Top 10 Problems with Website Design and Usability
You have tested your website and have visited it a few times. Maybe you have received some feedback and have a bit of data about your visitors. Since you might want to make some changes, here are the top ten issues in website design and usability.
Compare this list to your website and consider what you might want to do to make your site better.
1. The First Glance
In general, people look at the top left corner of your website first. You should have your essential information there: what your offerings are and how your potential customers can get it. Some visitors are at your site only long enough to confirm that you sell what they want, and some are ready to buy. All visitors need to be able to tell what you do right away. Don’t hide behind a splash page or make people wait while something loads – many won’t take the time.
2. Navigation
When your customers want and need more information, they’ll stay and look for it. Make sure they can find it easily. Put your navigation in the usual places, and make it very obvious what your visitors need to click in order to find each section. Don’t have more than 5-7 choices in your main navigation and keep it consistent on every page. Let your creativity and uniqueness show in some other way – follow the rules when it comes to navigation.
3. Contact Information
Can customers (and search engines) find you when they need you? Your contact information must be clear and accurate. It must also be easy to find. Visitors will visit your website several times before they choose to go for your services or purchase. Don’t make it hard for them to contact you when they’re ready.
4. Call To Action
What do you want your visitors to do? It should be easy to find out how to complete an order through your website or get more information. Regardless of the content of the page make sure that you include a clear call to action. Make it easy for visitors to purchase or request information from you. Just be sure to make it very clear.
5. Above the Fold Focus
Many visitors won’t scroll; most won’t scroll unless you have already convinced them that it’s worth their while to do so. Make sure important aspects are above fold. The unimportant things – why are they on your page? This is especially important on the home page. Visitors who’ve reached your FAQs page or your blog are probably interested enough to spend some time reading.
6. Inviting Content
To develop relationships with your clients, you need to have them visit more than once. In fact, most people won’t commit themselves the first time they come to your website. You need to offer them something of value so they’ll return. Do you have a blog, or frequently-updated featured products? Have you got any useful information that you could offer your customers?
7. Well-Organized Pages
Don’t make your visitors search. Always ensure that your page layout is clear, concise and gives the visitor exactly what they want without having to search for it. Try to put yourself in your customer’s position and use what you learn from testing. Decide what you want to say and plan its organization before you write, so you can be sure to have coherent paragraphs.
8. Visual Appeal
While the content on your page is the most important thing, an attractive page will be more enjoyable and appealing for visitors. Choose colours that work well together, leave some open space so it’s not too busy, and make sure you have everything lined up nicely. Even if you have not got artistic skills you can make a good impression – and you should.
9. Sincerity and Trustworthiness
The internet is all about trust. If you can ensure that your website is trustworthy, people will be more likely to complete an order. What’s more, the search engines also base your rankings on how trustworthy they think your page is. Don’t undermine your future success by trying to trick the search engines or mislead your visitors.
10. A Polished Finish
Do your links work? Make sure you check your grammar, spelling and layout are correct? Is all the information up to date and accurate? Your visitors would prefer to shop in a well kept and clean shop in the high street. They would prefer to purchase in a clean and well kept website too. They’ll have less faith in you if you have errors on your website.
What Does it Mean to Google on Who is Linking to Your Web Site?
Linking is what connects all the pages on the Internet. You have links in your website to let people navigate their way around. You may have links to other websites that you think will be useful to your visitors, and hopefully you have links coming to your site from relevant content.
All types of links can impact your search engine optimization results, helping determine where your website shows up online. Though the hardest to control, inbound links pointing to your site can make the biggest impact.
At its most basic, the concept is that if several high-quality sites are linking to your web site, then Google and other search engines figure your site must be popular with valuable content, and you have a better chance at achieving higher search engine rankings. The result is that you have higher quality links from other sites. This is an ongoing process, you never want to work this marketing strategy for a month then stop. The Google PageRank algorithm looks at the pattern of links to your site as they build over time.
Building the right kind of links can bring a major payoff, while a wrong turn could get you penalized. Trying to dig out of the Google Sandbox is not easy.
Armed with a bit of knowledge and some creativity, you can build up valuable incoming links naturally and powerfully, avoiding the traps that plague amateurs.
Spice Up Your Links With Some Variety
There are all kinds of link farming schemes to grow links, and you need to run the other way from these. This is also called reciprocal linking, where you exchange links with other web sites that will then link to you on a mass scale. Warning: Google is onto this.
