Everyone loves a good story and not just one told in print. Story telling in video can have a big impact on the videos overall success and also bring benefits to your business and web site as well. Tune in as Scott Mitchell, CEO and Co-Founder of LoopLogic, joins Brent Leary to explain why story telling is important and shares his insights on tracking views, engagement, interest and how to reap SEO benefits.
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Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Scott Mitchell: Sure, I have been in technology for over two decades. I was once a programmer. In fact, I am probably still 75% geek, but 25% business. My Co-Founder and I, we started this company, LoopLogic, in order to make video on the Web just a little bit easier.
Small Business Trends: Can you talk a little bit about the story telling aspect of video?
Scott Mitchell: When you think about video, using it either for your business, which is obviously the focus of your audience, or even at home, you do want to have a story arc.
It does not matter if you are creating a highly produced piece or if you are going to create something as simple as turning on your phone to do a quick 30 second interview. You will always want to think about it as a beginning, middle and end.
The three act structure has been around for a longtime for a reason, and you want to make sure that you do that. Create a buildup to making the point and end having a good conclusion. So that the viewer is able to walk away from it feeling informed and persuaded.
Small Business Trends: Is there a big difference in telling a story that will help a business as opposed to telling a story from a personal standpoint?
Scott Mitchell: When it comes to the structure, there might not be all that much difference – when it comes to the content, it is very different. With content marketing for businesses, the focus is less and less on the product in business, and more and more on human needs of people.
The hallmark of modern marketing and the hallmark of modern video and things like email marketing, has been a move away from, “Hey, here is bunch of features.” Trying to explain how to use the tools for maximum benefits in your business.
That type of content marketing, that type of storytelling to your customer in this modern age, is much more appealing. We have tracked this with our technology.
Small Business Trends: How do you go from having a finished video to using it to drive leads and build relationships from it?
Scott Mitchell: What you want to make sure is that anywhere you are posting the video, you are able to track who is viewing it. When are they viewing it? For how long? So that you can better understand how the video is working. Is it engaging people?
The other thing that you want to do is not just place it in one place, you want to try to distribute it through multiple channels, being able to place that video on a syndicate of affiliate sites.
But again, whenever it is being posted in those sites, being able to have the analytics on those sites about viewership can be important. So what you might find out is that, maybe the video performs extremely poorly on your blog, but low and behold, it performs extremely well on one of your affiliate sites.
Another place that we’ve seen more and more people using video is embedding it in their email marketing. In the past, that would typically mean if you had your email marketing message that would say you have been around us for 30 days and we want to teach you a little bit more about X,Y, or Z and here is the link to a video.
Well people click on those links at about half, or even as low as a quarter, of the time that they will click on a nice thumb nail of the video, inside of your mass email program.
Small Business Trends: You have a way to set some responses based on who views the video, and what they’ve seen in the video. I think that is the critical part from a business prospective.
Scott Mitchell: For some, posting video to YouTube provides a lot of SEO love back to your site. If you are looking to get some of that love back to your site, absolutely post on YouTube. What we can actually do is, we can always put a wrapper around that YouTube video. So you will get all of that YouTube love, but you will get all of the tracking you talked about.
Back to the tracking, let’s say you send out a video through you mass email program. We can track it down to a named individual. The reason why that matters, is you can start pushing people into different groups.
Here is a group of people that didn’t even click it, fine. Here is a group of people that watch the video, but they only watched it for a couple of seconds, they push play. Then here is a group of people that watch 50% of it. Okay, the people who push play and the people who watch 50%, those are very different people, in terms of a level of engagement.
I can have a very different conversation with those two groups. That is the problem of a “view of a video.” A lot of times, like on YouTube, it shows you how many people viewed it. But you don’t really know down to the named individual how much they viewed.
What we have started doing is using the analytics to actually trigger actions in your other systems. When somebody passes that 50% threshold, or let’s say 75% threshold, add a tag in the CRM system saying, super interested in X.
Then they pass the 90% threshold, super, super interested in X. Now you can use those tags in order to do future email marketing. Or, if you are lucky enough to be using one of these automated marketing tools, you can automatically trigger the sequences.
Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more?
Scott Mitchell: Check out our site and go to LoopLogic.com.
This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
This is part of the One-on-One Interview series with thought leaders. The transcript has been edited for publication. If it's an audio or video interview, click on the embedded player above, or subscribe via iTunes or via Stitcher.
We post on youtube all the time and then we share the videos with clients on other social networks and even in email blasts. The marketing works when you cover your bases. People are happy to watch a video rather than ready a lengthy text every time.
Agreed. Short video does wonders. It is important to differentiate the people who click on the video link vs. the people who watch, say 50% of the video.
The link clickers are interested in the topic.
The 50% viewers are engaged in the topic and, hopefully, understand the initial message.
Link clickers may need a different video to understand the initial message.
50% viewers are ready for the NEXT message.
Brent: I am now a follower on SoundCloud! 🙂 I will show this post for a person who is starting a new business with creating personalized video clips for small business owners.
Thanks Martin!