The Value-Add of Video in the Content Journey

Marketers consistently look for new ways to Engage buyers. Today’s best marketers are analytical, creative and measure everything to ensure we achieve optimal results. Modern marketers rely on a well-defined Demand Generation Strategy to engage, nurture and convert buyers throughout the stages of their buyer’s journey. A well-planned strategy includes different types of content, delivered via various programs, all helping to uniquely educate the buyer and possibly bring us one step closer to a sale.

So, what’s the secret to achieving optimal results in demand generation? Nothing is 100%, but if you are delivering content that speaks to your buyer and helps them solve a pain point, engagement is sure to happen. You need to find the right content marketing mix for your buyer as not everyone’s content consumption patterns are the same. Video is a format that is gaining in popularity as more and more B2B buyers (91% according to the 2015 Content Preference Study by Demand Gen Report) like to consume visual, interactive content.

The Role of Video?

What makes video and specifically, interactive video a good bet for the future of content? It’s all about helping the buyer. Interactive video enables a buyer to pick and choose which content they want to consume in a fast and easy way. Buyers like to drill down and get answers quickly to their questions and interactive video enables this easily. Marketers like to understand what their buyers are looking for, to capitalize on buying triggers and deliver relevant content in real -time and video offers this in spades. How? Mainly through the Buyer Intent data that video provides like what videos buyers are watching, for how long, and how many minutes of video content they’ve consumed in total. This helps marketers to produce additional, complementary content as well as to better understand what engages the buyer.

Sold on video yet? Good, but you still need to understand where and how to offer the video content to the buyer. In the past, video has been used mostly in the early engagement stage. However, if the content is relevant – there is no reason to only use at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. Videos further in the funnel like product demos, customer testimonials, or personalized sales videos can all help move buyers towards the close.

Using Data

If you have developed deep buyer insights, accurate content mapping will enable the right video content to be delivered at the right time, at any given point in the journey. Pay attention to engagement metrics to test and refine your video content. Viewing time, calls to action and even to drop off points are a good place to start as these might indicate less relevant content in that portion of the video.

It’s the engagement data that video provides that is the value-add of this format and it is why it will be used more in the marketing mix in the future. Just make sure you have integration with your CRM or marketing automation platforms to gain insight into specific lead behavior and guide future content suggestions.

Be Ready

In consuming video content, buyers can accelerate their journey by selecting certain content offers and the marketer needs to be ready. Don’t be afraid to let acceleration happen through self-selection of content, just make sure you have the next piece of content ready to continue the conversation with the buyer.

Want to learn more about how video can influence deals at every stage of the buyer’s journey? Download our guide Map Your Video Content to the Buyer’s Journey and discover:

• Why you actually only need 15% of your content at the top of your funnel
• What video assets can help you convert at every funnel stage
• How to close deals faster by creating a content journey

The post The Value-Add of Video in the Content Journey appeared first on Vidyard.

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5 Personalized Prospecting Ideas You Can Use Today

Let’s face it, regardless of how successful a rep you are, we can all use some fresh ideas every once in awhile. And since I’d bet that every one of your prospects and their dog is bombarded with sales messaging each day, you need a way to stand out.

You need to get personal.

But you probably already knew that, so let’s cut to the chase and dive into 5 new ideas for personalized sales outreach you can start using today.

1. Send a Personal Video Message

There’s nothing quite like receiving a message in your inbox that someone took time out of their day to create for you in a medium that barely anyone else is using for outreach: video.

With overstuffed inboxes and overworked employees, a personal video message can be your best avenue for cutting through the noise. Use a whiteboard with the prospect’s name on it or some other way to personalize the video’s visuals so the thumbnail is personal, too. Then embed that video thumbnail in your email, include “video” in your subject line, and you are off to the races! If you’re anything like other reps using video, you’ll see something like 5x higher click-through rates and 8x higher response rates!

Check out this example from Heba, below:

Want a simple, free video creation tool to try this with? Try ViewedIt.

2. Share Relevant Content with a Personalized Touch

Sharing content that’s helpful and relevant to your prospects is a great way to show them that you’re relevant to them. The two biggest opportunities in sharing content are:

1. To include a personal message on why this content is relevant to them, and
2. Not to overwhelm them with too much content. We’d recommend sticking to a minimum of 3 assets or videos and no more. Otherwise, it starts to feel like you haven’t personalized your recommendations.

A great tool for this is Uberflip’s Sales Streams, which allows you to share a collection of relevant content assets with a personalized message.

3. Ship Something Through Snail Mail

No, this doesn’t mean we’re regressing. The truth of the matter is that people’s inboxes are so incredibly crowded these days and yet, their mail slots remain relatively empty. And plus, most people still love receiving a good piece of old fashioned mail. But make it count and sure, probably only do this for your high-value, cream-of-the-crop prospects as it can be moderately more time consuming and does involve some cost.

Ideas for things you can send through the mail are:

• Company swag that they’d actually want to use or would provide a reminder of you when they use it or see it
• A “getting started kit” that helps them start to learn best practices around the solution you provide
• A book (yes, a real, physical book!) related to specific interests or author you’ve spoken about before

Always remember to include a personal note from you and hey, sometimes you can probably even get your marketing team involved if you and the rest of your reps want to do a small blitz out to your key target accounts.

4. Send a Thank You Video as Follow-Up

After you’ve spent time connecting with your prospect over email or on the phone, it’s always a smart idea to thank them. And since building relationships with your prospects is so important to a successfully closed deal, it’s important that it’s genuine. But sometimes a generic, quickly written email doesn’t cut it. In fact, most times it comes across as much more insincere.

Instead, create a more personal connection with this hot prospect of yours by sending them a quick thank you video. This gives the impression that you created this video just for them (and didn’t just copy and paste some text and hit “send”).

5. Engage with Prospects on Social, Regularly

Connecting with your prospects on LinkedIn is one thing, but you can’t just go straight in for the hard sell without expecting to be rejected. Just like in the “real world”, your best bet is to build a rapport.

Engaging with prospects through Twitter or LinkedIn 1-3 times before reaching out via email can be a great way to ease into this new relationship. Comment on their posts, share a related article, or congratulate them on a career move. It’s all part of the foundation that’ll lead to a personal connection, a stronger relationship, and a closed deal.

Want more? Keep learning about personal video with our live session on “3 Ways Top Sales Teams are Killing it with Personal Video”. You’ll learn how to:

• Boost your response rates by creating 1:1 personalized videos
• Identify your best opportunities by leveraging audience data
• Accelerate deal cycles by building better relationships with personal video

The post 5 Personalized Prospecting Ideas You Can Use Today appeared first on Vidyard.

