Category: Interactive Video

Interactive video is the probably the most underused technique for boosting sales engagement among enterprise technology marketers. What is it? Well, basically anything that will get the viewer to think about or act on the information the video is putting forth.

It could be something as simple as chapters that enable the viewer to jump to the topic the most interests her. (Given the chance, most people will skip the intro to a recorded webinar or demo).  It could be choosing to take the video in a one direction or another via branching. Or taking a quiz. Or offering feedback.

Conceptually, it’s easy enough to grasp. And now there’s growing interest in different ways of creating video interaction with the buyer or prospects.

 

How to make irresistible content

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Some forms of content are overused. But, in B2B marketing, interactive video isn't one of them. It represents an opportunity to make irresistible content that can improve your B2B customer experience.

Many B2B sales and marketing leaders regard “interactive video” — if they regard it at all — as an exotic form of communication that won’t interest their buyers. This is surprising. In 2017, 41% of B2B buyers said they prefer interactive content (DemandGen). Recent technology improvements have made interactive content pretty easy to create. And so much of it — e.g., personality quizzes — is surefire clickbait! In other words, interactive video represents an opportunity to make irresistible content that can improve your B2B customer experience.

Facebook recently-announced interactive live and on-demand video features that let creators add quizzes, polls, challenges and gamification. “Video is evolving away from just passive consumption to more interactive two-way formats,” says Facebook’s VP of video product Fidji Simo. Facebook sees this as fitting into the broader trend toward interactive content in general.

Better CTAs (and more of them)

Responses to a CTA (Call To Action) is a much-used “conversion rate” metric, especially among marketers of big-ticket technology solutions. A study by Forrester Research found that putting CTAs inside a video (as opposed to CTA’s outside on the web page where the video resides) increases the conversion rate 5% -12%. As Persephone Rizvi at eLearning Industry points out in Interactive Video Revolutionizes Role-Play Training. with interactive video, there are lots of actions the viewer can take, and every response generates customer data that can help improve your understanding of the customer, and your sales/marketing content.

Interactive video plus

It doesn’t need to be an “interactive video” to take advantage of the richness video brings to sales and marketing communication. Just about any type of interactive content can incorporate video, along with text, graphics, buttons and anything else that can be displayed online. Here are a couple of ideas from SnapApp.

Interactive quiz illustration

Quizzes like this arouse curiosity to drive home differentiators.

Quizzes. Quizzes let buyers quickly get their bearings, and give the marketer an opportunity to put across some eye-opening differentiators. Here’s a example of an interactive quiz from Boston Scientific. Interactive quizzes can provide the marketer with data on customer interests, messaging appeal, and levels of knowledge. And, being interactive, the quizzes can easily guide users to other content they’ll be interested in.

Maturity Assessments. 

 

Video: The Buyer Enablement Tool

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Illustration of buyer enablement video.
The idea of "Buyer Enablement" is to make the buying process easier for buyers by providing the resources and information they need when they need it.

Gartner, the leading supplier of categories to the Information Technology Industry, has come out with a new one: Buyer Enablement Tools.  “Today’s buying journey isn’t just hard — it has reached a tipping point where it’s become nearly unnavigable without a significant amount of help,” according to Brent Adamson, principal executive advisor at Gartner. “Much like sales enablement, sales organizations must focus on what we call ‘buyer enablement’.”

Gartner research indicates that two-thirds of any B2B buying journey is devoted to “gathering, processing and de-conflicting information.” Customers appreciate suppliers who provide information that makes the buying process easier.  “Buyer Enablement Tool” is not (yet) a Gartner Magic Quadrant category, but whether or not a piece of sales content fits into the category seems consequential to me now. If you start out to make content that makes the buyer’s job easier,  you may well end up discovering new types of effective content that work for you.

Buyer Enablement Video

Take video, for example. What is a logical objective for a video designed for buyer enablement? It might not be “describe key features and benefits” — not all members of a buying team care about the same features and benefits. More targeted objectives might be:

  • Clear up common misconceptions
  • Answer a frequently asked question
  • Show how easy it is to do an important task
  • Explain why we think the way we do
  • Provide reassurance on a key issue

If meeting objectives like these is really going to help out the buyer, you don’t want to keep her waiting. You’ll want your video to come to the point quickly, and stop there.

 

Make interactive videos for free with open source software

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It has never been easier to use interactive videos to help customers learn what you do.

