Using Video to Improve Your CRO and Customer Relations

Imagine you are perusing through an online dating site and you come across an advertisement for the exact person you are looking for. They seem clever, funny, down to earth, and they fit into that goldilocks niche of “not too hot and not too cold” that is right up your alley.

But, there’s a catch. Their profile doesn’t have a picture. No matter where you look you can’t find any evidence of them actually being a living, breathing person. And you just can’t seem to shake the feeling that you might be getting catfished.

The same logic can be applied to any website that is offering its products or services to a visitor. Without putting an actual human face behind the product, you risk coming off as secretive, manipulative, shady, and downright untrustworthy.

And that is NOT good for your conversions.

But, come on! They clicked on your ad already – a campaign you’ve worked hard on and paid money to optimize all in order to convert those stingy, little fingers into clicking on your link. Why isn’t that enough?

Well, it turns out that there is a big gap between clicking onto a landing page and converting once you land on that page. That gap is the trust leap between your PPC agency and your search engine consumer.

Clicking is for Computers, Conversion is for People

Peaking an online search engine user’s intrigue enough to click on your ad is the quick and easy part of the PPC struggle. Now that you have them on your landing page, it’s time to convince them – on a personal level – that your service is right for them. This is where consumer psychology and neuromarketing come into play. Knowing how your user ticks and how to appeal to what delights them is how you transform wayward traffic into big time conversions!

Here are two little factoids to keep in mind when trying to optimize your landing pages for conversion:

1. The neuroscience behind page design: the human eye and our selective attention prioritizes what we see on the display screen (or anything for that matter). Our eyes naturally pay attention to motion, then image, then text, in that order.
   
2. The personal touch: in a recent study performed on newly employed millennials, the results showed that millennials working in companies with fewer than 1000 people develop an increased value for in person interactions. They trust people more than statistics, even if they are both telling them the same information.

So what do these factoids mean? What can we take away from them? The answer is simple:

Give your company a face and personality by using video on your landing and product pages!

Using Video to Improve CRO

With the growing diversity of social media and the evolution of mobile technology that comes along with it, the number of options you have when considering video has grown fairly fast. What’s good about this seeming multiplicity of choice, is that you can customize your videos in both form and content to better fit your conversion campaign goals.

Posting videos that lower the friction rate on your landing pages will inevitably increase your conversions. Remember that millennial statistic: users today trust a person even more than numbers. After a rampantly growing trend of depersonalization and media isolation, it looks like we, as a people, are hungry for some human interaction. So, feed the beast.

Testimonials

Testimonial videos, especially user testimonials, are a great way to broadcast the quality of your product or service. Handing the reigns over to an actual user of your product, as opposed to advertising your obviously biased opinions of how awesome your product is, shows a level of confidence that will encourage viewers to convert once they watch the video.

There are some nuances to making a strong customer testimonial video, however. You want to make sure that you use more than one customer in the review video – nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.

Also, if you can, show off the customers using the product in various ways, the more diverse functions you can fit into your video the more viewers you will be able to impress with capabilities that they might not have known about. Swipey did an amazing job on their testimonial videos and saw a huge jump in their conversions. You can check out a great post about what makes a great testimonial video here.

Lastly (and I feel silly for saying this but you’ll understand why I have to), don’t use actors. Nothing is worse than a user testimonial which is clearly just actors reading from a script. It not only doesn’t achieve the goal of a testimonial video, but it turns your brand into a joke. And not the good kind.

Products in Use

Another way to lower the friction on your product page is to show the product in use instead of talking about it. Either of these (or both, if you’re truly bold) forms of testimonials work very well, but remember that our eyes are drawn to motion more than they are to anything else. Using more motion in your testimonial videos might make them pop a bit more and get your viewers more engaged and conversion ready.

In terms of in-motion product videos, I don’t think you can find one that is more impressive than GoPro’s.

GoPro’s many video campaigns work so effectively because they accurately target their key demographic and align their content with the platform they are using. Their videos are dynamic and energetic and feature their best clients representing what GoPro is all about: recording those adrenaline filled rush-moments that ten years ago we were all wishing we could save to watch another day.

You can implement a “show not tell” product video even if you don’t have a product that is as visually dynamic as GoPro’s footage. Using screen-sharing to show how your product software functions and optimizes other companies is another great way to not only broadcast your product quality, but also give a little “how to” lesson along with it. The dual feature will definitely go over well with your viewers.

Benefits and Services

This is where you get to put your own face on the big screen. Benefits and Service pages are where you are going to develop the trust and conversions from the traffic you are generating. It’s essentially where you invite the user into your office to sit them down and explain to them how you’re going to make it all worth their while. So why not make it into less of a powerpoint and more of a conversion?

We actually implemented this tactic on our own site to make some of our pages more personable and interactive. Instead of just static photos next to character bios on our careers page, we now feature videos of our employees speaking to the viewer (potential future employee) about what they love about working for Directive Consulting.

before and after of employee “about us” content
(sorry – no video here)

Ramping up the personal touch on your pages will not only help to draw more repeat traffic to your site, but it will make users more comfortable with your product and service. Having a transparent and comfortable site and service will lead to improvements in your conversion, your repeat visitors, your social media shares, and your overall brand recognition.