While it’s perfectly advantageous to link to high-quality sites that also link to you, the key here is to cultivate a natural mix of links over time.
Is it natural to suddenly have 100 links pointing to your site, all with the same text? Of course not. When people link to you naturally, they might use your business name (SEO Advantage) or some variation on a descriptive phrase (search optimization company). If too many similar links exist, it can signal that those links were generated artificially and potentially result in penalties.
Also consider which pages on your site inbound links point to. Your home page is probably going to get the most, but it’s natural to have links pointing to specific pages inside your web site, too. Cultivate links to your services, your blog, your news pages, your articles, etc., to help those pages get indexed and build their own PageRank. Called deep links, these can help bolster your site’s overall performance.
Some links also carry a title tag, which is indicated in the source code. This is a little too technical to go into detail here, but if you can influence this you’ll want both the link text and title to vary a bit among the links pointing to your site. Once again, the key is to grow your links in a natural pattern.
Not Every Link Carries The Same Value
Links from popular, established web sites usually carry the greatest value. That’s because they have high PageRank from plenty of other people already linking to them. A link from CNN.com, for example, will carry much more weight than a link from a free press release distribution site that few people know of. Likewise, a link from www.sbdpro.com will have a greater impact than a link from a directory that uses no-follow tags.
No-follow tags are the bane of naive link builders. It’s tempting to think you can just link to pages on your site from your Twitter tweets, Facebook and other social media applications. However, many of these sites as well as online ads and also some directories employ “no follow” tags that prevent the search engines from following a link to your site. In this case, it’s as if the link doesn’t exist in the eyes of the search engines. (That doesn’t mean the links aren’t valuable to people who find you and follow the link, it’s just not helping your web site show up in Google.)
So, How Can A Business Build Incoming Links Naturally?
The mix of links created out on the web pointing back at your web site should avoid skewing toward any particular type. A good mix that you can influence may include:
• Directories – Professional organizations, online communities and forums, business directories, etc. can all potentially provide good links to your site. There are several premium directories that are staples in an SEO firm’s link building toolkit, like DMOZ.org. Keep in mind that your listing itself should be optimized in order to reap the full link juice benefits.
• Press Releases – Writing and submitting press releases online can help you get your news in front of more people and build links to your site. (Be sure to use best practices for writing and evaluate carefully your outlets for good links).
• Blogs – Link to relevant pages on your site from your blog. Build relationships online with other bloggers, too, and they may want to link back to you! Active blogs with high visibility and large followings are going to be your best bet, but you can mix it up over time targeting lesser known bloggers, too. Keep in mind that as other sites grow in PageRank, the value passed to your site will also grow.
• Create Some Link Bait – Make sure your content is so fascinating or funny that people will want to tell others about it. This is the ultimate for building naturally growing incoming links but of course hard to do.
A sample schedule could mean every month you list your site in two good directories, link to interior site pages from a couple relevant posts in your blog, distribute one press release to news sites, and write one great article that other people may want to link to and then let them know about it.
A word about selecting outlets is in order, too. You’ll need to carefully assess each place you target in order to determine the link value they can pass onto you. For example, different press release submission sites and directories can give you a wide variety in link value. This can be time-consuming to determine but worth it when your site’s PageRank starts to climb.
5 Social Media Strategies to Expand Your Business
A great social media campaign creates viral exposure with the community performing most of the communication.
When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.
If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?
Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.
Strategy 1 – Great Content
The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. Content is king on the Internet. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s hot in your market and find an angle so you can distribute the best content.
Strategy 2 – Niched Network Nuances
The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or yours.
People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you are on the right track.
Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored.
The worst part is, if someone is not spreading your message, then the whole concept of this marketing goes out the window. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match.
Strategy 3 – Simplify Sharing
You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network. Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-ín wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-ín list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?
If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.
Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button, put a few sharing links on your page, make it easy for them to Retweet, the easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.
Strategy 4 – Consistency
It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistently, and still give the best possible service and support to my customers and clients.
The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.
You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.
Strategy 5 – Think Engagement
Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.
Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.
This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) has evolved to become the most reliable strategy for reaching your target audience and driving conversions on the Internet. It compels your market to visit your website, it boosts your company’s exposure within your space and it positions your product as the solution to their problems. As a result, your sales go up, your revenue and profit swell, your ROI rises and your business enjoys stronger branding and customer loyalty in the process.
