Which Twitter App a Tweet Was Sent From: Quick Tip

I see this question a lot: Ever since Twitter web interface stopped showing an app each Tweet was sent from.

In fact, this information offers a lot of useful information:

• Which apps does your competitor uses to schedule updates?
• Was this update scheduled or published live?
• Which apps do I need to take a look at? Are there any useful features I am missing?
• How others create visual tweets?
• OMG, I didn’t tweet that. How was this tweet published?

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The good news is, Twitter still reveals this info through API, so there are apps that do that:

1. Twitter Archiver: Google Spreadsheet Addon

One of the most useful Google Spreadsheet addons out there, Twitter Archiver is freemium (You’ll have to delete old searches you track before adding new ones.)

Twitter Archiver lets you import, archive and monitor any Twitter search results. You can import tweets by any user, or addressing any user, containing any hashtags, etc.

2. Hootsuite (Web-Based)

Hootsuite is one of those multi-purpose apps that have something for anyone, including tracking the app use. Just set up a column (or several columns) to monitor your competitors and you’ll see which apps they are using to tweet and schedule tweets.

3. Echofon for Twitter (iOS and Android)

Echofon is a free iOS and Android app that has a very robust Twitter functionality including push notifications and inline photo previews. Each tweet is accompanied by the details where it originated from.

Which apps are you using to find where an update was tweeted from? Please share your ideas!

The post Which Twitter App a Tweet Was Sent From: Quick Tip appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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Always Be Teaching Something: Wise Words from Andy Orsow

When you’re looking to learn something new, who do you turn to? The best in the business, that’s who — and that’s why we’re excited to launch a new series on the Vidyard blog. Wise Words goes beyond thought leaders who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. We’re interviewing marketers that are in the trenches, creating video, managing campaigns, and driving revenue to see how they’re getting the job done every day.

For our first interview, we had the privilege of talking to Andy Orsow, Communications Designer at InVision, the world’s leading product design collaboration platform. Andy’s been with the company for over two years, and has watched them grow into a distributed team of over 200 people. Starting out his humble video career producing a music video in high school, Andy was tapped to write a blog post on a new feature InVision was creating, and put together a video. “It wasn’t great, but it was better than what we had done before,” Orsow said during our call, “and I quickly ended up becoming the go-to guy for product launches and videos.”

Over time his responsibilities have grown from the occasional video to producing a regular content series, and doing product launch videos on a regular basis. The secret to InVision’s success? Their belief in video comes from the top. “Our CEO, Clark, works very closely on video projects. He and I will noodle on ideas together, and having that advocacy at the top is super important.” Orsow added, “Clark is one of smartest people I have ever worked with. He’s an incredible storyteller and marketer in general, and having those two skillsets under his belt is key.”

To understand how InVision uses video in their day-to-day, we dove into campaigns, episodic content, and more:

1. Do you produce your videos in-house, or do you work with an agency?

About 90 percent of our video is done in-house, by me in my apartment. We’re an entirely distributed company, and have folks working remotely all around the world. This proves to be a big challenge with video, as sometimes you’re living in a larger place, sometimes you’re in a smaller one, and it’s not always glamorous when you see behind the scenes of something like Design Snacks. Some of my equipment spills into the kitchen, but we get it done, and it can be a ton of fun.

2. Design Snack is your episodic video series, tell us about that!

Episodic content is something we’re trying to capitalize on a bit more now. We’ve shifted the strategy to go from tips and tricks about Sketch and Photoshop to broader topics including general design thinking, the life of a designer, etc. What’s interesting is that Design Snacks do not get as many views as a product launch video, but they have a really high engagement rate for long videos. Our recent videos are over three minutes long, and have a 79 percent engagement rate, which is better than most marketing content. This is the data I’m currently trying to parse, as I want to know how we can boost our traffic to such engaging content.

Episodic content is great for generating a loyal fanbase — people who care about a specific thing that you are doing — which is always good. If that translates into an enterprise deal, that’s great, but getting people to care about what you do as a company and giving back to them is always a win.

3. Let’s talk about conversions, how does video fit into your lead generation strategy?

Our most successful lead capturing effort was a video that utilized email capture at the end, providing a preview of an upcoming feature. For example, we have a new feature called Motion coming out soon, which will bring motion design UI animation into InVision so people can design much smaller and more detailed interactions. The community is excited about it, and we used the video as a way to build a beta list. We had a 40 percent conversion rate on email capture, which is huge.

The key is, you want to make your video short enough so viewers watch all the way to the end if that’s where you include your call to action. Do your best at understanding people’s time, energy, and focus, and make a video that is concise and exciting.

4. What spells success for you as a video marketer?

I don’t always look at form submits, as we don’t always include them in every video. Video for me is an amplifier for the other work that goes on in the marketing process. We have an insanely talented group of people at InVision and their efforts go into this culminating point of a product launch. If you take video and add that to the collective effort, it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.

