, providing value to viewers. It can be an interview, a panel or a person speaking directly to the camera. You can choose. A good example is HubSpot which has taken its marketing and sales academy to YouTube. In those serial videos it educates its own audience on best practices and showcases its expertise. Next up we have live videos. These can be ask me anything chats or live streams from events, conferences. The attraction here is the exclusivity your followers get content they wouldn't have been able to get elsewhere. Owl Brain recently did an MAA with their CEO where he revealed that he's a former cow milker. Which is a surprising fact to discover about the CEO of a tech company when you come to think of it. So Adam, Nick, from your experience, what's the best video format for the awareness stage?
4:41
Nick Liebman
Sure. Thank you so much. I think that the ones that you identified there are key and those are going to be very important. But there's some other ways you can be creative to capture people's attention. At this stage in the funnel. One thing I would mention would be tribute videos. These are in other words, a short tribute to someone who is interesting, someone you think is awesome, someone who embodies your brand values or is interesting to your potential target audience. For instance, what you see on the screen there is very early in Powtoon's history we created a video that was honoring Gary Halbert. He's called the King of Copy. He's a really well known copywriter in the marketing sphere. And that was a world we wanted to break into. We wanted to make product attractive to those people and also to just put out content we knew would be interesting to that target audience. Another example are something we're calling Engage Videos. These are short videos. They're designed for social media. They use an eye catching live action video in the back with short text. Short, pithy, kind of like almost like a meme sort of text that evokes an emotion in your audience. It's great for anything you're putting in a social feed because it captures attention immediately and then you can direct them to other content as well.
6:01
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks guys. I have to say that personally, I love your videos. They always make me laugh when I see them on social media.
6:07
Nick Liebman
Awesome.
6:09
Nina Zoukelman
So moving on, the next stage in the funnel is consideration. Now that things are looking great on the awareness front, buyers have caught on to your knowledge. It's time to wow them with your product. Your buyers want to know more about the benefits of your product, so so you can present them with a challenge or pain point they may have and then address how your product or service can fix it. The videos you'd want to create at this stage, case studies and testimonial videos. These provide real life examples and use cases of how your product has benefited an existing client. One example that always comes to mind is Marketo. They did a video featuring their customer, FIS Global. In this video, FIS's marketing CDO, Colin Day, which you can see here, illustrated how Marketo's platform is helping them drive their marketing efforts. Another format is explainer videos. These are really popular. If your solutions or products are more complex, explainer videos can help break them into a very simple and intuitive story. Many B2B companies opt for live action, animated or whiteboard videos, while others feature Real People. WalkMe has an explainer video which clearly demonstrates the frustration employees feel when adopting new technologies and how WalkMe can help. So Adam, Nick, do you have any insights on which format works best at this stage?
7:35
Nick Liebman
Yeah, that's a really great question. I think it depends on what you're trying to communicate and who you're trying to reach. So case studies and testimonials are very personal. Here's a person just like your target audience, right? And they had a problem that your product or service solved for them. So you want to use these where your subjects or the people that you're doing the testimonial with, they're active on some kind of social network. You can tap into the power of their network by celebrating them, not your brand. Right now explainers are very powerful for people who are less swayed by personal or emotional appeals, who are but are looking for someone who understands exactly what they're looking for. Right. So an explainer video allows you to trigger all those same emotional triggers as a testimonial, but with the intention of teaching or of sharing some value with who's watching it. So I definitely would recommend using that format on YouTube and LinkedIn especially.
8:34
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks guys. So we're moving on to the last stage of the funnel and that's the decision making stage. At the decision stage, you will be creating videos aimed at persuading buyers that you're the best solution out there. The nature of the videos at this stage is more product oriented and somewhat technical. So some examples of formats you can go for are product tutorials. Research shows that a viewer's understanding of a product gets a 74% boost with video. So create a product tutorial that will help your customer understand the all its hidden ins and outs marketing automation platform. Acton released a product tutorial using a fun and whimsical editing style to demo its product. It really works. So another common B2B format are FAQs. We all know that unanswered questions or fears can prevent buyers from adopting your solution. Creating a video to address some of those questions will go a long way in reassuring your buyers that they're making the right decision. A great example for this format is Cisco, which created a series of FAQ videos, each about 30 seconds long, for attendees of their annual Cisco Live events. So guys, going back to you, since we're only talking about social media here, would you say that product tutorials are better fitted for a specific network?