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Chalk Talks: Crushing Your Next Product Launch with Video

Launching a new product can be a challenge. Not only do you need to educate your internal team on the product launch, but you also need to create killer sales tools and make sure that you’re driving a ton of excitement in the space so that when your product does launch, you’re driving rapid adoption with new and even existing customers.

I’m Jesse Ariss, and in this Chalk Talk, I’m going to talk to you about how you can use video to create a killer launch!

So now if you’ve ever been involved with a product launch at all, you’re probably familiar with some of the key challenges. As a product marketer, I’m always concerned about how can we communicate the value of our product? This is about what the product does for your customer more so than actually what the product does itself. Video’s a great way to do this. As well, there are so many stakeholders involved with a new product launch. Video is a great way to keep everybody informed throughout the entire process. And then finally, what good is a product launch without some incredible testimonials from some of your customers? I’ll talk to you in a moment about why I believe video is the ultimate medium for some of those case studies.

So let’s say you’ve decided to use video for your product launch. That’s a great start. I would say the next step is understanding what kind of video specifically you’re going to want to use!

Where to Start with Video

Let’s start with the explainer video. The explainer video is a two, maybe two and a half minute long video that is really high level, and it talks about what your product does from a value point of view.

So let’s use the explainer video to say “Here’s how I can help the problems that you’re having.” Let’s not get too much into the actual weeds of what the product looks like or some of the specific functionality. This is really high level stuff. We’re going to save the actual functionality for the second piece, which is the demo video.

Now the demo video can be longer than the explainer video. We see successful demo videos at around four, maybe five minutes, because you know if a customer’s watching a demo video, then they’re a lot more involved and interested at your product at this point. With the demo video, let’s still try to keep things high level, but use actual footage for your product. Try not to use illustrations or conceptual imagery because if people are watching a demo, they want to see what this product actually looks like.

I wouldn’t go too deep on a specific industry or set of features. You’ve got a great sales team behind you and if a customer wants to learn more, they’ll be more than happy to give that customer an in-depth demo.

Putting a Friendly Face on Camera

The next video that you’re definitely going to need for your product launch arsenal is the testimonial video. This is a video of a customer who’s used your product, talking about some of the values that product has brought to them. One thing I would emphasize with the testimonial video is don’t get too hung up on production quality. As a matter of fact, some of the best testimonial videos that we use and that we have were actually filmed just with a phone or webcam. They’re very rough, raw and authentic. There’s nothing more powerful than a face of someone who’s a happy customer, talking about how that product that you’ve created has really driven home some of these values and made their life easier. Again, don’t focus too much on the production value. You’re looking for raw authenticity. And the final piece of video content that you’re probably going to need is the whiteboard video or the chalkboard video, like the one you’re watching.

This is a great opportunity to get someone, say, from your development team or maybe the product manager or product marketer to stand up and talk about what they they’ve invested into your product. So maybe it’s the product manager talking about why they made a certain decision for a particular feature. This adds a real human element and shows that you’ve got a great team behind this product.That human touch goes a really long way in driving a lot of trust and excitement around your product.

Okay, so you’ve got this supporting video content, now what? You’re shaping up at this point to actually have a pretty incredible launch. The next step is around internal education. So there’s so many stakeholders in product launches today. How do you get them up to speed quickly and make sure that they’re on the same page?

Using Video Internally

The way we do it is after every meeting we have, I’ll record a screen capture of my PowerPoint presentation with a little video capture of me in the corner walking the people through what I’m talking about in that PowerPoint presentation. The reason I think this is really important is because first of all, let’s face it. If you send someone a PowerPoint in their email, what are the chances they’re going to open it? Probably pretty slim. But if you send someone a video with a little personalized face? Okay, now I’m going to click on that, now I’m going to watch!

The second thing is that it really allows for you to be super clear with what you’re trying to communicate. So say it’s messaging. There’s no longer any ambiguity around what that specific bullet meant or what that image represented and how it was supposed to be said. Again, video is a really great way to communicate this information and if you’re using a tool like Vidyard for example, you can actually see if that sales rep or if that marketing person actually watched that video, and you can follow up as needed.

Getting Personal

Okay, so you’ve got your content, you’ve got everybody trained, and now you’re ready to go with your epic launch. How do you use video in this launch? Well, of course, you can repurpose some of the video you’ve already created, and you can update blogs, you can send out emails, you can put it on your social media.

These are some pretty traditional channels, but what I would recommend is taking that a step further and sending something like a personalized video to your customers or potential customers. A personalized video is a video where it actually has an element of personalization built right in. So it would say something like their name or it could have a picture of them, or maybe it would have their company name, and that would show up in the thumbnail and actually be right in the video itself. If you played your cards right, some of the content you created before can absolutely be repurposed to be personalized. That’s definitely a trick you should keep in mind.

We found that when sending a personalized video versus just a normal email, you’re going to see open rates and click through to open rates as high as four or five percent. So if you want to make a splash and make a loud noise when you launch your product, definitely keep personalized video in mind.

The last thing when it comes to the launch is while you’re doing all this, your sales team should be sending one-to-one videos out to their prospects as well. Now these are personalized, but they’re personalized in a little bit of a different way. These are personalized in the sense that more like these internal education videos, it would be someone, it would be the sales rep, for example, with a talking head talking to that customer and specifically talking to them about how your new product can address some of their concerns, and it really lends itself back to some of those values. Definitely these two approaches to personalized video, as I mentioned, should be run in parallel and is a great way to drum up a ton of excitement around your product launch.

Pulling it All Together

So, here we are: You’ve got all your supporting video content. You’ve got your really cool explainer video. You’ve got a powerful demo video. You’ve got a testimonial that just is so authentic. You’ve got a whiteboard video. You’ve educated your team. You’ve created personalized videos that you know your customers are going to open. You’ve created a ton of excitement.

Really, this is the full package. This is what it’s all about when using video for product launches. So I hope you’re as excited as I am. I’m Jesse Ariss, and this has been a Chalk Talk!

The post Chalk Talks: Crushing Your Next Product Launch with Video appeared first on Vidyard.

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Content Repurposing: Getting the Most Bang for Your Content Buck

Meet the Team, Vidyard Style: Blake Smith

Meet the Team is our monthly chance to introduce you to the fabulous, quirky, talented people that work at Vidyard, using our favorite medium — video! In today’s episode, we caught up with Creative Director Blake Smith on his childhood heroes, favorite travel stories, and more:

What Didn’t Make the Cut

Blake went way beyond swimming with sharks in this interview, so here are a few answers that didn’t make the cut:

What brought you to Vidyard?