In the absence of a really hard metric like signups, I pay attention to how many people clicked play — there’s a lot you can infer from this. For example, if you have a 30 percent play rate, how many of those people may have bounced if that video wasn’t available? How many are more engaged because they watched the video? We also look at video analytics like attention span to see how many people are watching all the way through. I value both of these things, so I work for shorter content on the marketing side – nothing over 1.5 minutes.

5. What’s your plan for taking video to the next level?

To start, more video. We’ve started expanding the different categories of videos that we make, working with outside contributors, and increasing the frequency of the videos that we post on the blog. We also have someone producing tutorial videos and that content has been performing really well.

Generally, we want to start expanding outward from the types of videos that we make. Not just product features, or how to do XYZ in Sketch — which is important and valuable — but looking at videos that serve our audience by teaching them something valuable, something that will better their lives in some way. That’s important not only to me, but our content strategy. Our goal is to give away helpful content that will empower designers to be better at their jobs.

6. Can you share a resource that you find valuable in your marketing efforts?

I don’t tend to read super technical marketing or design blogs. My inspiration comes more from the things I take in while watching other videos. Sometimes it’s watching a movie, sometimes it’s TV, sometimes it’s even just how someone shoots a commercial. That type of stuff gets stored away in my brain, and I figure out how to apply it.

If you look at a few of our Design Snack videos, there’s two where I do a goofy flashback moment, and I use the same types of sounds and visual effects as if you were watching a comedy on Fox or ABC. I love lifting from Hollywood.

Want to hear from more brilliant video marketers? Check out our Video Thought Leadership series, and get expert tips from Meagen Eisenberg, Jill Rowley, Joe Pulizzi, and more.

The post Always Be Teaching Something: Wise Words from Andy Orsow appeared first on Vidyard.

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5 Unlikely Obstacles Hindering SaaS Conversions

Want more conversions?

Well, it’s possible.

However, the first step is realizing that conversions are people. And those individuals desire a remarkable customer experience.

The key is to remove barriers in the sales cycle. This includes cumbersome checkout processes and poor follow-up sales procedures.

Your SaaS team must perform better. It’s one of the best ways to crush the competition.

“Successful sales people, and successful sales teams, exhibit a superior ability to eliminate the common barriers that would otherwise prevent their prospects from making buying decisions,” writes Bob Apollo, managing partner at Inflexion-Point Strategy Partner.

“They take pains to identify how and why their prospects choose to buy, and what they need to do to straighten the path and remove the obstacles that might stand in their way.”

Earn more sales. Solve these five obstacles blocking your SaaS conversions:

1. Too Many Steps to Sign Up

Do you remember that classic Tootsie Roll commercial? The one that challenged kids to answer the question: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

Kids would literally waste an entire afternoon counting their licks.

Your SaaS team should ask a similar question. How many clicks does it take for a customer to convert?

People don’t enjoy time-consuming tasks. And if they’re ready to buy, prospects don’t want to spend the next 15 minutes clicking through all your useless sales steps.

“Asking your users for a lot of information even before they’ve seen your app could backfire.
Marketers tend to get greedy with information, but the more info you require, the more friction you introduce. If you’re asking for more information up front, make sure to justify each action to eliminate friction,” states Sadhana Balaji, a product marketer at Chargebee.

So, limit the number of steps it takes for a prospect or free trial user to sign up for your service.

According to MarketingSherpa, “by optimizing step one of its sign-up funnel, 1-800-DENTIST lifted conversions by 23% in less than a week.”

Moreover, as you decrease the steps in the process, consider eliminating the multiple add-on features during initial setup.

Studies show that “contrary to economic belief that more choice is better, confronted with too much complexity, we make bad decisions, or stick with what we have already got.”

Thus, overwhelmed prospects may just abandon their sale completely.

Save the customer time and boost your revenue. Remove the 12-step signup process.

2. Treating Every Prospect the Same

People are different. We don’t think the same. We don’t eat the same foods. And the needs of a 20-year-old woman are different from an 80-year-old man.

This concept holds true within your target audience. Prospects are buying your products for different reasons.Some may desire the all-in-one platform, while others love the 24/7 email support.

Use your customers’ differences to your advantage. Start segmenting.

Segmentation helps your team sell specific product benefits to different users.

“If you are looking for segmentation ideas, a great place to start is by asking the sales team about the various roles and buyers they speak to on a regular basis…Use the information you gather from sales to create segmentation strategies that will resonate with your audience,” states Anna Talerico, executive vice president of ion interactive.

The goal of segmentation is to customize the shopping experience. You want prospects to feel like you’re talking directly to them.