You can increase engagement and provide superior customer experience at the same time by making interactive videos out of your ordinary “passive” videos.  I mean, wouldn’t you, as a viewer, like to start up a webinar and see clickable “chapter headings” — so you can skip ahead to the interesting stuff? Wouldn’t your sales team like to enrich product videos with new options — like seeing more in-depth info — right there in the video window?

The advantages of interactive video for you and for viewers are clear:

  • The viewer is thinking about your content, not just watching it
  • Viewers can navigate to what interests them most
  • Learners learn more when they get to ask and answer questions
  • You can add more than one call-to-action
  • You can verify viewing
  • You can collect feedback and interaction data

Interactive video tools designed for business users

OK, you say — but doesn’t that take heavy-duty tech and video skills? It does not. Now, interactive video tools designed for business users are available on many video platforms.

If you want to get a good idea of the process, I recommend trying the free, open source platform H5P. Here’s a demo of what you can do with H5P. You can test-drive their software to make your own interactive video, as well as other types of interactive content.

H5P is a widely used learning management solution that’s well-suited to injecting fun and games into any long-ish marketing video. With plugins for popular open-source content management systems WordPress, Joomla, and Moodle, H5P is easier to use than PowerPoint. You start by selecting a video on the web — your website or a video hosting platform like YouTube.

Screen shot showing how easy it is to select content for interactive videos

Host the video on your website — or make interactive videos from your videos previously uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

Then you add pre-made interactions. 

 

Why you need more “snackable” video content

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Snackable video content can help sales gain credibility in social media.

The DemandGen 2018 B2B Buyers Survey Report is out. Among the findings that might surprise you is this: the role of sales is critical early in the sales process. Yes, buyers are spending even more time doing research on their own, and the buying team is bigger, and the purchase cycle is longer. Nevertheless, a month or two into the purchase process, buyers look to sales to deliver the content and additional information that speaks to their specific needs, industry and business challenges. The survey doesn’t differentiate content types, but snackable video content should certainly be in the mix.

Buyers’ top concerns

Respondents’ top concerns were ‘deployment time/ease of use’ (77%), ‘features/functionality’ (72%) and ’solved a pain point’ (71%). Deployment tends to get little coverage in product videos (beyond assertions that it’s easy). Clearly buyers have an appetite for details about deployment. There ought to be video on the subject.

While most technology companies do have text and video content that speaks to industry-specific features and pain points — much of it is the opposite of snackable. For every buying team member who wants to spend 40 minutes with a webinar, there are undoubtedly several who would watch five minutes of highlights. 

 

Should sales or marketing produce your videos?

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Sales video or marketing video. If it's a video for sales engagement, who should take charge?
In the tussle between sales and marketing, it sometimes makes sense to allow sales to win. When that is the case, you need video for sales engagement, not just to create awareness.

In an interesting blog post, guru-to-the-startups Rita Baker makes a strong case that, if your product or the needs of your market are complex, it is sales, not marketing, who should run the show. On that logic, since most tech solutions are designed to eliminate or hide complexity, the answer to the question “Should sales or marketing produce your videos?” could well be “sales.” But that’s not the way it usually works. Marketing usually produces video and other content, which goes on the website and gets used in campaigns and sales automation. But what about video for sales engagement?

Is video for marketing, sales engagement, or customer experience?

Explainer video depicting a new view of the buyer's journey advanced by Hank Barnes at Gartner.

Explainer video depicting a new view of the buyer’s journey advanced by Hank Barnes at Gartner. Many marketers use video to create awareness about a product or solution. But video can create a lot of customer engagement.

Current thinking about buyers and sellers puts the emphasis on the customer experience over time. In my favorite buying cycle model, from Gartner, there is an “owning cycle.” Most customer journey models for tech products appear to call more for empathy and hand-holding than for conventional content marketing. Marketing content may bring in leads, but the rest of the process depends on engagement.

Stalled opportunities in their pipeline

the Journey Sales Smart Room solution Their "Smart Room" solution opens up many new ways to use video for sales engagement.

This Journey Sales explainer video on transforming SalesForce CRM into a collaborative engagement platform gives an idea of the many kinds of content needed for a personalized B2B buyer experience. Their “Smart Room” solution opens up many new ways to use video for sales engagement.

Most companies are better at bringing in leads

 

Videos for lead nurturing? They can do a lot more than you think.