That’s a long story! Michael Litt and I would pass each other in the halls of Communitech and a little birdie who still works at Vidyard introduced us. Mike and Devon were managing a media company called Redwoods Media, and they were looking for some talent to help do some of their motion graphics work. They saw my work, they liked it, and they brought me in on contract.

Over time, that turned into full time managing the Redwoods Media side of things while they fleshed out Vidyard. It was interesting starting out at the company when there were 6 of us sitting around a dinner table, which has now evolved into a Megazord of teams. It’s been a crazy experience so far, and it continues to excite me to see where we’re going next!

What is your favorite video on the internet right now?

My favorite video on the internet is nothing new – it’s actually been around for two years. It’s a called Junk Mail, and it’s a short documentary about an elderly woman named Mary. She’s 98 years old, and this piece touches the fact that she’s lonely. She has great-grandchildren and family, but they don’t visit often. So to keep herself busy, she takes all her junk mail, rips it up into little pieces, and cuts it into smaller with scissors, and then throws them out.She does this because she has nothing else to do with her day. She says in the video that if she didn’t do it, she would go nuts.

The rest of the video touches on this community centre that’s there for individuals like her that don’t have anything else to do with their day. This group of people want to make sure that the elderly people in their community that have nowhere to go and nobody to talk to have something to do other than sitting there all day. I really enjoy it because I love videos that tell a story and pull at the heart strings. And from a production standpoint, the visuals, the sound effects, the sound editing, and how it all gels together brings tears to my eyes.

What’s your favourite place to eat in Kitchener, and why?

My favourite place in KW is a place called Kenzo Ramen. A few years back I went to Japan and I was introduced to ramen – not the instant packet kind, the legit stuff. We ate it all the time because it was super cheap, and when we came back I had this fixation for it. I needed to eat more and more. About two years ago this ramen place name into the KW area as there are very few options to go out and buy ramen in our city. This place has a huge variety of different ramens and I was all over it.

I would recommend the Netsu Ramen or the King of Kings. They share the same broth, smooth yet spicy, and they come with pork, soft boiled egg…I don’t know how else to put it. It’s just really good!

The post Meet the Team, Vidyard Style: Blake Smith appeared first on Vidyard.

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How Can Personalization Help In Content Optimization

Most marketers have this wrong assumption about content marketing. Perhaps, you are one of those marketers which think that your job is done after you have published your work. But the truth is; the real work begins before and after you have successfully published your article.

As a marketer, it is also your job to optimize your content. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about the nitty-gritty technical details about the SEO or keywords or the Meta data.

In this content-driven digital world, content optimization is now more about how the quality, the relevance and the connection you can build with your audience through your content.

Content Optimization Influence How Content Is Consumed

How well you optimize your content has an impact on how your content is delivered to your readers. If you optimize it right, you increase the likelihood that your content will reach and consumed by the intended audience.

A study revealed the top three factors that make content effective are relevancy, engagement and storytelling and call to action. With these factors in mind, content personalization is something that is getting more and more valuable in content optimization.

Optimize Content With Personalization

Content personalization involves analyzing accurate audience data to create and deliver relevant content that will stir their curiosity, encourage engagement and compels them to do an action.

According to statistics, about 74% of customers feel frustrated if the website content is not personalized. Nowadays, you have to be real. Not everyone is the same. Your target market may be of the same generation but their buying behavior is not the same. Their purchasing journey varies because of various factors such as location, culture and interests.

So whether you are creating our content for lead generation, for engagement or for brand awareness, it is crucial that you create a personalized content. Create a content that a specific group of audience can understand and related to so you can send you message across.

But amidst the hype of personalization, how marketers can utilize it in content optimization is still a conundrum. So to help, here are some pre and post-publishing steps that will help you start you content personalization strategies.

THE PRE-PUBLISHING PROCESS – UNDERSTANDING YOUR AUDIENCE

Basically, the pre-publishing process is the steps you need to follow before you start creating your content. It is vital to understand who your audience is and how or when they consume your content.

Systematize Your Data Gathering

If you keep on gathering data here and there without any systematic process, you will end up cluttered with various data which seemed to have no use.

A systematic data gathering needs technology to maximize and organize your efforts. Strategically, you may use a CMS which provides effective CRM features and allows you to be connected to data sources, thus, giving you a useful and seamless way of gathering user’s data.

Moreover, a systematic data gathering goes way more than just observing your users behavior. It is more than just surveys and statistics. It involves various factors such as online real-time behavior, social media activities, demographic information, activity on your website and a lot more.

You need to figure out how to align these factors to create a systematic and organize approach in data gathering.

Segment Them With The Right Data

After you have successfully gathered the significant data, you need to segment your list. Group together those with similar attributes. You need to be aware that you have different types of customers. Identify each key factor that makes each of them different with one another. You need these key factors to help you create an experience map needed for the next step.

Creating An Experience Map

Each group of target consumers has a distinct behavior which sets them apart from another. You have to determine and understand what they are to create an experience map.

An experience map is your guide to content creation. Using each distinct features of your audience you can create a map of their specific purchasing journey which increases your chance of transmitting your message successfully through a personalized content. You should be able to take your content to the distinct purchasing journey of your target consumers; from awareness to consideration to decision.

THE POST-PUBLISHING PROCESS – DELIVER, GATHER RESULTS, INNOVATE

The publishing process itself is difficult but getting to the post-publishing process could be another headache. But unless you can deliver to content to the right audience, your published content can only do so much.

Use The Right Automation

In content delivery, using the right automation is the light at the end of the tunnel. It allows you to reach out to your target consumers. With the right content marketing tool, you will efficiently and effectively attract your ideal consumers as they consume your content.

Choosing the right marketing automation is not as complicated as it seems. You just need to find the one that uses the data you gathered in order to reach out to your specified audience. It should create a delivery pattern based on your data to send your content across.

When choosing your automation tool, keep one thing in mind; it should help you deliver the right content to the right audience.

Measure, Analyze And Reinvent

At the end of your campaign, you need to have a solid way of measuring and analyzing your audience response. This is a critical element which is not just about clicks or about page views. This is the stage where you need to track data about how your audience responds with your content base on how you segment them.

You need to measure your content’s performance in each group of audience. You have metrics to track to help you find some loopholes and determine areas of improvement. Then, leverage the data and insights you gathered to figure out your personalization strategy’s weakness and improve them for your next optimization campaign.