Graphic design tool Snappa sends targeted emails to their subscribers based on their position in the sales funnel. Here’s an example of their process flow diagram:

“Marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects at mass scale,” says Joydeep Bhattacharya, author of Seo Sandwitch Blog.

Don’t get stuck selling everything to everybody. Differentiate your message.

3. Nurturing Like A Used Car Salesman

Research reveals that “65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns.” Without a clear path, your SaaS team may be causing more harm than good.

Poor lead nurturing results in unethical sales practices, missed deals, and negative brand image. No one wants 10 voicemails in a day from a salesperson.

Rather, strive to educate and build a relationship with your prospective user. That means informing them about your product, not selling.

“It’s about giving the right content to the prospect at the right time, and you can only do this by watching for signs that they’re progressing through the buying cycle. This is done through lead scoring…,” says Sarah Burke, content writer and marketer at Spokal.

Learn where the buyer fits into the sales process. Then, adjust your lead nurturing efforts accordingly.

The image below details the types of content that fit the buying cycle. Top of the funnel prospects may desire video, while the bottom of the funnel consumers may need quotes.

Image Source

Moreover, lead nurturing is built on trust. If buyers don’t trust your brand, it’s time to add some social proof to your sales message.

“Trust badges are also known to increase conversions. Getting a BBB seal can put people at ease knowing that you’ve been vetted by one of these organizations. You’ll also want an SSL certificate to show that your payment gateway is secure and trustworthy,” writes Sid Bharath, an entrepreneur and growth hacker.

Sell with the intention to build relationships.

4. Value is Unclear

Studies indicate that “91% of organizations said they aspire to be among the customer experience leaders in their industry, yet only 37% had started a formal CXM (customer experience management) initiative.”

To jumpstart your CXM program, figure out what value you offer your users. It should be clear and concise.

Aim to make an emotional connection between your product and the consumer’s needs.

Invision’s value proposition is simple. The SaaS offers people the opportunity to design and collaborate efficiently. They want their customers to design with confidence.

Kevin Dewalt, a startup founder, investor, and advisor, suggests offering incentives to portray value. He states:

“Offer additional purchasing incentives to customers who complete Acceleration events to get them to convert early. Examples of purchasing incentives are coupons, annual contracts, or special offers. Or simply tell them to enter a credit card now so they don’t lose service.”

Take control the customer experience. Show the value of your service.

5. Redesign Your Sales Page

Adobe reports that “38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive.”

Customers want eye-catching websites. Your design must grab and hold their attention.

In addition, with loads of information at buyers’ fingertips, it is rare for someone to call a sales department.

So, if customers don’t like what they see, they may just leave. That’s why your sales page must explain your product and address your consumer’s concerns.

“As buyers spend more of their time self-educating before contacting sales…the pricing page of SaaS websites has reached critical importance in the buyers’ journey for enterprise SaaS sales..,” writes Brian Devaney, inbound marketing strategist at New Breed Marketing.

Unbounce’s sales page is an exemplary example. It tells prospects what they will receive and the prices. And the layout is clean with ample white space.

Evaluate your sales page. Is it time to change the copy or the layout?

No More Barriers

Eliminate the roadblocks in your sales cycle. Gain more users by improving the overall experience.

Ditch the multiple steps to sign up. Stop mass selling with one message. And revamp your sales page from the customer’s perspective.

Get rid of the obstacles. Start converting.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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The Determination of Trust and Other Stories: Weekly Forum Update

Hello again! We took a little break from writing updates last week but our communities have been busy in the meantime! And now we’re back to give you all the updates.

There’s plenty of legal drama directed at Google for us to talk about; in Florida, a judge has ruled that Google must go to trial over removing a website from the SERPs and in France, Google’s Paris office was actually raided by the French tax department.

In technical discussions, we’ll look at a debate about AMP and mobile pages, how to persuade local businesses about the importance of search engines, and more.

In our title discussion, user goodroi has started a fascinating discussion about how Google determines “trust” and authority on the web. Let’s dive in!

A Separate Mobile Search Index is Still Coming

About a year ago, Google started working on building a separate mobile search index. Why is that? Well, things are very different for mobile devices – sometimes in subtle ways. On Threadwatch, a user writes that

“For example, ‘Google found there are fewer linking rank signals on mobile pages…’ That’s part of the reason why pages rank differently on desktop and mobile. There’s also the issue of content – mobile versions of some pages are truncated.”

So, as you’ve probably noticed, your desktop searches and your mobile searches can often return very different results. Google has been ironing out the differences, it seems.

Or perhaps they’re embracing mobile’s unique qualities? It’s difficult to tell, but fun to wonder – what would a mobile only search index look like?

How Google Can Determine Trust

How can Google determine trust?Click To Tweet

“Trust” and “authority” are valued online as much as, even more than, they are in the “real world.” WebmasterWorld user goodroi writes that

“Google is always trying to separate quality from spam. Sometimes they succeed and other times they completely screw up.”