Many of your competitors are already using SEM in an attempt to capture a larger portion of your market. There has never been a better time to protect and expand your territory. I will explain why search engine marketing should be a critical piece of your online marketing strategy. I will also show why there is value in hiring an SEM expert versus forging a path yourself. Will also describe how SEM PR and SEM social media tactics converge with SEO and PPC to produce a groundswell of momentum.
Why Search Engine Marketing Is Critical
Search engine marketing blends SEO, pay-per-click advertising and social media strategies to give your company a higher level of visibility within the search engines’ listings. However, visibility without sales defeats the purpose. And therein lies the true value of SEM.
Your marketing efforts must generate conversions in order to justify the investment. Conversions might include a prospect buying your product, signing up for your newsletter or becoming your affiliate. It might include subscribing to a continuity program that generates monthly revenue. Search engine marketing not only allows your company to approach your audience, but it engages the conversation that is already occurring in their mind. It compels action, which lifts your conversion rate.
Is Hiring A Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Expert Necessary?
Every tactic that is leveraged within a comprehensive search engine marketing deployment can be learned. The problem is, doing so is incredibly time-consuming. The algorithms that govern the search engine’s organic rankings change constantly. The major PPC platforms endure a seemingly endless string of upheavals. Social media sites are still in their infancy. As they mature, so will the tactics required to leverage them. Developing proficiency in each area of search engine marketing takes an enormous amount of time.
An SEM expert will design a search engine optimization campaign that pushes your website to the top rankings for your chosen keywords. They can also launch a pay-per-click, PPC, advertising campaign that further improves your exposure. Social media marketing tactics can be integrated to dovetail with the rest of your search engine marketing deployment. Even though you could launch these strategies yourself, do you have the time to learn and apply them?
SEM PR: Melding Search Engine Marketing With Public Relations
SEM PR has its roots in search engine optimization. Years ago, online public relations was managed largely through the creation and distribution of online press releases. This is still effective today. These press releases gain traction in the search engines’ organic listings. That builds your company’s brand while helping to push negative publicity off the first page of results.
Today, online public relations has been incorporated within a broader search engine marketing context that includes PPC, SEO and online reputation management (ORM). For example, a press release can be distributed online in order to gain traction within the natural listings. Then, a PPC campaign can be launched to direct your audience to the press release on your website. Links can be placed throughout the page to other positive coverage. The more points of exposure, the less likely negative press will penetrate the top rankings in the search engines. This is a core element of ORM and by extension, search engine marketing.
Leveraging SEM Social Media Optimization For A Competitive Edge
Social media sites began to enjoy ranking authority in the major search engines a few years ago. That authority has only increased over time, making social media an important cog in search engine marketing. This is the reason SEM social media optimization has become critical for companies that need to reach niche markets.
By establishing a presence on the top social media sites, a search engine marketing agency can develop multiple entry points in the organic listings. That increases your audience’s exposure. It also prevents bad press from infiltrating the top listings for your keywords. These advantages converge to deliver a competitive edge for your company.
The Value Of Hiring A Professional SEO Marketing Consultant
Time is the most valuable commodity of all. Once it expires, it cannot be retrieved. This is why a growing number of companies, including your competitors, are opting to hire a professional SEO marketing consultant. They realize that search engine marketing strategies are complex. The learning curve is steep. What’s more, deploying PPC, SMO and SEO tactics poorly can do more harm than good. Precision in execution is critical.
How Can A Blog Help Your Business
If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.
This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.
Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.
When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.
On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.
Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.
To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.
Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.
Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.
A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.
The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.
Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weight).
Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.
If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.
A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.
Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.
Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.
And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.
Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffic and repeat visitors you’ll get.
Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.
One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/
By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.
You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.
Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.
7 Ways To A Viral Video
Viral videos are the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing. Every individual, marketing firm and corporation is striving to create a piece of video content that goes viral. Most of it ends up getting lost in cyberspace, but it is worth the shot.
Some experts say “only 2% of YouTube videos go viral.” Granted, it’s a bit absurd to try and quantify what percentage of videos go viral when the very definition of something having “gone viral” is open to wide interpretation and debate. How many views make a video viral… is it 100,000? A million? How fast do those views have to come to count as viral? You can see how difficult it gets to quantify. But I think we can all agree that very few videos go viral as hoped.