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With the rise of interactive video, there are lots of new ways to use video for lead nurturing
With the rise of interactive video, there are lots of new ways to use video for lead nurturing

I’m talking about actual nurturing here, not creating leads or tipping them over the lip of the sales funnel. According to SiriusDecisions, 80% of unqualified leads today — understandably ignored by sales — will go on to buy from someone within the next 24 months. According to Jeff Cohen, a blogger for Oracle Marketing Cloud, nurturing is making sure your brand is in front of them when that happens. Cohen recently posted a five step plan for lead nurturing that struck me as comprehensive and useful. He never mentions video — so here’s an outline of the plan, with the some ideas about videos for lead nurturing filled in.

1. Understand your buyer

That’s the hard work that goes into developing personas, mapping the buyer’s journey, discovering the pain points, creating the messaging and all that. It should all be done before you make your video.

But it never really is done. Videos can help you better understand the people who watch them — good leads by definition. Just add some clickable objects to the video and capture data on what gets clicked — easy!

2. Pinpoint what motivates your buyers

This is a great opportunity to zero in on which pain points matter and which features matter most. Simply repurpose old videos with chapter headings and count which ones get clicked. Old videos in new bottles? Surely worthy of a spot in your lead nurturning plan.

3. Whiteboard the ideal user experience

The idea here is to adapt the flow of communication to the customer’s behavior and engagement with your content. Your video library

 

Don’t miss out on this new kind of video for business development

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Clickable objects make interactive video a much more engaging sales tool for business development
The great thing about interactive video for business development is that a single video can lead to lots of different interactions with different buyers.

In tech companies, business development goes hand-in-hand with innovation. It’s about getting people to try something new, namely your tech solution. Usually, a video helps to launch a tech solution. Is that enough video for business development?

Business development for technology solutions is often a drawn-out process where you’re trying to nurture a group of buyers. Every buyer appreciates the time-saving immediacy of video communication. But they’re all not interested in the same thing.

A better user experience for business development

You’re not talking to a lot of people. You don’t care about audience size. You do care about engagement. You want viewers to do something — take another step in your direction.

Interactive web videos for business development present clickable objects on screen. The viewer can make choices. Instead of watching a video, they get a personalized user experience. Clickable objects in an interactive web video can be chapter headings that allow the viewer to jump right into the feature or value proposition they’re most eager to understand. Clickable objects can be pop-up buttons inviting deeper exploration. They can be markers that allow the viewer to take their own path through the experience.

Anyone in your company can improve your videos

Anyone in your company is capable of adding interactive controls to existing video for business development. It’s that easy. Need a lot of customization and fancy branding? Your web dev team will have no problem with that — the technology is all HTML5, CSS, and Javascript.

User engagement you can measure

Interactive web video for business development collects data on user interests and behavior. Use it to plan additional sales engagement content, refine your messages, measure video effectiveness.

New life for old videos

The explainer video can direct viewers to more detailed information in existing videos, such as webinars. Or, interactive sales training and similar learning applications can include webinars and subject matter expert videos.

New ways of using existing content and web apps

Use interactive videos to run meetings or book demos. Integrate existing web forms and other web apps such as shopping carts, calculators, and polls.

Time to get started

There is not likely to be a better time to start experimenting with interactive video. It’s easy. It’s not expensive. All that’s required is imagination and editorial skill. And a desire to see more customer engagement coming out of your marketing video investments.

 

Marketing video’s big fail. And how interactive web video succeeds.

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The big fail with ordinary marketing videos is not generating click-throughs or customer data. Interactive web videos do both.
The big fail is that marketing videos don't get click-throughs. But interactive web video is poised to fix that.

Explainer videos explain. Marketing videos create awareness. And then what? What do viewers actually do after they click the “Play” button?  Who knows? This is marketing video’s big fail — an impersonal user experience that captures no user data. The big opportunity is interactive web video.

This used to be specialist technology. It didn’t really scale. It didn’t work on iPhones.

Now it’s HTML5 and works in a browser. That’s instant scalability. With the release of Apple’s iOS X, it works on iDevices. That’s big.

Lack of click-thru is a big problem for tech marketing videos. Interactive web video solves this problem, generating data and click-throughs..

No clicks means no data. It’s scandalous that marketers make do with so little data about how viewers respond to their videos. Even YouTube only generates 0.76% click-throughs. But the 16X improvement with interactive video represents a big breakthrough for marketers, opening up new opportunities to engage with buyers and use real data to improve performance. Source: HapYak

Interactive web video: a new kind of personalized user experience

Why is this such a big opportunity? Because instead of one-way passive communication,  you can provide customers with what are, essentially, video web apps. Users have control.  They can choose their own path. They can give you feedback right in the video. They can learn on their own, in the bite-size chunks eLearning experts recommend.