In this thread, goodroi and other users discuss how webmasters can convince Google that their sites are worthy of trust. What are some of their ideas? Goodroi suggests “use one of the original tlds like .com or [an] appropriate country tld but more importantly avoid unusual tlds like .info, .zip, .work.”

Goodroi also recommends HTTPS, bounce rate monitoring, brand building, social media, and more. User tangor adds that

“Trust levels will vary regarding content/niche. Info sites which are not actively involved in commerce of any kind will be viewed differently than those involved in commerce.”

There’s plenty of in depth information about this important topic – give this thread a read for sure!

A Florida Judge Rules Google Must Face Trial over Site Removals From SERPs

Speaking of trust…here’s a story all about it! The basics are this: Google removed a group of websites that it identified as “pure spam.”

Then they went a step further and removed a second group of websites owned by the same webmaster. Their reasoning? Also “pure spam.”

Cases like this pop up rather frequently, but this is the first one where a judge sided so strongly against Google. According to an article in Forbes,

“If, for whatever reason, the plaintiff actually makes real substantive progress in this lawsuit, the implications for Google could be seismic. The plaintiff’s allegations go to the core of Google’s search indexing practices.”

WebmasterWorld user superclown2 writes,

“…Since [Google] place so much weight on trust I can understand their action, but is it legal and ethical? A difficult one. Either way, I doubt if it will make much difference to the SERPs in the future.”

What do you think?

How to Persuade Site Owners That Search Engines Matter

On Cre8asiteforums there’s an interesting discussion about the tendency of smaller businesses to ignore search engines and even websites. Facebook and social media are, to some, the holy grail. Can they be convinced otherwise? That’s the real debate in this thread. User Black_Knight writes that

“What I don’t do is try to make it my business to drag resistant and misguided small businesses into a better path than they will ever choose, follow or stick to… I select clients that can already grow and thrive, even without my help, but where my help can make the process faster, smoother, more efficient.”

User iamlost adds that

“Search engines are increasingly NOT the only game in town. Indeed in many ways they are dinosaurs having difficulty adapting to changing environments.”

It’s a tricky topic, but also one of those business-focused ones that I personally love to read!

Google’s Paris Office Raided by Investigators

If you thought that WebmasterWorld was just about web development and marketing, then this thread will prove you wrong. Our users are well-rounded individuals and savvy thinkers.

But to the story at hand: French tax officials raided Google’s Paris headquarters back on May 24. Now Google stands accused of owing about $1.8 billion in unpaid taxes.

WebmasterWorld users sound mostly glad to see Google getting slapped around – but some users are wondering if this raid was just a bit of political theater. User heisje writes,

“Google are smart, but have got too smart for the taste of many people, for many reasons. Seems time to be outsmarted.”

Shepherd sees users celebrating the raid and writes,

“…never thought I would see the day that government strong-arm shakedowns were looked upon so favorably…”

The thing is that Google isn’t the only company being raided – many other American companies are too. User NickMNS writes,

“…so far France has targeted exclusively US firms. This is 100% politics and show.”

What do you think?

Conversions and Keyword Data – Together Again in Google Analytics?

Google recently announced that Search Console metrics will soon be “deeply integrated” into Google Analytics. On SEO Chat, users are waiting eagerly for the changes to roll live. User whiterabbit writes,

“…it’s not gonna be one to one at the keyword level, still at the landing page level but super useful to again be able to optimize by keyword…”

Pierre Benneton writes that a closer merging of GA and GSC is appreciated but,

“…I’m pretty sure we will still be stuck with the same ‘not provided’ problem on a lot of queries.”

User Cat-MoreNiche reports that they’ve seen the changes in some of their GA accounts – have you?

When to Index or Noindex WordPress Category Archives

A user on Cre8asiteforums has a directory type website that relies heavily on categories. Some pages are included in four or even five categories. User Pete writes that,

“…clicking on any category archive to bring up a list of page excerpts would inevitably have quite a lot of duplicate content with some other categories.”

User glyn presents two options:

“Where two pages are the same, decide which is more important and then use Yoast to noindex that page. Or let Google index it all and see what it considers important…”

User jonbey agrees and writes,

“Let Google index them, but make the category pages good and unique,”

and follows up with a specific plan of action. What would you do?

AMP and Mobile Friendliness

Here’s a curious question from SEO Chat! User coolvicks16 writes,

“I have [a] mobile friendly website. Then, do I really need AMP pages…?”

Chedders answers that, like most things in life, it depends on the particulars.

“AMP typically is not as flexible but provides you better speed so it’s more down to what you’re trying to achieve here.”

cmarkee remarks that AMP is a rising star:

“First of all, you should be applauded for asking about AMP. It’s not going away and it WILL be the standard for mobile content very soon.”