Important Tip: Always Be Human

As a marketer, perhaps you came across this advice several times already. But how well do you understand this step? Being human is more than just profiling your audience. It is about giving your audience a genuine human interaction and content personalization is all about being human.
You need to significantly provide customers with answers to their questions through your content. If you put consumers at the center of your optimization campaign, you will know what they looking for and give them what they want.

Understand that personalization is a consumer-centered strategy which helps you humanize your brand. In personalization, you don’t just talk with your audience; you also have to listen to them. It enhances a two-way communication between consumers and brands. This way, brands can fully understand them and create a compelling and personalized content that help people in their goals.

Final Thoughts

Gone are the days when your target market is treated in general. It may have worked years ago but as the demand for your market changes so does you marketing approach.

Nearly 100% of consumers surveyed said that they have been discouraged from completing a transaction because of incomplete or incorrect content. Your content no matter how well you craft it would be useless if it does not reflect the needs and wants of your target market. With these in mind, it is safe to say that accurate and personalize content is more important than ever.

Personalization when done right can boost your optimization campaign. There is no doubt about that. The only reason why some marketers fail is that they don’t really understand how content personalization works. But with these tips put into work, hopefully, you can create a personalized content for your next content optimization campaign.

Al Gomez is the man behind SEOExpertPage.com, Dlinkers and UnliDeals. With more than nine years of experience in digital marketing, he enjoys supporting smartpreneurs like himself achieve online success. Connect with him on Twitter (@dlinkers).

Original post: How Can Personalization Help In Content Optimization

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4 Easy and Effective Ways League Integrates Video Into Their Sales Strategy

This post was originally published on Upshot.

Crafting a perfect sales message can be painful, but it’s essential to capturing a decision maker’s attention. In an over-saturated sales market, why not try video? That’s exactly what we did at League. We create innovative personalized video emails in an instant. We’ve not only emerged as industry leaders in digital heath, but we’ve increased our response rate by three times. Here’s how Vidyard’s video marketing has shaped our sales strategy.

The sales industry is cut-throat and competitive. We are all too familiar with our inboxes being saturated with offers featuring the latest and greatest product or being inundated with popup ads every time we consume digital entertainment. Quite frankly, it becomes annoying and turns off potential clients.

When I accepted the position as the VP of Sales at League, a digital alternative to health benefits, I knew I wanted to build a cutting-edge team and invest in an innovative sales software. In the past year, we’ve grown from a team of one to more than 30 dedicated sales professionals. I attribute a great deal of our success to the early adoption of Vidyard. Their video creation tool is our secret weapon in the ever-competitive world of marketing and sales.

I was familiar with Vidyard and knew they had a world-class marketing and sales operation. When they launched ViewedIt, I reached out to one of my friends at the company and asked for the opportunity to spend some time with it. It only took a few moments with the software to realize that ViewedIt was exactly what our sales team needed.

How to Successfully Deploy Video in Your Sales Org

Ease-of-Use Is the Top Priority at Vidyard

Implementation and training was a snap and each of our sales reps at League are trained to use ViewedIt to communicate with select prospects. When you’re in an industry that’s dominated by big names, you need every edge you can get. Thanks to the incredibly simple, yet powerful interface in ViewedIt, the sales team at League has had no trouble separating ourselves from the crowd.

The following four features in ViewedIt are simplifying our sales cycle, saving us time and generating revenue.

• One-Click Recording: With ViewedIt, making a new video is as simple as clicking a button and just talking.
• Easy Email Sharing: Once our sales rep has recorded a message, they drop the link into an email and shoot it to the recipient. It’s as simple as that.
• A Buildable Library: After a member of our sales team has completed a video, the finished product can be added to our group library to be used for future messaging.
• Send Out a Playlist: ViewedIt allows us to create video playlists that we can send to our clients to convey a bunch of information all at once.

More than anything, ViewedIt works consistently and effectively, every time. Of course, solid tech is just the jumping off point for the myriad benefits that League has discovered over the course of our time using ViewedIt. We’ve seen tangible results throughout the sales cycle. Here is a sampling of the instant value that we’ve gained from Vidyard in six months.

Cut Through the Noise

When it comes to enticing prospective customers to try League, ViewedIt is indispensable. The inbox of most company executives is constantly getting pounded with sales emails all day every day. Even on LinkedIn and on Twitter, there’s almost no reprieve. So, to have software like ViewedIt that helps distinguish our product immediately is invaluable.

Add Valuable Personalization

One of the biggest benefits to ViewedIt is the instant connection your video emails make with the client. As opposed to a traditional solicitation email, ViewedIt puts you front and center with the customer from the get-go. This enhances the customer-provider relationship immediately.

ViewedIt Provides 3X Better Response Rate

We’ve found that video emails are much more impactful than the traditional options across the board. When a potential customer sees their name or sees a video that’s been tailored to their business, they’ll instantly appreciate the extra time and effort you’ve put into your work.

Using Video for Improving Response Rates

Convey Your Message Precisely

Let’s be honest, most executives are way too busy to read word-for-word every single sales pitch that comes their way. There is simply no time to read every email with precision. With ViewedIt, however, our clients can simply click the play button and hear exactly the message we want to convey. There’s no skimming the message, which means there’s no potential for our message to get garbled because an executive is busy with his or her assignments.

Using Video in Proposals

ViewedIt Is Impactful at Every Touchpoint

Whether you’re reaching out to a new customer, responding to questions, providing a micro demo, recap or overview of a meeting, ViewedIt’s intuitive tools make it easy to transition from old school emails to something fresh and interesting.

4 Tips and Tricks When Adopting ViewedIt for Your Company

At League, we adopted the ViewedIt platform in its infancy. As a result, we’ve had more time than most with the product, thereby learning some important lessons.

• Get Your Team Onboard: If you just stick to the standard lessons provided by Vidyard, you won’t likely see wide adoption of ViewedIt among your team. Not because the product isn’t exceptional, but because it’s new. With all new things, it’s important to assign your team specific projects that focus on the new technology. If you encourage your staff to pick up ViewedIt and use it once or twice, you’ll find that your team is much better equipped to make the most of the ViewedIt software.
• Give Your Team Helpful Feedback: When starting out with ViewedIt, some will be too stiff, some will talk too slow or too fast, some will use their hands too much or not enough. The point being, not everyone is going to be a natural when it comes to filming themselves for the first time, so be sure to provide some constructive criticism in the early stages so that everyone on the team can improve and feel confident.
• Circulate the Best Videos: When someone on your team shows a natural talent for video emails, or you run across a particularly good example of a video email, spread it around. Not only will this help motivate your employees to work hard, but it will also give them a more clearly defined goal to shoot for when they make their video.
• Circle Back Around: It should only take about two weeks until the ViewedIt software becomes a habit for your work force, but that doesn’t mean you should sit back. Keep assigning projects that are shared with the team at large, keep giving feedback and keep showcasing your best material. Using ViewedIt consistently will help make it part of your corporate culture, which can only improve ViewedIt’s already-sterling results.