I think it might help to examine some viral video successes and attempt to break them down, check out what makes them different and define what it was that made them work.
1. The Accident – AKA: Oops, You’re Famous
Summary: Probably the most common type of viral video is the accidental viral video. These are shot by non professionals, usually just a single user and are uploaded without the faintest hope or inkling of mega popularity. These are often uploaded for friends and family, but unexpectedly take on a life of their own.
Chance of Success: Virtually nonexistent. Since viewers are the ones who cause Accident Viral Videos to exist, they are impossible to predict. Creators of these Accident videos are often quite surprised to see their little creation hit a million views or to get invites to a national talk show. By definition, you can’t plan for this to happen.
2. The Imitation – AKA: Anything You Can Do I Can Do Worse
Summary: What happens when Big Business takes notice of an Accident viral video (or any other viral video success for that matter)? They try to recreate it, naturally. You can also call this “The Hollywood”, since major film studios have been riding film trends with countless rip-offs for years—after coming out of the Disaster Movie era a few years back, we are now firmly entrenched in the Snarky Animation era (thank you Shrek) and the Torture Horror era (thank you Saw). It works like this: See something successful, then recreate it as closely as possible, removing only the most obvious copy-cat elements. Like making photocopies of photocopies… the enjoyment and interest in the video wanes exponentially with each passing generation of rip-offs.
Chances of Success: Moderate. Ripoff, Spoof, and Copycat videos are never as popular as their inspiration. They benefit initially by piggy-backing off the fame and popularity of the original, but that soon wanes. A huge section of the video-watching population sees them for what they are… rip-offs… copies of an original that is much more… well, original.
3. The Embarrassment – AKA: Kill Me Now
Summary: Something embarrassing happens to someone, and said embarrassment is caught on film. Uh oh. This is one of the most popular kinds of videos… it’s the “you’ll never believe what this idiot just did” phenomenon. It’s very difficult for major brands to have success with this kind of viral video, as most brands aren’t interested in embarrassing themselves. Yet you have the recent Jim Brewer Goes Off On Film Crew video that, to me, has to be fake and manufactured. And in that example, it’s the hired actor “embarrassing” himself, not the brand.
Chances of Success: Higher than normal if real, far less likely if staged.
4. The Special Effects – AKA: Is That Real?
Summary: A popular trend in viral video is the subtle use of special effects to make an unbelievable event slightly more believable. Because the quality of video on YouTube is generally lower than what you get at your local movie theater (and because the screen size is so much smaller), special effects are slightly harder to gauge for the average viewer. With just the right touch of CGI, you can make something fantastic appear real.
Chances of Success: High, particularly if you can score a celebrity like Kobe to star in your video (keep in mind… “high probability” on this scale is still a long-shot). All that’s required is enough believability to cause a portion of the audience to wonder if it’s real. Once you have a few of them believing it, they’ll start the viral process for you, sending out links to the video to all their friends. Even something so obviously fake as the Microsoft Slide video still convinced enough people to go viral—even prompting Microsoft to eventually admit it was faked.
5. The WTF – AKA: What Did I Just Watch?!
Summary: Sometimes a video goes viral simply because viewers aren’t sure what they’re looking at. Sometimes unexplained imagery captivates an audience in a way that standard videos cannot.
Chances of Success: Low. Hitting on a “what the heck is that?” video is an extremely inexact science. If you’d have told me two years ago that Cadbury’s was about to release a viral video of a gorilla playing drums along to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and that it would get millions of views, I’d have told you that you were insane. Predicting what people will like is hard enough when you’re staying comfortably in the box. Stray outside that box into the strange and bizarre, and your odds go down even further. The payoff, though, can be huge.
6. The Shill – AKA: Obviously Corporate Advertising
Summary: You might think I’m about to bash or slam these videos. But I’m not. If a company can find a way to highlight a product or service in a manner that is still entertaining to viewers, you have what we call a “win/win” scenario. What might initially look like a television commercial can—with the right dash of humor and personality—become a web sensation. Users want to be entertained, first and foremost. If it happens to be an advertisement, so be it… as long as it makes us laugh (or smile, or cry, or whatever).
Chances of Success: Among the highest on this list. People have inherent trust in certain brands, and at the end of the day, most of the viewing public just wants to be entertained. If you can do that while being completely transparent in your attempts to advertise, then you can save time and money on the front end and have maximum impact on the back end.