But, cmarkee adds,

“…deciding whether you need to go AMP requires you to ask yourself some questions.”

Take a look at the thread for some expert insight into AMP!

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Un-Acquire – The Counter-Intuitive Way to Build an Early Customer Base

Churn. Lost deals.

Those are dreaded words at any stage of the company. For a very early stage company, these events are even more impactful. Behavioral economics tells us about ‘loss aversion’ mindset. As founders, we hate to lose deals. We hate to turn down customers. It’s classic ‘loss aversion’ at play. But, just as you launch your product into the market, you need to be cognizant of such biases and be courageous enough to say ‘No’ to certain kinds of customers.

By doing so, you’ll not slow down. Instead, you’ll avoid churn and bring the right customers into your customer development journey.

In your early stage, your customers have a profound impact on the trajectory of your product & your company, because:

• They can impact what gets built
• They have a direct impact on your acquisition channels, the cost of acquisition and hence your precious little runway.
• This one’s more important – Each customer is representation of a potential market segment or a niche.
• If you choose to say ‘No!’, it brings focus. You’ll spend time, money and your product bandwidth to keep the ‘Yes’ customers happy. You’ll avoid ‘spray and pray’.

Now that we’ve established that deliberately flushing out prospects from your funnel is good & even important, let’s see some of the criteria we’ve used for our own company, when picking our first 50 customers.

Your product’s performance should not be affected by factors that aren’t under your control

Let’s say you are building a lead-generation software for tech sales reps. A staffing firm company may be a bad first customer because it’s a business with very little differentiation and would not excite a prospect that much. However well your lead-gen product discovers new prospect opportunities, being an undifferentiated offering, response rates are going to be poor.

You need to have an idea of the kind of customers to whom your product in its “as-is” state is going to give superior results. Only then are they going to engage deeply with your product (which is essential for you to derive insights for your product roadmap) and hopefully become your source of ‘word of mouth’ appreciation.

You should be very familiar with the industry dynamics of your first few customers

Not all prospects are articulate and vocal about their wants and needs. As a product owner, we need to fill in the gaps, instigate with the right questions and deduce insights. All this is possible only if we relate with the problem space or the industry of the prospect.

If you do onboard customers without fully understanding their motivations to use the product, you won’t know why they churned either (or at least you’d incur significant follow-up cost to just find why they churned).

No customer pilot should demand unreasonable amount of your or your team’s time

I will again take an example to drive this point. Let’s say you are building a mobile chat tool that can be integrated into any app for the app owners to provide chat-based support. There will always be a prospect that’d say that they need a web interface as well. Now, don’t rush to launch a web-client just to sign up that customer.

Why? Because you decided to launch it on mobile for a reason. You have a market hypothesis that you are trying to prove. Don’t get distracted and pick another hypothesis until your current hypothesis has proven there is not a market for it.

But then you might ask why turn down a customer if it’s just a bit of additional work. Well, in the early stages of our companies we are severely short of time, money and other resources. If one customer draws up significant amounts of your engineering, product management and quality assurance time, something else gives. Most often, it affects your original customer development journey.

Alignment beyond the current product version

Early stage customer acquisition costs are high, because the founders are involved and it’s often one-to-one selling. So it’s important that such customers don’t just hire your product today but also for several quarters to come. Your product roadmap and their expectations have to be in sync for a long time. One way you could be sure of this is by doing a customer interview to understand the reasons they’d buy your product. If your current product is a subset of the needs of your customer, you’re in the right direction. One framework we’ve used to do the customer interview is the ‘Jobs to be done’ framework. It takes another blog post to write about it. So I’d leave it to you to read up on JTBD.

If your product is a quick fix to a bigger problem for which they need more sophisticated solutions that you don’t intend to offer, your customer is going to churn out. You are better off not selling to them in the first place.

No ‘Pay It Forward’ customers. Only honest & real customers

We all have friends who can write checks just to see us succeed. Take their money but don’t make them your customers. They never had the need for your product. They aren’t going to give you insights. They are going to churn at some point. It’s better to avoid ‘nice’ prospects that are just ‘paying it forward’ or ‘returning you a favor’. If you don’t, you’d end up being that blind man whom was led by another blind man.

At the early stage you need customers that give feedback. I can’t stress the importance of getting your product hooked up with a good analytics suite from day one – start with Google Tag Manager or Kissmetrics or one such tool. But don’t postpone. Observe which customers complete what actions. Bucket the core actions of your product and find out what percentage of customers complete it. Later on you may expand such analysis to cohorts.

Before you reason out a pattern, pick up the phone and talk to customers. It doesn’t need to be a structured interview but one that will give you a good grasp of why users do what they do. Here’s a good list of customer development resources. And before picking up the phone be sure to first read this post from Chuck Liu which covers which questions to ask in customer interviews.