Our Customers Love Video Messaging

Since transitioning to ViewedIt, we’ve received tons of feedback from our customers that state quite clearly that the first step in our relationship was due entirely to the innovative and creative use of video emails. This marketing strategy is cutting-edge new technology; early adopters can only reap huge dividends with video emails, and while the market may saturate over time, there is nothing quite like video to maintain a clear, concise and timely message.

If you want to kick your sales efforts up to the next level, then video emails are the way to go, and ViewedIt from Vidyard is the only smart option. It takes 30 seconds of our time to create a personalized video to leave a lasting impression with our prospects. While I would love to keep this secret all to myself, I would encourage sales professionals looking for the next trend in sales and marketing software to check out Vidyard.

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4 Creative Ways to Promote Your Site

Promotion of a site can be a time-consuming and expensive task. This is especially tough if you have reached the initial stage of users and are looking for organic growth. We have compiled a list of 4 creative ways to promote your site that will engage your users and bring in more.

1. T-shirt giveaways for readers

T-shirts are like walking billboards and who wouldn’t want a fair bit of advertisement? T-shirts have a long lifespan and are extremely flexible for customization. You can literally print anything on T-shirts and get any t-shirt designs you wish for.

A well-made T-shirt design will ensure that users will keep it for a long time. A survey states that if a T-shirt is fun, functional and trendy, then people will keep it. This is why you should give out T-shirts to your readers and users to make sure they spread the good word about you.

If you are wondering how to create a custom t-shirt design, then you should go for crowdsourcing! You can use a crowdsourcing site like DesignHill to get the best T-shirt designs from hundreds of apparel designers.

Some of the unique ways in which you can give away the T-shirts to your readers –

-Conduct a contest in which readers can tag their friends to win it
-You can get your readers to like your social media pages, and lucky winners can get free t-shirts
-Perform a task or activity to get the T-shirt
-Reward a fan or reader by sending a T-shirt

You should make sure that T-shirt designs are relevant to your product yet interesting. Your readers do not want to literally wear a walking advertisement for you. If your T-shirt design looks extremely promotional, then your reader will not wear it, hence not serving your purpose.

2. Partner with local businesses

A business cannot thrive without the support of a business community. If you are looking to grow your business, then it’s time you partnered with local businesses. Partnering with other businesses is easy, but you have to do it the right way.

Find potential partners
You have to make a list of all the businesses that could be your potential partners. Several businesses have many arms so make sure none of them competes with your business! You want to partner with businesses which complement your product/service.

Reach out to them and execute campaigns
When two businesses partner for growing a business without a formal merger it is important they are on the same page. Engage with businesses which have a similar philosophy and business ethic. Here are a few ways in which you can work with your partners to promote your site –

Cross promotion – Both the parties have to equally promote each other’s products. Sit down and finalize on the communication strategy and design for these promotions.

Events – Combining resources is the best way to maximize impact. You can create events together which will satisfy and engage your target audience.

Rewards – You can give away each other’s products as rewards. For instance, you can give your t-shirt designs to a local football club; while the football club can give you discount coupons for your customers to avail their membership.

Assess the performance
Not all partnerships work out, some of them become too difficult and a drain of your resources. Run a campaign and take a step back to assess how your partnerships worked. If the partnership has brought in more users and business, then continue else put a stop to it!

3. Run a contest for readers and subscribers

Online contests are a very popular way of increasing traffic to your site. In fact, a survey found out that after an effective contest campaign, sites increase their fan base by almost 34%! This is because contests are a fun and exciting way to engage users and promote your site.

Here are a few contest ideas you can use –

-Create a slogan for your site
–Name a new product or service that you are going to offer on your site
-Upload their photos and tag their friends for a particular theme contest
-Challenge contests are an extremely popular where you can coax your followers to participate in unique challenges
-Caption contests which can be funny or humorous
-Upload videos where the users have to perform a certain activity, and they have to get maximum likes to win it
-Crowdsource for new ideas on products, varieties or other customizations
Quizzes and guessing games

You can add a condition that maximum likes or shares on entries will be considered as a parameter for winning the contests. Here are some prize ideas that your users will love and spread it among their community –

-Giveaway customized t-shirt designs
-Free products and services including 1-month trials
-Cash or discount offers on services, products, and subscriptions
-Chance to be featured on the site as well as advertising
-Free trips or customized prizes

You can even continue leveraging the contest after it is done by posting about the user and his prize. You can develop that story over the next few posts so that your users trust your contests and participate in them the next time.

However, make sure you are transparent in your communication regarding the contests. Your users and fans should not feel let down with your promises. Else they will quickly review and brand you as fraudulent!

4. Reward influencers and customers who recommend you on social media

Your audience is going to be important to you always, whether you have 100 users or 1 million users. It is the relationship that you have with your users that will change as your audience grows. One of the best ways to engage with your users is to make them feel important by one to one interactions.

If you are a big brand with many users/subscribers, then you can do these activities to engage users –

On Facebook – Share the reader’s feedback or post by putting it on your timeline. Tag the reader so that they will get a lot of followers in turn. This will also ensure other readers promote your site too.

On Instagram – Repost their Instagram post and tag them. Shareability and discovery are difficult on Instagram. By the repost, you show importance to your reader and their thoughts.

On Twitter – A retweet by a major brand will enhance the value of the reader’s tweet immensely. Other accounts will also start tagging your site.

If you are an upcoming brand with new users being added every day, then your strategy will change. It is unlikely that readers will recommend your site right away. In such a situation drive focus on influencers. In a survey, it was found that over 71% users were likely to purchase based on social media referrals.

On Facebook – Tie up with influencers and ask them to review your site. You can give them your products or have any other similar deal

On Instagram – With the recent addition of Instagram Stories, influencers are able to make more impact. Send free products or special deal discounts which they can, in turn, give away to their users

On Twitter – This is a completely open platform and can make or break your brand. Retweet and hashtag effectively to create maximum positive impact

Do you use any other creative ideas to promote your site? If you do then let us know in the comments below.