7. The Blair Witch – AKA: Those Faking Fakers
Summary: Not to be confused with The Special Effects (though they are similar), The Blair Witch viral video is one where everything is staged. Big companies are so desperate for their own slice of viral video history that they’re often willing to try faking it. Hire some actors, give them a script, and then pay them to pretend they aren’t actors. It’s a lot harder to do right than you might think. Forget for a second that the average YouTube viewer is already trained to cry “fake” at the first sign of something out of the ordinary. It’s actually incredibly hard to artificially manufacture authenticity.
Chances of Success: Pretty slim. Lonely Girl kind of killed it for the rest of us. The YouTube series turned us all into cynical skeptics.
So, which variety of viral video should businesses shoot for? Well, most businesses aren’t out to embarrass themselves, so we can scratch that one. The Accident videos are, by definition, not something you can intentionally create, so that’s out too. The Imitation is a short term solution, destined to have a ceiling for success, but I still have clients that choose that option.
The Special Effects videos almost always require a bit of budget, particularly if you’re going to use a recognizable figure. To fake an amazing feat, even if you eschew CGI, there are tons of hidden costs in planning, setup, and execution.
The WTF is probably the riskiest venture, because you spend money on producing an ad that has no assurance of even being understood, let alone enjoyed. I’m sure there was more than one raised eyebrow in the room when Sony was pitched on the Bouncing Ball concept. Most of my clients are not interested in being video concept trailblazers, at least not in this economy.
And the Blair Witch is nearly as risky as the WTF. First, it’s tough to find actors who are good enough to pull off the fake but are also not recognizable enough for people to instantly remember them from some White Castle commercial. But it’s also risky because of the possibility of getting caught in the fakery. Once viewers know something is fake, you may still get views… but your branding efforts are completely undone.
That leaves The Shill. Yes… believe it or not, I generally advise my clients to get creative with their actual business… the services or products they offer. This is partly because the majority of my clients are small and medium businesses, who have their hands tied by budget and the traditional notions of what marketing should be. But the area I see the most success in intentional viral video creation is far and away The Shill. If it doesn’t go viral, it’s at the very least a good commercial for your business that you can use down the road. And as I mentioned above, most viewers don’t mind overt advertising when it comes in the shell of something truly entertaining.
If you’re just dipping your toe in the water of viral videos for the first time, or if you are a small business… the best approach is to simply find a creative, lighthearted way to highlight who you are and what you do.
Quality of Video Views Over Quantity
I thought I’d take a brief moment to point out a successful use of online video: The Circle Players. The Circle Players, begun in 1949, is one of the oldest community theater troupes in Tennessee—they’re also a nonprofit. All the members, from actors to set designers, are volunteers.
To promote the biggest production of their current season—an adaptation of the musical, Fame—they decided to get jiggy with it, and create a viral video. Their concept? Flash mob dancing, naturally.
By now you’ve all seen plenty of great examples of flash mobs, likely those created by the fantastic Improv Everywhere group. The concept is to stage an apparent spontaneous group event in a public place… and make onlookers gape in wonder.
The Circle Players chose to set their stunt at the Nashville Farmers Market, a trendy downtown lunchtime spot sure to have plenty of clueless onlookers (in addition to being, you know… an actual farmers’ market). At the predetermined moment, the music for the classic “Fame” theme began, and members stood up and started performing one of their choreographed numbers from the show. As many as 50 or more members participated.
In the days that followed, the bloggers and local media were all over it… giving The Circle Players the press they’d hoped for.
And while the video only garnered about 5,000 views on YouTube, it was a clear success. Jim Manning, the President of The Circle Players, suggests that the flash mob was a raging success from a buzz-creation perspective. In fact, by the time he edited his video together from 10 different camera angles, someone else from the crowd at the Farmers Market had already uploaded their own video of the event to YouTube.
There was an extended life for the campaign on Facebook, as members of The Circle Players used the social networking site to further publicize the video. A local paper, The Nashville Scene, published an article about the flash mob, along with countless blogs and personal websites all over Tennessee and as far away as Washington DC. Local organizations have called to request The Circle Players come perform for their meetings. The Farmers Market immediately asked the troupe when their next flash mob would be, and the Tennessee Reparatory Theater even passed the video around their own offices as an example of creative marketing. Not too shabby for a nonprofit community theater, eh?