Remember that just adding users isn’t your goal in the early stage – The goal is to add the right kind of customers that complete core actions of your product (for them to stick around for long), give earnest feedback and are representative of a large segment.

Templates for a future customer base

You are not acquiring your first few customers to become profitable. You are acquiring them to demonstrate or experiment with ‘Product-Market Fit’. So each prospect that you convert should be buying and using your product for reasons that are common to the next cohort of customers as well. Your first few customers, as a cohort, should collectively represent your market.

Please note that I use the word ‘buying’ as some investment that’s non-trivial that shows serious intent. It could be giving their credit card information or email or even buying a few credits – whatever that fits your business. The goal isn’t revenue or price discovery – so for the early customers, move them to the path of using the product as soon as possible, even if it means removing all but bare minimum friction that validates seriousness.

It’s hard to predict this, but let me give an example. If you building a mobile video startup that’s like Periscope and users have to upload short videos and put up on Twitter (core actions), your good first users are the ones that have a lot of highly engaged followers on Twitter. The bad users are ones that just have passive followers or no followers on Twitter.

If you know that the customer is not a representative sample of a large monetizable (or servable) market, you would be wise to avoid them.

Conclusion

In summary, be very judicious about picking your first few customers.

• Take your product to those customers that have a very high chance of success when they use your product.
• Choose those customers whose industries or problem spaces you know very well.
• Avoid customers for whom you’ve to put a lot of additional resources to make the pilot work.
• Pick customers who’d have a need for your future product, not just the current version.
• Choose those customers who are representatives of large enough segments that you can go after.
• And finally, don’t do your first few deals with friends who are doing it just to make you happy.

If you follow these principles, your customer base would be completing the core actions in your product at a rate that’s healthy. You’d have better insights and better demonstration of stickiness with your early stage investors and you’d have set the right base for acquiring new customers. The return on your learning will be high.

About the Author: Ashwin Ramasamy is the founder of PipeCandy – an intelligent prospecting tool auto-discovers new prospects & helps you reach out to them with the right message at the right time. PipeCandy is currently in private beta & the essay above is based on our experience with onboarding customers.

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Change The Channel: Why Your Videos Need a New Home

In the beginning, there was YouTube. Well, close to the beginning. The world started in 2005, right?

Okay, maybe not. The world has been around for a while, and online video was nothing new in 2005. That said, while YouTube wasn’t the first site to feature video on the internet, it did change the way video existed online. It created an entirely new channel for marketers, amateur singers, hilarious backyard shenanigans, and big businesses to feature online content.

But what happens now, a mere 11 years later, when YouTube has over one billion users, and well over one billion videos?

While it’s good to have your content on YouTube, your prospects’ eyes are competing with hundreds of other videos in your category alone. Chances are, they’re going to click on another video on YouTube once yours is done — at best, it’s one of yours. Worst case scenario, it’s a pug playing the piano, or a competitor’s video on a similar topic. YouTube is still a very important channel for getting eyes on your video content, but it’s best used as a way to drive people back to your website. Once they’re there, you need to keep them on it.

That’s why more and more companies are choosing to build their own private YouTube. They’re turning off the external noise, bringing their videos home, keeping viewers on their site, and branding the experience. It’s time for marketers to change the channel. Here are a few examples to show you why:

Lone Wolf Technologies

Real estate isn’t always a sexy industry behind the scenes. Outside of the home-flipping TV shows and smiling faces on the lawn signs, the nitty gritty details of buying, selling, and managing home sales is a messy blend of paperwork, signatures, and legal documents.

Smart brokerages are moving towards digital solutions, and Lone Wolf Technologies is leading the pack. But how do you educate real estate agents and brokerages on how to use new technology quickly and efficiently? The short answer is video — the long answer is well-organized video tutorials that are succinct and don’t waste anyone’s time.

Lone Wolf’s video hub is a shining example of what a support hub can be. Videos are organized by the technology that agents or brokers use, and newcomers can quickly and easily find the exact video that solves their problem. A new agent looking to add your first listing? That’s easy to search for. Broker looking to add a new agent to your system? That’s here too.

All of this content could exist on YouTube, but with the deluge of real estate related content floating around, it’s easy for a prospect, or even an existing customer, to get lost in a YouTube ‘black hole’ and find themselves six degrees of separation away from their original question. With Lone Wolf’s video hub, once you’ve finished watching a support video, the only other content you see is more support videos. Win-win.

Influitive Advocamp

So, you’ve run your event, all of the attendees had a great time, you turned a few attendees into customers, and a few customers into advocates. Your work here is done, right?

Wrong! All those sessions you recorded are your new best content assets — and having a private channel you can tie into your event page is the key to getting the most out of them. Advocamp, Influitive’s incredible advocate marketing conference, pressed record on every session at their 2016 event, and their video hub is the next best thing to being there.