9:57
Adam Davis
I think really the best network for a product tutorial is on YouTube. Basically as a starting point for your product video, you're going to want to upload it to YouTube as something that you can embed on your website. I know when I'm going to a website or of a product or a company or an application, the first thing that I want to see is some sort of video, even if it's 15 seconds long, explaining what that company does, what their product does, how it can benefit from them. And to be honest with you, if I don't see that on a website, it's going to probably make me leave that website pretty quickly or go to a rival product. YouTube is very simple to embed onto a website. It works with most website CMSs, but most importantly on YouTube itself. How to's and tutorials are really highly discoverable. They're things that people are searching for. And don't forget that YouTube is the second is the Internet's second largest search engine after Google and it's also owned by Google So it's basically the same thing. And most people searching for your company or for something that you do or a search term that can be answered by your videos, most people are going to YouTube to do that. Putting your content on YouTube is where people can find it organically. They're looking for a solution that's going to make them search. And basically you're putting them into the funnel in a way that other social media networks can't really do that for you.
11:17
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Ann. So this is the place to mention that YouTube is basically the only social network that is searchable. So use that with SEO. So we're moving on to the next section of our webinar promoting videos across different social networks. As we know, different networks serve very different goals and audiences. A video that drives tons of clicks on Twitter won't necessarily do that on LinkedIn or YouTube. So when picking the right network, you need to consider the video's format, topic, stage of the funnel, and other elements. Nick and Adam will now share with you what those are.
11:55
Nick Liebman
Sure. Thank you so much. As Nina mentioned, when you're creating social videos, there are some elements that are going to remain consistent across every platform. This is really about creating good content no matter where you're placing it. Right. So one thing that's really important is storytelling. Human beings make sense of the world with stories, characters who. Who go through a trial, something like that, some sort of difficulty they need to overcome. It's compelling to us and it helps us remember what the story was about. All that information. If you want to dump a bunch of information on your audience, you're not going to make a big impact. If you tell them a compelling story, you will. Speaking of compelling video is such a visual medium. It's so important to have something there that's really going to pop. It's really going to grab attention that's right there. Like a dog in glasses, something like that. Maybe it's incongruous, maybe it's humorous, maybe it's touching, maybe it's emotional. But you're going to want compelling visuals to help people lock into your message there. Not just in the text or in the ideas, but in that visual. The next thing you want to do think about is the emotional impact of what you're putting up there. Think of it as emotional marketing, if you will. Right. People. People are interested not only in solving their problems, but they want to feel like their problem is solved. They want to feel like they've been successful. You want to create and conjure in your video, no matter where you're putting it, no matter what the purpose for it necessarily is directly. You want people to feel the emotions and that you're playing. You want those emotions to resonate. And ways to do that are with music and all sorts of things. But it's an important thing to remember. We are very emotional beings and your audience will be too. Another important thing to do is to have consistent branding. Right? There's your brand is a bit of your visual calling card, right? And video, since it's so visual and. And since it's out there. And also since you'll be able to catch people, certainly for the first couple of seconds, you're going to want to get your brand out there. Another thing to mention, detailed descriptions. This is especially important on YouTube, where, as we mentioned earlier, not only are they searchable, but it's all tied into Google as well. So there are crawlers out there who aren't necessarily going to be able to see your video, but they can see all the text. So you want to have a good description and you also want that description to be accurate, because if people are downvoting your video or not watching it because it doesn't match the description, the algorithms won't place it as highly in search. So you definitely want to be sure that you have a detailed description that's accurate. A couple of quick things, Subtitles. You may not need this on every platform, but certainly on platforms where people may be watching without the sound on, like Facebook or something like that, then you're going to want to be sure that your message isn't lost. Just because people can't put the sound on where they are in their moment. People are mobile, people are all over the place. So you want to have that ability to get your message across, whether or not the person can listen. Finally, this is so important. Calls to action. You want to. No matter what the purpose of the video is, and no matter which platform it's on, at the very end, you have a golden opportunity. Because the people who stayed engaged with your content, they want to know what to do next. They've met you that far. So you want to tell them exactly what to do. Don't leave them hanging. Tell them, subscribe. Like, come to our website, sign up for a demo, call our office, whatever, call our salespeople, whatever your call to action is, please don't leave your audience hanging. No matter where you post that video, give them a clear call to action.