They are also generating data that tells you how specific leads and prospects engage and interact, data you can send to your CRM or sales/marketing automation tools to guide further interaction.

Better user experience

Let’s say your product has three major differentiators, X, Y, and Z, and you usually pitch them in that order. Some viewers are really interested in Y. Others care more about Z.

Now you can let viewers skip ahead — they’ll like that. (And why do you care if they skipped X? Unless everyone skips it.)

If they skip to Y, you can pop up a button offering to show even more information about Y. Now you’re guiding the buyer’s journey.

Better video content management

Product explainer videos are usually under two minutes long. Important details always get left out. Now they can be “included” in the video production process, so viewers who want to learn more can do it with a click. It’s never going to be cheaper or easier to create that additional content than it is when you’re producing the video it’s additional to. It’s like planning — then using —  what otherwise would have been left on the cutting room floor.

Another way to create additional related content on the cheap is to record subject matter expert interviews conducted during pre-production, as you write the script. “More info” links can then guide viewers to additional relevant content.

Interactive web video opens up numerous such opportunities to develop well-coordinated video content strategies.

 

Does Virtual Reality have a place in IT marketing videos?

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Virtual reality in tech videos?
In some ways VR is just another kind of video. In many ways, it isn't. But what might be its role in IT marketing videos?

I’ve always thought of making IT marketing videos as a semi-journalistic exercise — there’s no pretense as to objectivity, but the video certainly ought to communicate something true and worth knowing about. I recently attended a panel discussion at the New York Times on the future of virtual reality in traditional journalism. The Times preemptively grabbed the leadership position in VR journalism in November 2015, when it added a VR experience to its wide assortment of graphics and video options. What caught everyone’s attention wasn’t so much the video — the Times has lots of that— but the distribution of more than a million Google Cardboard viewers with the Sunday paper.

The history of this skunk-works style project, brought off without conspicuous upper-level management support, is an interesting business case you can hear about in this Times Insider podcast of the event. What came across most forcefully was these editors’ conviction that VR can support the institution’s journalistic mission. That’s why they insisted on tying their first VR project to the biggest story at the time, millions of people displaced from their homes and homelands. What made this VR experience feasible in the first place, of course, is that Google Cardboard was the only “technology” the Times needed to distribute. They could count on subscribers’ smart phones to deliver the VR content. That’s why I think what the Times is doing with VR videos could be relevant to IT marketing videos.

IT marketing videos need stories. VR, maybe not.

The small team at The Times continues to struggle to define the role of VR in a journalistic enterprise. VR editor Jenna Pirog (the first, and still the only editor in journalism with “VR” in her title), agreed that VR by itself isn’t very efficient for story-telling. You don’t control the point-of-view, commentary is intrusive, and VR takes up a lot of the reader’s time. (Difficulties with fictional VR storytelling are discussed in this blog post).

NY Times VR App and Google Cardboard. Is this relevant to I.T. video marketing?

NYT VR app and Google Cardboard. NY Times journalists agreed that one of the best applications for VR is to share an experience of place. That may be what’s best for I.T. video marketing, too.

 

5 Ways to try interactive video on the cheap

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try interactive videoAnd why would you want to try interactive video?

  • 89% of consumers want control over ads they view online
  • 64% of consumers are more likely to spend more time watching video if they have more options to interact with it
  • 68% want to be able to control offers and updates they receive from brands via email
  • Videos with choice can triple viewing times and double conversions

This is comes from a recent survey by Rapt Media. It’s consumer research, not B2B. But don’t these numbers seem to seem in line with your experience watching videos online?

Pretty cheap interactive transcripts

try interactive video

The CaptionBox below the video contains social media buttons and acts as a navigation panel.

CaptionBox is a tool available from the inexpensive transcription service SpeakerText. SpeakerText does a good job of transcribing your video, which improves SEO as well as accessibility — and the first 5 minutes is free. Then, when you put the video into CaptionBox, your video becomes interactive – viewers can scan the content, and click to view the sections that interest them. It’s chapterization at a very granular level.

Quizzes and lists with video and potential virality

Have you ever clicked on one of those irresistible quizzes like “What City Should You Actually Live In?” Of course you have, and there’s a good chance it originated at PlayBuzz, the source of more Facebook shares than any other publisher. You can create all kinds of swipers, flip cards,