Advocamp organized their content into keynote streams, shorter one-person talks, streams around content, and featured videos from their hilarious pre-event campaign.

Having all of this event content organized in one place means attendees can quickly and easily find the videos of sessions they attended and share them with colleagues. It also means that non-attendees can experience the same content (minus the networking, free food, and celebrity hob-knobbing) and get pumped up for next year’s event.

Vocera

Video marketing isn’t just for tech companies and Nerf guns anymore — literally every industry is benefitting from the engaging power of video, and healthcare is on the forefront of this.

Vocera is a company that straddles the line of technology and health care. Their platform for internal hospital communications is designed to provide critical information to the right people at the right time, in a variety of complex situations.

Explaining this complexity isn’t easy — unless you’re using video. Vocera’s video library features everything from in-depth customer testimonials, short segments on individual functionalities, and an entire library about different applications for their key communication products.

Keeping this content organized and accessible on YouTube wouldn’t be easy, but customizing the video experience for viewers with a video hub means that Vocera can create relevant channels that appeal to specific customers, and put the right product data into the hands of the right people at the right time. Seems pretty in line with their core mission!

Act-On

The final company you should be learning from is Act-On. Boasting an impressive 3,000 customers, Act-On is a major player in the marketing automation space, and uses video to educate their customers on a host of important topics.

Their most impressive channel is their 15 Minute Marketer, in which they teach an in-depth marketing topic in 15 minutes or less. That may sound like a daunting task, but by being concise, looking at complex topics with simple solutions, and sticking to the formula, this series is making a big splash with marketers.

On top of that, Act-On has another channel dedicated to on-demand webinars, which they use a pre-roll email gate to collect lead information. While YouTube allows for some pretty in-depth annotations to direct viewers back to your website, or to other content, self-hosting your video is the only way to really collect true lead data before someone can watch. And if you’re asking people to fill in their contact details before they watch a live webinar, you should definitely be doing it for the recorded version as well.

Act-On’s video hub features support content, informative thought leadership videos, and on-demand webinars all organized in one simple, easy to navigate space. YouTube would just be holding them back.

Are You Ready to Change the Channel?

Self-hosted video hubs aren’t for everyone — you’ll notice that most of the businesses featured here have more than one or two videos, and are tracking metrics well beyond view counts.

If you’re working with a large library of video, and not seeing any traffic coming your way from YouTube, it may be time to start building your own internal channel. What you lose in the ‘subscription’ model of YouTube, you gain in brand recognition, customization, and control of what content your viewers see when your video is done.

Interested in learning more about how you can organize your content to create great video experiences for your audience? Click here to learn more about Vidyard Video Hubs, and see a few in action!

The post Change The Channel: Why Your Videos Need a New Home appeared first on Vidyard.

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How to Create a Winning A/B Testing Strategy

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your A/B testing just doesn’t seem to work. You run test after test and nothing seems to improve your conversion rate in a meaningful way.

Or, worse, your new pages actually decrease your conversion rate.

In your search for A/B testing success, you’ve read countless case studies and incorporated their findings into your variants…and still, nothing.

Maybe you’ve had a few token successes, but those either didn’t reach statistical significance or simply didn’t improve your conversion rate enough to make a real difference to your company.

What are you doing wrong?

The good news is, you’re not the only one with this problem. If you’ve tried A/B testing, you’ve almost certainly had that moment when you look at your results and think, why isn’t this working?

It’s a frustrating situation, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of A/B tests don’t improve conversion rates. If you’re looking for a big win with every test, you’re guaranteed to be disappointed.

Instead, the key to successful A/B testing is strategy.

Strategize Your Way to Success

Recently, we improved a client’s conversion rate by 22%.

Seeing results like that, your first impulse might be to say, “Wow, that’s an awesome case study! What did you do to get those kinds of results?”

The answer to that question is actually fairly simple: we got rid of the testimonials.

Exciting, right? The moral of the story is, testimonials kill conversion rates!

Except…that’s not really the moral of the story.

In fact, testimonials often improve conversion rates. To be honest, when we started working with this client, I never would have guessed that their testimonials were hurting their conversion rate.

So, if we thought this client’s testimonials were helping their conversion rate, why did we decide to test a page without testimonials?

Well, we didn’t pull this idea out of thin air. As you can see below, we tested a lot of other hypotheses first.

Although not every test improved the client’s conversion rate, every test taught us something about our audience and what they were looking for in a landing page.

Building an Effective Testing Strategy

The secret to successful A/B testing is creating a great testing strategy—one that teaches you something with every test. This takes planning and documentation, but it saves time and significantly increases the effectiveness of your tests.

Essentially, an effective A/B testing strategy has 4 parts:

1. Buyer Persona

Before you even build your landing page, you should create a detailed buyer persona.

