Before you publish your marketing videos, it’s always a wise idea to test them for effectiveness. Testing helps your make smarter decisions and tells you how you can boost conversion rates. Find that interesting or odd? Well, let’s dig a little deeper.
Imagine the following scenario
You just published a video on your website highlighting your latest product. You spent considerable amount of time creating this video. You paid special attention to every aspect of it; right from scratch. Your creative team delivered their best efforts. You now have something that is sure to grab the customer’s attention and present the product in the best way possible.
Sounds great huh? But, now, imagine this – your sign-up rates aren’t doing too good. In fact, they’re dropping. Could this be just a coincidence?
Video is a tool that is highly effective in terms of increasing conversion rates. It adds a human element to your brand and convinces potential customers to respond. However, publishing videos without testing their effectiveness or impact is a major no-no. A move like that could actually jeopardize your current numbers and you probably won’t even realize it, which just makes things worse.
For example, would you be foolish enough to approve an update on your website without looking at its ability to boost conversion? Well, ideally, most businesses wouldn’t.
The same principle must be applied to the videos you publish on your website. It is necessary to carry out an A/B testing for your videos, especially on the ones that you post on your busiest pages.
Expect to find problems
No matter how right you think you got it, testing your video will show you that there are problems. This is something that you should be prepared to accept.
Here’s a small case study to show you how video testing can be helpful.
Professional video hosting firm, Wistia, had created a new video to encourage new users as part of their onboarding flow. The video was produced with some serious effort going into it. Teams had worked on it for hours and days. To put it simply, a lot of resources had been spent on it.
Fortunately, Wistia had decided to test the video for effectiveness. They established a baseline using a previously used video.
Any guesses as to what they found?
Well, some of their assumptions were right. However, the overall outcome was far from what they had expected. Every metric they tracked, showed a drop in results. The video had actually failed, despite their near-perfect efforts.
But, here’s the thing, Wistia made the right decision to test the video, which protected then from losing thousands of dollars in revenue.
The point here is to never go with assumptions when publishing your marketing video. Melty Cone is a marketing video production company in NYC.
It always pays off to go the extra mile.
The testing process
Your video is going to generate a lot of data and you’d be foolish to ignore this. In order to start testing your videos, the first thing you need to do is identify your primary metric and then work on ideas to improve it.
Here are a few steps to help you out.
Identify the metric that is responsible for your success. For example, your main metric could be how many users sign up for your service.
Conduct a brainstorming session to discuss effective ideas. Find out how you can use your video to boost sign up rates.
Start ranking your ideas. For instance, Wistia apparently used an ICE Score to crank ideas. However, your ranking requirements may vary. Come up with a system that best works for you. The ICE Score, for example, measures ideas based on their potential effectiveness and the level of confidence it instills in the team in terms of whether it can actually be as effective as expected. Once the ideas are scored on this basis, it becomes easier to decide on which one’s the best.
In the case of Wistia’s video, the testing phase found that the new video was shorter and more abstract. The earlier video was longer and more to the point, which made it more successful. Of course, this is exclusive only to Wistia’s scenario. The same might not work in your case.
Anyway, getting back to the point, Wistia went back to the drawing board and began planning on using a new approach. The Wistia team sat down and developed a hypothesis based on the data they had collected from the testing process.
Their hypothesis centered on re-editing the older video to increase their video upload rate, which was part of their new customer onboarding flow. They decided to change the thumbnail on the video and shorten the original length. They found that shortening the length might just boost the engagement rate.
Once the changes were executed, Wistia found that their customers were more likely to engage when the video highlighted their service’s core values right away, just before they signed up. So, shortening the amount of time it took to highlight the service’s value propositions made all the difference.
Test to win
It’s clear now that the right data and an effective testing system is all you need to understand how your video will impact the viewer. Of course, you will always find problems at first, but, that’s the point. Identifying issues with your video is exactly what is needed to put you on the right track.
The testing process helps you gain insights, which, will help you make better decisions about your video marketing efforts in the present and also, in the future.
What is Melty Cone? Melty Cone is a full-service video production company in NYC. We make videos from start to finish; from creative idea conception to final video delivery.