16:01
Adam Davis
So continuing along that same vein, when you're creating videos, there's a lot of different quote Unquote, rules or things that you have to follow for the different social media networks. We're going to take into consideration that the different platforms are very different. They have different elements and different features and you want to ensure the highest level of performance for your videos. So starting on the left here with Facebook, there's a bunch of different ways that you can really get video across on Facebook. And obviously the one that most of us see most of the time that we're scrolling through our feed is those attention grabbing videos which we referred to earlier as engaged videos. They're generally anywhere between 12 to 30 seconds long, they're quick, they kind of look like memes, they kind of, you know, look like exciting little videos. You're, oh, hey, I want to see that, I want to share that. That's one road to go down when you're sharing video on YouTube, excuse me, on Facebook. Next, you're going to want to try to drive interest with a bit of a longer video. And keep in mind that this doesn't mean you're making something lengthy, it's just longer than those engaged videos. So it's going to be about a minute and a half to two minutes where you're going to be offering a little more information, giving out basically a little more to the people watching it than just a, hey, check out this video kind of 15 second thing. And then of course there's live videos, which as we say, sky is the limit. Basically, you can just go nuts. You can run a live video for as long as you want. You want to have people interact with you, maybe on a webinar, on a Q and A, on an event that you're hosting. At certain points people are going to tune in and out. But as long as you're still running that video and the content is exciting, people are going to be engaged in real time.
17:35
Nick Liebman
And you'll also, pardon me, to jump in. But you'll also know in real time, if people aren't engaged, people won't be watching, people won't be commenting. So live video on Facebook, you also get a lot of direct feedback from your audience right away.
17:47
Adam Davis
Exactly. That's really the one thing you got to keep a check on is the engagement for these videos when you're doing live videos. But moving along to Twitter, the nature of Twitter is short and sweet as we have the character limits for tweets themselves, but also for promoting video. You don't really want anything that's longer than 30 to 45 seconds. You want to get a message across a little Longer than those shorter attention grabbing videos, but nothing too crazy. Basically you're using Twitter video to be to the point you're sharing your content and then people are just going to be scrolling on to the next thing so you don't want to hang on to them too long. Moving to YouTube obviously YouTube is the home base when it comes to video. It's one of the largest social networks in the world. It's one of the largest websites in the world. It's where people go to consume most of the video that they watch on a daily basis. But there still are a few things and features that you want to take advantage of. For example, there still are attention grabbing videos or ads. You can use a specific ad template for a 6 second ad that goes on in between videos. Or you can create shorter attention grabbing videos that are under a minute, around 40 seconds long to keep people interested or excited and give them kind of a nugget or a teaser about your content. Of course, as we mentioned before, there's how to videos and discoverable content. These are what people are looking for when they want to know about your company. Tell me everything I need to know. How does this feature work? What does your company do? How can I know more? 2 to 6 minutes. If you want to give more content more explanation, you can go for a longer five to six minute video. No one's really expecting less than a minute and a half to two minutes on these because it's not really enough time for them to know about your company. So you want to make it informative, you want to make it engaging throughout. And if it is, then people will usually watch throughout the length of this video. And then of course, long form content, people are posting full webinars on YouTube, they're sharing Q and A sessions or speeches at events, things like that, that are going to obviously run half an hour or an hour and a half, things like that. And if people want to find that content, if they miss the event, if they miss the webinar, there's no reason that it shouldn't be on YouTube. Some of the most popular channels that are on YouTube are posting 2 hour and 3 hour videos because that's the kind of content that they have and that's what people want to see. Also just to remember with YouTube, there are a lot of different reasons why people come to YouTube. They want to be educated about a certain thing, they want to be inspired and they want to be entertained. And if your content isn't really falling into one of these categories, you're going to have a hard time connecting with the viewers on your YouTube channel. So make sure that you have at least one of these elements in your videos and they're going to go a long way in terms of engagement. Of course, Instagram is the new kid on the block and video is booming on Instagram right now. Of course, within the feed itself you have videos that are gonna be up to around 30 seconds. Of course you can upload up to a minute, but you don't wanna have people watching for too long. They're not gonna make it that long on Instagram Stories. Stories are this thing that were very exciting to a lot of users and brands, but now a lot of companies are really starting to get involved with promoting their content on Instagram stories. Each clip within an Instagram story is up to 15 seconds. You can of course add an entire story that has