Original post: 4 Creative Ways to Promote Your Site

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Chalk Talks: Generate More Value Your Existing Videos

Modern businesses have amassed huge libraries of video, from explainer content, to demos, how to videos, recorded webinars, promo videos; you name it, businesses have got it on camera. So much so that businesses now have, on average, 293 videos in their library, and that number is expected to double in the next 16 months. But whether you have five videos or 5,000 videos, your goal as a marketer should be to maximize the ROI and get as much value as you can from each video asset. Today in this Chalk Talk, I want to talk about how you can use a modern video marketing platform and your existing video library to reach new audiences, generate new leads, and ultimately accelerate your deal cycle and drive prospects to the buying cycle faster with video. First things first is getting more eyes on your video content.

Where to Start

I suggest starting with your website and making sure that all of your videos are optimized for SEO, include the right metadata, and make sure that your videos are in your sitemaps so that search engines like Google can find it. Google does index video as part of the search results and it presents a very visual and compelling call to action in an otherwise sea of search results.

 

Now you can look at using video on your blog. I would suggest getting started with an old webinar, including the full video of that webinar in your blog post, and writing a quick transcript of some of the key points. This is a great way of getting eyes on a piece of older video content and also getting a free blog post topic out of it, which, as a content marketer, I love.

I would also suggest including video in your email campaigns. The play button is one of the most compelling calls to action on the web, and that goes doubly so for email. Include culture content, old campaign videos, even short how-to videos in your nurture campaigns and you will see an increased engagement on that video content and in your email campaigns.

Next up is social and YouTube. I’m a big fan of using YouTube, but I think businesses make one big mistake when they’re setting up videos on their YouTube channel, and that is not including a link back to your website. If you don’t give people an opportunity to get back to where you want them to go, they’re just going to get lost in YouTube and you’re never going to see them again.

Last but not least is video hubs. This is a relatively new piece of technology. It allows you to create a private YouTube like experience on your website and you can group your videos into categories like how-to videos, customer testimonials, culture content, and give people the chance to consume your video content while seeing recommended videos that are only from your library.

Driving More Clicks on Your Video

So, once you have those more viewers, how do you increase the click-through rate on the videos that you already have? I suggest starting with the metadata, so title, description, and the keywords on your video. You’re going to want to make sure that this is consistent across all of the videos wherever they’ve been embedded. This is one of the nice things that a like a platform like Vidyard can do. If you change the title and description in one place, it’ll propagate that change everywhere so all of your videos are always up to date.

Next up, I would say, is making sure that your thumbnail is compelling. Your thumbnail is the thing that people see before they click play, and you want to make sure that you have a compelling one because like it or not, people do judge books by their covers. Many video platforms allow you to split test your thumbnail image so you can pit two or three different thumbnails against each other and find the one that is the most compelling. This is a great way of making sure that all of your videos are always optimized for click-throughs.

Turning Viewers Into Leads

Once people are clicking on your videos, then you want to make sure that they’re converting as a result of that video content. I suggest starting with a post-roll call to action, something like a subscribe button, sign up for more information, option to download whatever content asset you’re talking about, anything that gives people who have been engaged enough to watch that video all the way to the end the opportunity to do something about it.

You can also set up a choose your own path style video, where you present three or four videos at the end of a piece of video content, giving people a chance to continue consuming that video. YouTube does a great job of this by offering recommended content, but you can do the same thing with your own videos.

Last up is lead forms, and whether you use them pre-, during, or post-roll, they’re a powerful way of getting people to self select themselves as leads, and ultimately accelerate themselves a little bit further into that buyer’s journey all on their own. I’m a big fan of post-roll lead forms because as far as I’m concerned, again, same as the post-roll CTA, if somebody’s watched your video all the way to the end, that’s a pretty compelled lead. Give them the chance to put their hand up and say “I’d like more information” or “I’d like to sign up for a demo.”

Video for Sales

Last but not least is getting your video content used by sales. Sales people are interacting with prospects on a daily basis, and they are looking for content to send out. All you have to do is make sure that that content’s easy to access and works in a way that fits with their workflow.

First up is making sure that each one of your videos has an individual page that salespeople can send prospects to similar to what you get on YouTube when you link to an individual video. Now, a platform like Vidyard makes this very easy by giving a sharing page for every single player that you create, and why this is so powerful is that it gives your sales team the ability to just select a single video, send it out to a prospect without distractions and without anything else to click on. So rather than sending them to YouTube or to a landing page, all they’re sending them to is that video, and they know for sure whether or not they’ve watched it.

Another thing you’ll want to make sure of is that it’s easy for sales to share your video content via email or through their prospecting tool. Here’s how we do this with Vidyard: Within your email tool, you’ll see a Vidyard button you can click on and this will show a drop down of all the videos you have access to. You can click on one or many different videos and it will automatically drop a thumbnail of those videos into your email and send it off to prospects. Your sales team will see who’s clicked on which videos, how long they’ve watched, and be able to get other engagement data on the video content in addition to being able to very easily share your videos.

This is very, very powerful stuff, and everyone knows that sales teams are hungry to be able to provide the right content at the right time to prospects, so a little bit of effort in terms of getting your videos so that your sales team can share them easily will go a long way in making sure that those videos stay relevant to your prospects.

So, whether you have five videos or 5,000 videos, using these tips and a video marketing platform, you can breathe life into your existing video content to get more eyes on your videos, get those people better engaged with your video content, and hopefully ultimately accelerate your sales cycle and close more deals. My name is Jon Spenceley, and this has been a Vidyard Chalk Talk.

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3 Fundamental Pillars of Technical Support and How Video Can Help

The expectations of customers are changing.

In a 2017 report, Salesforce found that Customer Experience is “the defining line between companies that are struggling and those that are thriving”. What’s more, customers are saying themselves that “their brand loyalty is heavily influenced by the quality of service they receive.”

This is why your service team needs to be staying ahead of the curve and finding ways to provide the best possible experience.

It’s also why they should be using video.

Top support teams are utilizing the power of video to provide a personal touch and engage deeper with customers across the entire lifecycle. In addition to marketing and selling to customers with video, Technical Support has found three key areas to increase customer satisfaction of our services:

1. Personalized Customer Engagement,
2. Knowledge Management, and
3. Troubleshooting and Case Resolution.

Let’s dive into exactly how video can help.

1. Personalized Customer Engagement

How often, as a customer service professional or even consumer have you written or received an email that apologizes for a bad experience or a mistake?

I’d bet at least once.