Check out how much more natural and genuine he appears on video, the difference is clear (and the video isn’t even running here!).

Impressing Clients with Video

You’re not just looking to lower the friction rate of your landing pages. Doing just so is far too passive of a tactic when it comes to really optimizing your PPC campaigns. You want to be active, you want to impress your viewership, you want to wow them with innovative content presented in creative and adaptive formats.

Making the format of your videos more interactive and dynamic is one way to ramp up your video-based conversion campaigns. This is where the editor gets to show off his skills and really make a product that will impress and inform their viewers.

Instructionals

If you’re looking to really show off how much you know about a topic, and if you really want to provide your viewers with easily digested tips to optimize their own campaigns, then an instructional video is the route to take.

Tons of online marketing agencies are beginning to tap into the power of video through these instructional videos. They go by many names such as “how to guides,” “5 minute tips,” “CEO snippets,” the list goes on. What they all do is they put a well-informed employee, often the face of the company, on camera and have them talk through a single, specific tactic in depth. It’s a great way to give the users something incredibly useful and time-saving.

Backlinko actually does a fantastic job of producing these instructional videos. Brian Dean is incredibly knowledgeable in his field and has a very charismatic and comfortable on-camera presence. Backlinko also uses a lot of screen-sharing example shots while Dean is explaining the concept in real time, so it gives a real dynamic but dually efficient vibe to the video that gets users tingly with efficiency.

When you’re producing such high-level and informative videos such as this, it’s only natural that you have your own YouTube channel with a following of over 16,000. These videos are all about impressing viewers with your expertise and your explanatory ability, so the better you are at explaining your high jargon to the laymen, and the more charismatic you can make your videos, the better they are going to do for you (heads up Brian Dean, we’re coming for you!).

Behind the Scenes

If you really want to show off about how good you are at a given craft, what do you do? You don’t just show everybody the finished product, most people won’t appreciate it. What you do is you show them how you got to be so awesomely and amazingly impressive.

Behind the scenes videos are a bit more complicated than other videos, due to the fact that sometimes there is no product to show the process of (hint hint, this industry exactly). But that doesn’t mean that offering a backstage view of how all the work gets done is a waste of time.

Fashion companies and models are continuing to use social media and video sharing apps like Periscope to show the meta side of their runway shows and photoshoots. Burberry recently had a live Periscope channel running of the pre-show that continued covering the models through the entire runway fashion show. And the viewers were raving about it the entire time.

Showing your viewers what goes on before the finished product is published not only raises a whole new level of intrigue in their minds, it also opens up a whole new level of transparency and trust on your end. “We have nothing to hide. In fact, come on in, I’ll show you exactly how we do things, I’m sure seeing our process will only delight you more.” Now that’s confidence.

Interactive Future of Video

Impressing your viewers with continually more interactive media will delight them more with each visit, yes. And the more delighted your viewers are, the more likely they are to convert, surely. But is there a glass ceiling to how you can optimize your videos?

I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is an actual ceiling to the potential of video. But it does have it’s limits, each of which are being tested as the our online marketing campaigns grow more adept and advanced.

The truth is that the one draw back to video is that it monopolizes the viewer’s attention while they are watching the clip. Unlike infographics and normal images, both of which usually have links that direct them to other service pages or content pages within your domain, videos are often a stopping point for the viewer (in terms of information uptake). While even having the option of watching a video increases the chances of conversion, once the video is completed, it’s usually a hit or miss case where they either convert or bounce. Further navigation requires further content of the same level of intrigue.

So how is video adapting to this limitation in usage? With live link videos. Live link videos aren’t quite mainstream as of yet, but they soon will be. The videos actually have links to different moving parts within the shot that viewers can click on that will take them to other more relevant videos or content pages. It’s almost a game of cat-and-mouse trying to chase down the link floating above the head of some scrambling outfielder.

Now, as I said, these videos aren’t quite considered mainstream in use as of yet. I suppose the coding and technology of the live links is more difficult than regular link building (but I can’t claim to have any authority on any tech related developments). What’s important to recognize is that live link videos represent an increase in the interactive nature of video marketing.

The viewers are following the natural development of technology and interactive media. So make sure you ask yourself when you are designing your landing pages to convert those exact viewers, are you doing the same?

Optimizing Video Campaigns

So what have we learned about implementing video into your Landing pages? Well, we learned that converting users after they click on your link is about convincing them on the human level instead of with CRO tactics and tricks. It takes a finely balanced combination of developing trust and impressing the user with interactive expertise to take a visitor on your site all the way from curiously surfing the web to deliberately converting on your page.

Implementing video into your online marketing campaigns is a great way to broadcast your expertise and transparency in order to develop authority and trust amongst the online community. There are some more nuanced tips about how to optimize your video campaigns in this post about video conversion rate.

All in all though, the equation is simple: a humanized, trustworthy, and interactively expert brand will almost always lead to a higher CRO.

Looking for high quality videos? Look no further than Directive! We are a well-trusted video agency for SaaS brands. Get in touch today to see how we can help!