several 15 second clips, or you can take one video and chop it up. There's a bunch of different tools online for taking a video that you've created and chopping it into 15 second clips. But really we were just at an, actually here at Patoon, we were just at an event a couple months ago of Instagram and they were saying everyone was talking about how Instagram stories are the future. Not only the future, they're now if you're not getting on board with Instagram stories, you're already behind with your business. So a big tip is to start looking into that. And of course igtv, which is the newest feature that Instagram has, which is vertical long form video. It's really if you're, you have a vertical camera or your phone set up while you're doing a webinar or a Q and A or just filming anything you want to do, post videos on IGTV that are up to an hour long and are really going to give your fans a whole different view of your content, especially if they're only seeing your content on Instagram. This is kind of a new feature that a lot of people have yet to take advantage of. And it could be some a way for you to get your foot in the door with Instagram video. And of course, finally we have LinkedIn. LinkedIn has always had this vibe of being more business oriented, more B2B. But the fact of the matter is LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social networks that's out there and it's really starting to explore video more and more every single day. So as we wrote here that you have the limit for uploading video is 10 minutes. And I'd Just like to point out that that's native. If you upload natively to LinkedIn, you can upload up to 10 minutes. But of course, the way that people are still using LinkedIn are evolving. Video uploading was only introduced a year ago. The trends are focusing more towards explainer video and thought leadership, which is kind of the vibe of LinkedIn. And those can usually go more than a few minutes. But basically, just as we said before, you really want to check out what your audience is consuming and find the best network and type of video for your content and your brand. And of course, the next thing that we're going to talk about is once we've digested all these rules about the different types of video to upload and where to upload it, you're going to want to get into the aspect ratios. For anyone who doesn't know what an aspect ratio is, it's the size and shape of the video that you're producing. It differs according to the different networks and it matters also in terms of what kind of content you're creating. As you can see here we have this, what we call wide or 16 by 9 aspect ratio, which is best consumed on web. It's how Most people watch YouTube videos, it's how people will want to watch widescreen or videos on their phone. And it's basically generally considered the most classic and usual form of video that people are creating. This is best used on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, which of course is everything except for Instagram. If you see this image in the middle here, one to one or square is for video that you're going to be want to. You're going to be posting in your Instagram feed. It's specific to Instagram feed, but it also can work for LinkedIn and Facebook and of course Twitter. But if you're only making square video. Sorry, excuse me. If you're only making video for Instagram, it really needs to be one to one. Of course you can do wide or square for the other ones, but really specific to Instagram. Otherwise it's going to be chopped up, it's going to be minimized, it's not ideal. Basically try to get square as much as you can. And then of course there's 9x16, which is vertical, which used to be the annoying way that some people filmed things on their phones, which would kind of have these black squares on the side to make it widescreen for YouTube. But now with Facebook mobile, with Instagram and with IGTV, vertical video is kind of making a comeback. A little bit or kind of becoming more valuable. And of course, if you want to just hold your phone up and record things, there are a lot of mediums now for you to really utilize that content and put it out there. Of course, the final thing in terms of network specific video elements is live video. As I mentioned before, the sky's the limit and if we're going to bring it into a hashtag right now, it's really just yolo. You only live once. You want to put that video out there, you want to go live, you want to be exciting, you want to be face to camera or you want to be recording an event, make it as long as possible and test it. If people are kind of dropping off near the end of it or at a certain point, you'll know for the future. But really there's so much that you can do with live video. You can show what's happening right now. You can engage with people in real time, you can be not stiff, pre presented kind of way or non edited kind of way. You're talking to people, it's all real. And people want to see that. You know, more and more with the rise of Instagram, people want to see what people are actually like. They want to see your face, they want to see your brand, they want to see what's going on. And live video is a really good way to show it to them. So of course you can use live video on Facebook, live on Instagram Stories and igtv, and of course Twitter has live video and pre recorded videos are really more for YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook, as we mentioned before, according to all those different rules. So that's really giving you an idea of how to look at the different networks, what kind of elements to choose for each of those networks. And of course you don't have to be on all of them and you don't have to follow everything. Really try to do ab testing or search what's best for your audience and for your brand and don't go overboard to start and just really focus on the network that's right for you.