While apologies are good, apologies over email often sound insincere or lacking in empathy. Let’s face it, there are only so many ways to apologize in writing. If you introduce video, however, you introduce a whole new form of communication: body language. Now your clients will see you empathizing with them. They’ll hear their name spoken and the physical gesture of a hand reaching out to them directly, which shows your team means their issue seriously.

Speaking in short, clear, actionable sentences along with verbal pauses give you the ability to add resolve to your messages and more easily demonstrate commitment to improving. Video also invites a more open dialog with your clients by humanizing your message and opening yourself up to a response.

On a brighter note, video doesn’t only have to be the way you crawl (graciously) back from a mistake. It can also be used for positive outreach! Try replacing automated text-based “thank you” notes with personalized videos. You’ll be guaranteed to stand out in your customer’s inbox as well as make them feel like they’re worthy of your time (always great for that NPS score). Check out an example of one of these that I recorded below:

2. Knowledge Management

Today more than ever, customers expect a seamless experience. Apps for your phone don’t come with manuals and software applications are moving to digital knowledge-bases instead of lengthy PDFs or printed guides.

The easier you can make it for your consumer to use your product, the better. A 2015 McKinsey customer experience survey of 27,000 US consumers across 44 industries found that companies that focus on providing a superior and low effort experience across their customer journeys realized positive business results, including a 10-15% increase in revenue growth and a 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

But this trend towards ease of use doesn’t mean that customers don’t need help at all. They do. But when they look for help, they want it in bite-sized chunks. By creating short, polished videos for product overviews and major features, you can onboard more end users and guide them towards successfully using your products in a repeatable and consistent way.

Organizing and structuring searchable video content and embedding that content in a Knowledge Base will give your customers access to branded instructions and best practices to onboard themselves.  With video analytics you are able to tell which of your videos are most or least engaging and how frequently they are being consumed. This leaves the perfect opportunity for optimizing your content. You control the branding and message, and your customers can self-service themselves more easily.

Take a look at an example we created for our own knowledge base for a question we’re regularly asked at Vidyard:

3. Troubleshooting and Case Resolution

Have you ever tried to explain a concept to someone over the phone or email and it just wasn’t getting through?

It happens all the time. For me, I was speaking with a non-technical customer early in my career who had never resized a window within the Windows Operating System. Explaining how to position the mouse pointer over the edge of a window until a double arrow icon appeared was painful. The terms “pointer”, “window”, “double-arrow”, “click-and-hold” and others were all foreign to this user.

Had I had access to video, the process likely would’ve been a lot less painful. Video would’ve easily shown the user exactly how to gesture, where to go, and what it looks like all in a more efficient way than simple text can.

Just think about this: the last time you tried to replace the air filter on your car, use a new recipe, or check out a movie review, where did you turn? Increasingly the answer is YouTube or Facebook channels showing quick 30-60 second videos of how to solve these common problems. Search Engine Island found that searches related to “how-to” on YouTube are growing 70% year over year.

Video engages you in the process of solving your problem. Explaining in text how to remove a hidden bolt, or tell when your curry sauce is ready is more difficult than showing exactly what it looks like.

Enabling your Technical Support Representatives to provide video walkthroughs of complex troubleshooting or implementation techniques will reduce your Average Case Handle Time, engage your customers in a more positive experience and lower your cost per case. By making these videos re-usable, your teams can focus on more critical or less common types of problems, providing the team with more engaging roles and speeding up the average handle time of even the most difficult cases.

Finally, video also humanizes your support team and can reduce escalating tensions by putting a face to the company representative. It removes the anonymity that makes criticism and insult so easy in our text-based connected world.  

Check out an example here:

Increasing customer engagement, improving average close time, and giving your customers the power to self-serve will positively impact your business. Utilizing video ensures your customers are best positioned for success and are more engaged with your brand.  As companies start to ask for higher levels of service and customer experience becomes a larger factor than price in the decision making process, it is vital to find new ways to ensure a consistent, effective method of working with your customers. Video brings the best of your team forward. It is more personal than text and less interruptive than a phone call. Your positive correlation to Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) will be seen and your team will have more energy to focus on the most important cases. This is the power of video within Technical Support.

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Increase Your Blog’s Appeal By Adding These 3 Spices

If you’ve been dreaming of making it big with your blog, and gathering millions of loyal subscribers who can’t wait to get your next email, you’re in good company. Everyone wants their blog to be successful, but only a handful achieve it. Not because there’s a secret formula they’re keeping secret, but because they know the ingredients required for success.

Although it seems complicated at times, you don’t need a degree in rocket science to have a successful blog. Here are three simple steps you can take to spice up your existing blog and make it more desirable to your readers:

1. Write only when you have something to say

One of the most common pieces of advice given by expert bloggers and marketers is the frequency at which you should post new articles. Some say you need to post articles daily, while others say you can get away with posting a couple times per week, which is still frequent. Almost no advice out there will tell you to post sparingly.

Posting frequently sounds like a strategy backed by some technical reason or logic, but it’s really not. The intention behind frequent posting is nothing more than keeping a steady stream of content in front of your already-distracted visitors so they don’t forget about you and move on.

That advice was created to help people with mediocre content achieve mediocre success. Truth is, more content doesn’t equal more target readers. When you have high quality content, people don’t need to be convinced to read your articles, and you don’t need to keep putting your content in their face. A truly successful blog will have visitors who voluntarily come back for more.

People don’t read, they scan

Studies like this one from the Nielsen Norman Group show that people don’t read web content word for word. Instead, they scan for keywords. Even when an article is interesting to them, they only read a portion of it. Chances are, if you’ve been publishing articles to stay on top of your weekly quota, they’re probably not even being read.

Posting less frequently isn’t a strategy itself, but it’s a side effect of the ultimate strategy of publishing articles only when you have something of value to share.

When your content is delectable, and people actively want to consume it, posting less frequently will cause people to anticipate your next post and become excited when it’s published. When people want your content and wait for it, that’s a true sign of success.

2. Write about creative projects related to your niche

Whatever your niche is, some creative mind out in the world has started a humanitarian or art project related to it. Finding those people and writing an article about their creative projects is a wonderful way to give your readers something fun to read.

For example, if you’re in marketing, you could write an article about an artist doing portrait mosaics out of business cards and flyers! Engaging readers with creative content makes them feel good.

You want your blog to stand out, so the more unique your content is, the better. Another example of creative articles can be seen on the Clunker Junker’s blog. There’s an article written about an artist from Poland who used scrap metal to build scale models of various supercars. His models are hauntingly beautiful, and contain so many small parts that it’s hard to imagine how he was able to do it.