And there’s even some evidence from their internal audience surveys that suggests the flash mob did its job and brought people out to the production.
Says Jim:
“I’m glad Circle Players could kick off its 60th season with something rather innovative and that it got people talking about Circle Players in general and about Fame specifically. In that sense, it was a huge success since it garnered a lot of excitement from people who are involved in Circle and people who are just hearing about this organization. Will we do it again? Hmmmm…”
Judging by that quote, I’d say they are a lock to employ viral marketing again in the future.
So what’s the lesson for us marketers? Number of views doesn’t matter… at all. Not one bit. Not really. What you want are the right views by the right people… at the right time. I’ll see your million views by non-converting teenagers and raise you 5,000 views by business decision makers who are ready to buy.
This concept is not unlike a successful pay per click campaign. A good pay per click campaign is not targeting clicks… but rather the right clicks… those that are most likely to convert. If you want to throw away money on PPC and get hundreds or thousands of clicks… be my guest. I’d be more inclined to suggest you spend less and get fewer clicks—the right clicks from the right audience—and thereby actually increase sales.
Viral marketing is no different. The Circle Players didn’t spend any money on their flash mob. They just took an hour or two of their day to go do what they love doing anyway—performing for crowds. And the end result was something that all the billboards and Graffiti Advertising bathroom ads in the world couldn’t have created. So many small and medium businesses summarily dismiss the idea of a viral video because they feel they’d need tens of thousands of views to be considered a success. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Conclusion: No business is too small to capitalize on the many benefits of viral marketing. Provided you target your content to the right people, you don’t even need massive amounts of views to attain success.
Now sit back and digest all that while watching The Circle Players surprise an innocent lunch crowd:
Is Viral Video What You Are Looking For?
The words ‘viral video’ have become synonymous, mostly incorrectly, with increasing brand awareness, online marketing and online video advertising. Yes, viral video can do all of that, but there might be a better way for you and your company to get the word out instead of the shotgun approach of a viral video.
What is Viral Video?
By definition Viral Video is a video that is put on a video sharing site, like YouTube, that then begins to spread based on the content. That means that the viewers do all the work for you. They watch the video, think it’s cool/funny/informative/awesome, then begin to share it with their friends. In turn their friends find it one of those things and share it with more friends. In the end the video starts racking up millions of views. In other words it spreads like a viral infection from person to person until everyone is immune (isn’t interested in the video let’s say) or has been infected (watched the video, perhaps more than once). Infection (sharing of the video) is generally done through Share buttons, social networks, email or instant messengers.
Is Viral Video Effective?
Well, that depends on what it is you want out of the viral video. If you want a video with a lot of views, that’s exactly what you’re looking for. If you want a video to increase your brand awareness, well you might be better served with some other approach like a cohesive online video campaign or some more targeted form of online video sharing. Viral video is sort of like hunting blindfolded with a wide scatter shotgun… you might get lucky and hit something that you want to hit, but you also might aimlessly shoot at a lot of things you don’t want.
Some interesting facts about YouTube videos is that an average video is 1.5 minutes but an average YouTube session is about 30 minutes. So the chance of someone seeing your video and heading off to your website seem slim. So if you’re looking for traffic generation or click through it’s not going to be the best route to that for you probably. If you have a range of products that you’re offering for sale, etc. then you might be able to utilize a vast amount of video to get your name out there and increase your brand awareness and even turn it into sales giving you a strong ROI if you’ve got an online shop.
Other forms of business, nonprofits especially, have a tougher time of it. How do you take those videos and turn them into conversions to your cause? That’s the magic bullet it seems. With the new call-to-action overlays you might have a stronger chance of getting someone to engage with your site and your cause. But it’s going to take more than just one video.
A series of videos that lead from one to the other could eventually create a good basis for getting people involved. An ongoing story, a series of case studies, or a set of instructional yet entertaining videos might be more useful to you than just one video that may or may not go viral and spread like wildfire. Even if it does go viral there’s no guarantee of engagement.
Something to keep in mind when planning your video strategy, viral or otherwise, might be ‘how do TV shows do it?’ How do they get viewers hooked? Good writing certainly, interesting/funny plots, good production values, character development, decent acting (of course one might make claims against that last one). These are some things that you will probably need to incorporate into your online videos as well. Just because it’s online doesn’t mean people want anything less than what they expect from other forms of video entertainment.