26:27
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks guys. And I just want to say that I think he allo should be the motto of every marketer.
26:34
Adam Davis
Exactly.
26:37
Nina Zoukelman
Okay, so moving on, we're going to continue with our next session, how to measure and optimize your social videos. This is probably one of your toughest challenges, so let's try to make things a bit easier if we can. So when measuring the success of your social videos, looking only at views won't provide you with an Accurate picture. You need to ask yourself, why did I create this video? What stage of the funnel is it for? And how do I expect my audience to react? For example, if driving sales is your end goal, then measuring likes and Shares will give you 00 insight on how to improve or report ROI. That's why I'd like to go over two powerful groups of metrics, engagement metrics and lead generation metrics. These will help you understand whether you're reaching your goals with video. So let's start with engagement metrics. In this case, we want to see how people are interacting and responding to your video content. Are the messages resonating with them? Are they compelled by the call to action? These questions can easily be answered by looking at these metrics. Play Rate. This is the number of times your video was played, divided by the number of views it received. That is, out of all the users who saw the first few seconds on Autoplay, how many decided to continue watching? Next up, we have shares, likes and comments. These typically indicate the popularity of the video and most importantly, click through rates. This is the number of clicks on the link you included inside the video or around it, divided by the number of plays. Out of all the engagement metrics, click through rate is the holy grail, which shows that people not only believed in what you were saying, but also decided to discover more. So, guys, are there any other metrics we should be looking at?
28:26
Adam Davis
Yeah, for me, when it comes to video, I have a few tips for measuring video success. A lot of times when I talk about analytics on social media, it's really easy to get lost. There's so many different analytics and KPIs and numbers that you can kind of get lost in when you're trying to present either to yourself or to your higher ups how your videos are doing. So really, just to kind of make sense of everything, I would narrow it down to two things. As Nina mentioned, watch time for me is very important. As we were saying just before views are important, you know, everyone's always tracking the views just like you're tracking followers and likes. Those numbers are really easy to get excited about, but really you should be focusing on how long people are watching your videos in order to get an indication of either when they gave up on the video, what information they saw or they missed based on how long they watched and how you can really edit future videos accordingly. Because really what you're trying to do here is not create a video and be one and done. You want a video content strategy and you're going to want to see, you know, if I have this awesome post or video or excitement or scene at the end of the day, the end of my content. But if people aren't seeing it because they're saying, oh my God, I wish this video was five minutes instead of seven, then what's the point of it being in there? So that's really a good way to analyze what your content is doing. And the second metric that I would say is really social sharing, as Nina mentioned. Of course, likes and shares and comments are important across all social media. But I think more than anything, video is very shareable if people like it. How many times a day do you find yourself sending people a direct message of a video that you saw on Instagram, or tagging a friend or a colleague or a family member and something that you saw on Facebook? Because videos are something that you want to share with people. They're funny, they're insightful, they're educational. And if the more that your people, the more that your users, excuse me, are sharing your videos is a really high indication of how well those videos are doing. Really getting started with video on social media, if you're seeing one or two shares that are from users or from random people organically coming to your page, that's a really good place to start. Because it kind of takes a lot for people to actually click share on a video to kind of show that this is now on my feed and I want everyone who I'm friends with to see it. So to me, releasing those shares is a good indication of how your videos are doing.