Don’t just look around at other blogs in your industry to get ideas. Think outside the box and bring creativity through art to your blog.

3. Share something mind blowing

To really spice up your blog, write about something generally only known inside of your industry that affects other people. Buzzfeed is a master of this strategy! Or, write about something commonly known but from an uncommon perspective afforded by your industry.

For example, Dave Asprey published an article on his Bulletproof Coffee blog about the reason many organic farms aren’t renewing their official, organic certification. According to the article, in some states certifications are moving from a set yearly fee to a percentage of gross annual income, making it impossible for smaller farms to renew certification. While these farms still produce certifiably organic produce, unless consumers investigate, they’d never know.

Most people go to the grocery store and think that unless food is labeled organic, it’s not organic. This article gives people the incentive they need to do more research and not be fooled by labels (or the absence thereof). That produce you’ve been avoiding because it’s not organic could, in fact, be organic.

Original post: Increase Your Blog’s Appeal By Adding These 3 Spices

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3 Things You Need to Know to Dominate Video On YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram

Would you write the same birthday card to your Grandma May on her 80th birthday as to your nephew Sal on his 8th birthday? I would bet not. Why? Because they have different tastes and are looking for different things. Sure, they’re both birthday cards but you can’t just reuse the same card for a different purpose.

The same goes for video (or any content, for that matter) across different social platforms. Since content consumers go to different social platforms for different reasons, it’s important to understand so that you can tailor your video content accordingly.

Take Facebook and YouTube for example:

• YouTube is mature and diverse
• YouTube is a video-first destination with a focus on maximizing video consumption, whereas Facebook is social first and focuses on ease of sharing
• YouTube has a big focus on search, whereas Facebook does not
• YouTube has both short and long-form content, whereas Facebook has mainly short-form

Mark Robertson, Co-founder of Little Monster Media Co., recently shared the 7 Rules for Optimizing B2B Video on YouTube and Social. This is a quick recap of some of the top lessons from his talk with three key ways to maximize the impact of your video content across different platforms. If you want to watch Mark’s full, 29 minute session, you can check it out here.

1. Content Discovery

One of the biggest differences across platforms is the way content is consumed. Mark defines the difference as a “push” and “pull” experience.

Social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn rely on the discovery through a “push” experience or mainly organic, passive discovery. To be watched, a video on Facebook must catch the consumer’s eye as they’re scrolling through their feed.

YouTube, on the other hand, has a “pull” experience where consumers of content have to know what they’re looking for in order to find it.

As Mark says, “On Facebook, your mission is to stop someone scrolling past your video in their newsfeed and grab their attention immediately.” And, in fact, 65% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will watch more than 10 seconds on Facebook.  

We can see the difference in content across different platforms even just from the meta tags used. That’s exactly what’s represented in the word clouds below:

• YouTube is mainly descriptive, but definitely diverse
• Facebook is emotional, inspirational, and provocative (think about the reaction buttons on Facebook) 
• Instagram is fun, happy, and about building a community

Learn more about the patterns of content discovery on each platform from Mark’s talk.

2. Getting Traffic Back to Your Website

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that one of your main goals is likely to drive traffic back to your site.

Yeah?

Of course it is. And, just like everything else, there are different ways to do this for different platforms. The best opportunities are outlined below:

3. Design and Aspect Ratio

Depending on where your video will be hosted, you may want to adjust the size or design of your video. On Facebook, vertical video is making a come-back because it fits so well within the mobile feed. Whereas, YouTube has a slightly better full-screen experience and therefore still works best with standard dimensions.

Of course, for an optimal video on Instagram, it’ll be a 1:1 aspect ratio.

Here’s a full breakdown of recommended technical requirements for video on each platform according to their user guidelines:

Facebook:

• Caption length text: Text only, max 2,200 characters
• Recommended Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1 / 16:9 / HDTV, 2:39:1 or 2:40:1 / Widescreen / 9:16, 1:1 / 1.33:1 / 4:3 / SDTV, 1.375:1 / film, 1.85:1 / Film, no pillar boxing or letter boxing
• Length: 120 minutes max
• Minimum resolution: minimum width 600 pixels, length dependent on video aspect ratio
• File Size: Up to 4GB max
• Frames: 30fps max
• Format: Full list of supported file formats here
• Bitrate: No limit to bitrate file if you’re using two pass encoding, as long as long as your file doesn’t exceed 1 GB. Otherwise, 8 megabits per second for 1080p and 4 megabits per second for 720p.
• Your image should include minimal text. See how the amount of text in your ad image will impact the reach of your ad.

YouTube:

• YouTube uses 16:9 aspect ratio players. If you’re uploading a non-16:9 file, it will be processed and displayed correctly as well, with pillar boxes (black bars on the left and right) or letter boxes (black bars at the top and bottom) provided by the player.
• Content should be encoded and uploaded in the same frame rate it was recorded. Common frame rates include: 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, 60 frames per second (other frame rates are also acceptable).
• Bitrate recommendations:

See more from YouTube here.

Instagram:

• Aspect Ratio: 1:1
• Video: H.264 video compression, high profile preferred, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan
• Format: .mp4 container ideally with leading mov atom, no edit lists
• Audio: Stereo AAC audio compression, 128kbps + preferred
• Caption: Text only, 125 characters recommended
• Caption length text: 2,200 characters Max
• Video aspect ratio: Landscape (1.91:1), Square (1:1), Vertical (4:5)
• Minimum resolution: 600 x 315 pixels (1.91:1 landscape) / 600 x 600 pixels (1:1 square) / 600 x 750 pixels (4:5 vertical)
• Minimum length: No minimum
• Maximum length: 60 seconds
• File type: Full list of supported file formats
• Supported video codecs: H.264, VP8
• Supported audio codecs: AAC, Vorbis
• Maximum size: 4GB
• Frame rate: 30fps max
• Bitrate: No limit to bitrate file if you’re using two pass encoding, as long as your file doesn’t exceed 1 GB. Otherwise, 8 megabits per second for 1080p and 4 megabits per second for 720p.
• Thumbnail image ratio: Should match the aspect ratio of your video. Your image should include minimal text. See how the amount of text in your ad image will impact the reach of your ad.

See more from Instagram here.

Discover the 7 Rules for Social Video

Watch the full version of Mark’s talk, 7 Rules for Optimizing B2B Video on YouTube and Social, to also see:

• • Channel and profile page best practices for optimizing for video
  • Advertising guidelines for YouTube and Facebook
  • Recommendations for meta descriptions, tagging, etc
  • How to maximize engagement with the text surrounding your video
  • And more!

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