Determining Success
Viral videos are generally about views right? Wrong! Viral videos are about spreading a message without having to do the actual spreading yourself. Sure some viral videos have had millions of hits, but most of them have not been for business, have not been meant to monetize something and have not been meant to raise awareness of a brand, cause or product. So then how do you determine if a viral video is successful?
One of the biggest viral video hits for the Maryland State Teachers Association only has about 2000 views. How can it be considered a viral hit? Because the goal of the video was to influence a debate about education funding and the state-level policy-makers and journalists that matter in that debate all heard about it, passed it on, and watched it. It worked.
So, just counting eyes-on-video is not always a measure of success. In fact, in most cases it wouldn’t generally be regarded as anything interesting. Television ads play whether or not people are even in front of the TV. Does that mean they are successful because they played to potentially millions of viewers? Not really. You need to take other things into account including ROI, sales impact and engagement. Of all of those engagement is the easiest to track and could be a good measure of whether or not your video was successful, even if it only have 10,000 views.
How to Develop Video Strategy
Viral video can indeed be very useful to an organization. But planning is going to be a necessity. You’ll need to lay out a plan of attack, a series of videos and some specific ‘hook’ to get people watching not just the first but the rest of the series and finally you’ll need to find a way and reason for people to engage with your videos. This is generally where a qualified and experiences online marketing firm that is familiar with online video marketing and viral video comes in. They can help lead you down the right path and get you on the road to higher engagement. But you’re also going to need compelling videos and that’s going to require some interesting writers and creative talent. That is going to be how you get people to continue watching your videos and how you will get them to engage with your site, product or brand.
You need to think about what the important and interesting things are and ask yourself, “How do we document this work?” You need to ask yourself why do you think what you do is important, and ask your staff as well.
These are excellent starting points for nonprofits and commercial businesses alike. If you and your staff can’t find the interesting things in your business, how will you ever manage to convey that to other people in a new medium that you’re not entirely familiar with? The short answer is that you won’t and that will not only cause your video strategy to be unsuccessful but it may make you think it was all a waste of money and turn you away from what could really be a great way to market whatever it is you have to market.
Budgets on Rise for Social Media
Mashable recently discussed a Forrester report that forecasts an increase in budgets on social media to “grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums.”
The report does not dive into what the money will be spent on or if the investment will be used to talk AT the conversation, IN the conversation or both.
Talking at the conversation is essentially a media buy, which is aimed at social media channels like Federated Media or social ads in Facebook). In this case, budgets would probably be spent on CPM, creative and CPC in some cases.
Talking in the conversation requires people. Hiring community managers, training them properly and empowering them to engage online is where the substantial investment would go. In my opinion, talking IN the conversation exemplifies the true essence of social media. I feel it is very important for any company to communicate directly to their customers or clients.
Talking at the conversation should not be discounted though. Buying media in Facebook that will drive traffic to a Fan Page where community managers are ready and waiting to engage would be ideal.
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Bing Indexing Some Real Time Tweets
Microsoft’s Bing search engine will start indexing some Tweets in real-time. This will make Bing the first major search engine to do so. In a post on the Bing community blog, Microsoft’s Sean Suchter said the company would highlight new Tweets from a select group of people in both the “search technology and business sphere” and also from those with “more general consumer appeal.” Already, search engines like Bing and Google index Twitter posts, but the results are not constantly refreshed.
When Microsoft relaunched Live Search as Bing earlier this month, it said it was looking into ways to incorporate Tweets in the search engine’s user experience. Although it had given no indication that it was in much of a rush, saying that there were many ways to define what “real-time” results actually entailed. Since then, however, Google has given signs that it is on the verge of launching some sort of microblogging search offering that would index content from Twitter as well as other microblogging sites in real-time. Results would also be incorporated into Google’s main web results.
Microsoft emphasized that it was not indexing all of Twitter in real-time, only the Tweets of a “few thousand people” based on their follower count and tweet volume. And, indeed, the examples that Microsoft provided indicated that the Twitter results will show up independent from the main body of entries, much like the instant answers that Bing surfaces when someone searches for the weather or a sports score. Users will also have to search for someone’s name as well as “Twitter” or “Tweet” or “@” in order to see the results. That seems to take away a bit from the value of the feature, since many people search Twitter to get a sense of what’s going on at a given moment on a certain subject. But Suchter said in the post that it was just a start. “We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search,” Suchter said.
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