30:48
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Adam. So once you've tracked those metrics, the real question is how do you optimize the video for better engagement? So let's see, as Nick and Adam mentioned previously, you can opt for square videos. The go to size is usually rectangle, but making your video square can have a huge impact on your play rates. If you're looking to increase the play rate on Facebook and LinkedIn where video is autoplayed, it's extremely important to optimize the first three seconds of the video. Make it as attention grabbing as possible. Compelling visuals are the name of the game. You change them if your video isn't getting enough shares, likes and comments. Now I know that Powtoon is really big on visuals. So Adam and Nick, what is some advice that you could give our listeners about compelling visuals?
31:36
Nick Liebman
Sure thing. So like I said earlier, one thing that's really important is to expose your brand very early, within the first three to five seconds of your video. Other things that can Contribute to an attention grabbing video or content is something that includes bright colors, close ups of faces and any dynamic on screen movement. Another thing that we see powtoon users finding a lot of success with is what we call merged media, right? Or incorporating elements of both animation and overlays, design, text and things like that with live action video.
32:19
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Nick. So if you're looking to increase ctr, our advice is to keep the video short, clear and concise. If something is redundant, cut it. Think of it this way, if someone came across your video, watched it for 20 minutes and then dropped off, something must have boredom. Another tip is to examine engagement trends. If viewers are dropping off before the call to action, alter the first 10 seconds of the video or make the video more visually appealing. Also, if viewers stop watching at certain points, work out why and change your wording and visuals to see if it works. Another thing you can experiment with is the description around the video and at subtitles. These two simple tricks can have a huge impact, especially on viewers watching on mute. Place a call to action at different points in your video and not just at the end, and make it highly relevant to the content of your video. If you're producing a what is video? Don't start talking about your product too much as people will stop watching. And as Nick and Adam mentioned earlier, if YouTube is your go to platform, invest the time in SEO. YouTube provides you with basic built in features so you can add meta descriptions, change thumbnails, add a transcript, etc. So Adam and Nick, any more tips on YouTube on how to optimize videos on YouTube?
33:45
Nick Liebman
Definitely. I think that on YouTube you got to remember your audience, you got to remember your search strategy, right? So if it's discoverable content, you're going to want to be sure that description is clear and that you've got a headline that really pops and matches what you're what people might be searching for. Searcher intent. And again, that idea of merged media, of using an animated element with video. Those are things that really drive people to be engaged with your content.
34:15
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Nick. So let's move on to lead generation metrics, the heart and soul of your video success. Depending on the conversion types on your website, someone may have filled out a form, subscribed to your blog, made a purchase, etc. So how do you optimize conversions? If your click through rate is high but your conversion rate is low, then you may need to refine your call to action and make it more impactful. Next, you should ensure your video is relevant to your audience's stage in the funnel. I can't stress this one enough. Once you've got this part right, you need to make sure your video is aligned with your audience's interests and pain points. Give them compelling content they can relate to. Finally, you need to choose the right network for your video. For example, Instagram audiences value visual reach content, while a talking head usually works best on LinkedIn. So guys, I know we covered a lot of ground, but do you have any further insights on how to optimize conversion rates for different social networks?
35:20
Nick Liebman
Yeah, definitely. And some of these you hit there, but a cta, a call to action that's going to be sure that your viewers know what to do and that will help them have a higher conversion rate because you've told them exactly how to achieve that. Another thing, continuity. This is super important. Have some common visual element between your video content on your social platforms and your website, where people are going to be going to make a purchase or go to that next stage. Whatever you've defined as your conversion, right? Wherever you're leading, people should feel like it's in line with their expectations. Another important thing, this is a little bit less about your video content, but it's definitely important to remember is customer experience. Right? Don't frustrate your customers. Make sure the website is easy to use and that purchase flow is clear, if in fact purchase is the conversion you're looking for. And finally, optimization. This adventure is like one part art and one part science. So you need to be able to continually optimize your creative network. Anything you're putting out there, you want to be sure that based on the views and the conversion metrics that you're seeing that you're optimizing. And this is huge for tons of powtoon users out there who are creating multiple iterations of the same video so that they can test things like CTA placement or the pacing, where their brand exposure is and all that kind of stuff. So the ability to be able to do multiple versions of a video to really optimize and see where you can make it better and where audiences are connecting with it, that'll drive conversions as well.
37:00
Adam Davis
Another thing that we talk about in the Pouching offices is this idea of a scavenger hunt. You're creating content for your business, whether it's video content or written content on a blog or your website. And you want everyone to see it, and you want everyone to see all of it. So why not create a system where you're sending people from one content that you've created to another. You have this video, this how to this product video that we talked about at the beginning of this webinar. People are coming to your website, they're seeing this video. Okay, now I get it. I know what this company does. And then at the end of the video you have a CTA that's leading to a blog post of something that you want them to read as kind of the next stage of your business onboarding or explaining what your business does. And then from that blog post there's a link to another page on your site that could be the purchase page, it could be another page explaining what you're really going to want to do. Of course, this doesn't only work with your website content. You could do this across different social media networks. You have an Instagram story that's saying, hey, swipe up to check out this link which leads to a YouTube video or to a Facebook post. Basically you're deciding where the user goes and what content they see. And if you're kind of leading them and putting in these call to actions and directing them where to go, then if the content is interesting, they're going to want to look and continue along the scavenger hunt and hopefully eventually reach that point where they say, you know what this brand or this product or this company is solving a pain point that I have. And if you kind of led them through that whole process and that's really a win and your content is getting seen by a lot of people and by and a lot of times by the same people.
38:40
Nick Liebman
It can also, if I could add, just briefly can add this sort of feeling that your brand is everywhere. And not only is it everywhere, it's everywhere with content that's right for that channel. And that's going to have sort of a meta impact on people that's going to make them want to trust you and your brand even more.
39:00
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks guys. I think that the scavenger hunt concept is definitely a valuable one for marketers. So now that we've covered the process of measuring and optimizing your social videos, let's see how you can really maximize the insights gleaned from your video analytics in order to improve additional marketing programs. If you're using a marketing automation platform, you know that it's hungry for qualified leads and valuable data on those leads. Chances are your marketing ops team keeps on feeding you demographic and psychographic information to improve the lead profiles. This helps them understand the leads content preferences, their top of mind interests and what makes them go wow. When they think of your product. So it only makes sense to leverage the buyer level insights you get from video and use this information to improve the way you score, nurture and attribute leads in your marketing automation platform. But what does this actually mean? Let's try and break it down. First off, growing your database with more qualified leads. When your social media manager platform is synced with your marketing automation system, any lead you generate through video automatically gets pushed to your lead database in Marketa or Eloqua Per dot or whichever platform you're using. Next up we have improving scoring and qualification of leads based on the video topics prospects consume, which stage of the funnel those videos are, and how many minutes of videos they're consuming. You can score leads to better understand their interest and intention to buy. So another way to get more from social video is by building a more personalized experience with targeted nurturing. Once you have a more complete picture of what your prospects interests are, you can offer them a highly personalized content experience tailored to the topics they engage with on video and push them from opportunity to a paying customer. If you're promoting video and audiences are engaging with it, it doesn't make sense not to integrate this engagement data in your marketing automation platform. In fact, not including it, you're only seeing one part of your buyer's journey. So now to our listeners, we'd like to hear about your challenges. We've been getting a lot of great questions, so we're going to try and address some of them. So one of the questions we got was do I need to worry about copyright when I'm creating a video for social media? Nick and Adam, would you like to take this one? Nick and Adam, are you with us just a second folks.
41:41
Nick Liebman
Sorry about that, we had a little mic snafu. But thanks for your patience. Yeah, copyright, this is really important. Even though social media, you know, it doesn't necessarily feel as polished or as official as something you're putting on your website or something that you'd be printing or something like that. You in fact, yes, you need to follow copyright laws, especially if you're a business a because it's only good business. And if you yourself produce intellectual property, you probably don't want other people stealing it. So that's definitely important. But the other reason is if you're infringing on other people's copyright, they can report you to the social platforms and eventually not only will your content get pulled for violating copyright, but you'll be banned from the platform. So please be sure either if you've got a tool like Powtoon, that's got a lot of royalty free content in it that you get with your subscription or whether you've got other ways to obtain rights, free or resell rights, commercial rights, media, please be sure that you do that.
42:45
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Nick. So another question we got is actually about something we discussed, aspect ratios. So what kind of aspect ratios are available in Powtoon?
42:57
Adam Davis
Okay, so when you're creating a video, as we mentioned before, it really makes sense to optimize the size of it and how it's going to look in the different networks. And at Powtoon, when you're creating a video with us, we have currently what we call standard wide, which is 16 by 9. We have the ability to create square videos and of course vertical videos that are 9 by 16. Also our product team is working on aspect ratios for different sizes that are a little more unique. Specifically Facebook cover videos. In case you're unaware, whether for your personal page or for your company page at the top of the profile where it has your cover photo, you can also make that a video. If you go to actually Patrick's Facebook page, you can see that we have a video up there on top, which is kind of exciting when people come to your business. So working on aspect ratio for that specific size and of course other relevant ratios that people have asked for on our online Facebook communities that are all on our roadmap currently.
43:59
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Adam. So another question is about optimizing videos for LinkedIn. What do I need to be looking at? So I would say that the first rule of thumb for LinkedIn is to keep videos under 3 minutes with 2 minutes being the optimal length. Secondly, don't neglect the copy leading up to the video. If it's compelling, users will want to watch. If not just gonna scroll down. Captions are also important since people tuning in at work won't always have the sound turned on. And my last piece of advice is two thought leadership. Provide value to reviewers. Make sure you're not only touting your product, but also giving valuable, insightful content that users weren't aware of. Serial videos with a clear theme are also great LinkedIn material. Find your expertise and showcase it on LinkedIn. So we're going to answer one more question. So where do I start when it comes to creating a video for social media? So guys, how about you take this one?
45:09
Nick Liebman
Sure thing. Absolutely. What I would say is you want to start with your audience. You want to think about who are you making this video for? Where are they from? What content are they interested in? What are their problems and how can your product or service solve these issues for them? You want to focus on those things and on helping your audience to achieve their goals. So that's a really good place to start. You can also analyze what kind of content your audience is already either producing or liking. You can do some market research and find some people who match your perfect customer out there. Right. And just take a look at their social feed. What are they liking? What are they sharing? That's a great place to get ideas. And the other thing I might say is there's a lot of the video creation platforms out there, including powtoon, have a number of templates in them, and those templates are great for saving time, but they're also really good for inspiration. Whenever I'm stuck making something, whether I'm making an explainer video about a new feature that we've got for powtoon, or if I'm producing a short ad to drive traffic for a particular promotion that we're doing or something like that, or if I'm just creating some kind of social content that's meant to just be enjoyable and engaging, a lot of times I'll take a look at one of the templates and just tear it apart and kind of dissect it and get inspiration and ideas there.
46:37
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Nick. You really make it sound simple. So our last question is how can I track conversions inside Oktopost? So, with a simple setup, Oktopost not only allows you to track conversions that originate from social interactions around the video, such as if you include a URL to a landing page or a web form in the YouTube video description, for every video conversion that Oktopost tracks, you can drill down the analytics to see exactly which social network campaign profile and post the conversion came from. So this is all, this is all the time we have for questions. Unfortunately, if we didn't get to yours, we will get back to you via email. So first of all, thank you to all the marketers who tuned in and we hope you enjoyed our webinar. And a big thank you to Nick and Adam from powtoon for co hosting this webinar with me. Thank you guys.
47:30
Nick Liebman
You're welcome. Glad to be here.
47:32
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks. If you have any questions or if you'd like to hear more about how Oktopost or powtoon can help you execute a social video strategy, feel free to contact us. Hope to see you next time.
47:42
Adam Davis
Bye.
47:43
Nina Zoukelman
Bye.