Basically, your buyer persona is your testing blueprint. It gives you the information you need to come up with testing hypotheses and a framework for understanding your results.

At a minimum, you should know the following about your audience:

• How old are they?
• Are they mostly male or female? Or evenly split across both?
• What are their responsibilities?
• What is their budget?
• What are their goals?
• Why are they interested in your product or service?
• What is their pain point?
• How does your product or offer fix their problem?

To get at this information, it’s often a good idea to talk to your sales team or even interview some of your current customers. It’s a bit of extra upfront effort, but it can cut a lot of time off of your testing learning curve.

In the case of this client, we knew a lot about their audience. In general, we were targeting middle-aged men and women with money to invest. They knew they needed to be smart with their money, but they also knew they needed someone to help them through the process.

2. Define Your Goals

To test effectively, you need to understand what you’re really trying to accomplish with your test.

After all, if you don’t understand what you are trying to achieve with your test, it will be very difficult to create variants that produce meaningful results.

Consider the following:

• What is your overall goal? (if you answered, “To increase sales,” give yourself a gold star).
• What does your ideal customer look like?
• How does a visitor become a customer? (what steps are involved?)
• How will your test help you to achieve your overall goal? (increase form submissions? purchases? email signups? phone calls?).
• Are you trying to increase conversion volume or conversion quality?

If you want your page to be successful, you need to understand what your company needs to succeed and be able to track the metrics that matter most. Otherwise, you’ll never know if your test was a success!

For this particular client, the overall goal was—of course—sales, but we were testing this page to try and drive more qualified leads for their sales team. Since the client had a lot of different options, our page also needed to identify which option the leads were interested in.

3. Create Your Hypotheses

Based on your understanding of your audience (ie, your buyer persona) and your business objectives, it’s time to start coming up with testing hypotheses.

The primary goal here is to identify the points of friction between what your buyer persona wants and what your business wants and come up with ways to reduce that friction.

Here are some potential reasons why your audience might not be converting:

• The offer is wrong. Your audience is looking for something specific and you aren’t giving it to them.
• The next step is unclear. Your call-to-action may be hard to find, ambiguous or uninteresting.
• You have a copy-offer mismatch. If your audience is looking for a simple solution and ends up on a complex page, that will create friction and confusion. On the other hand, if your offer is complicated and you don’t address an important point, that can create unnecessary doubt.
• You aren’t evoking the right emotion. A funeral services page filled with images of laughing people at a party probably doesn’t match the audience’s emotion. If you don’t stir the right emotion in your audience, they won’t feel like you are a good fit for their need.
• Your content is confusing. Poorly written, hard-to-read content or awkwardly designed pages can make your page too difficult to bother with.
• Your page doesn’t seem trustworthy. People are very wary of marketing, so over the top claims, poor design, lack of social signals or trust seals can seriously damage your conversion rate.
• You have the wrong traffic. Even the most effective site won’t convert uninterested traffic. This isn’t exactly a CRO problem, but improving your traffic quality will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your A/B tests.

Understanding your potential friction points can help you set up an effective testing strategy. By testing variations that address your friction points in different ways, you can figure out exactly what works for your audience.

4. Document and Learn

The last step is to actually run your tests, document your results and then use what you learned to create new hypotheses and tests.

Your documentation can be as simple or as complex as you want, but it is critical to document what you were testing and what your results taught you.

Here is a simple example of how you might document a CTA test series:

If you don’t document and learn, you might as well not use A/B testing. However, if you are documenting your results, you can greatly improve your conversion rate.

For example, while working with this client, we progressively discovered that our audience responded best when they felt like they were in the driver’s seat. The less we sold ourselves, the more effective our page was.

Ultimately, this led us to use a simple CTA that invited our audience to identify what they were looking for before we asked for any personal information.

In addition, we discovered that our users wanted a simple and straightforward experience. So, we spoke to that in our headline and body copy.

But, we didn’t see our best results until we applied all that knowledge to our overall page design.

In an effort to create as focused of an experience as possible, we got rid of the testimonials and created a streamlined landing page that focused on how we could help our potential clients succeed.

As a result, the new page outperformed every previous variant. But, at this point, that was hardly a surprise.

We knew our audience and we knew what they were looking for in a page. And, as we discovered increasingly better ways to meet their needs…our conversion rate improved.

Conclusion

Most successful landing page A/B tests aren’t lucky one offs—they are the result of a great, methodical testing strategy.

It might take a few tests to yield the kind of results you’re looking for, but with the right testing strategy in place, you’ll get there eventually.

You’ve heard my two cents, now I want to hear yours. What sort of results have you seen with your testing efforts. Has a strategic approach helped you improve your conversion rate?

About the Author: Jacob Baadsgaard is the CEO and fearless leader of Disruptive Advertising, an online marketing agency dedicated to using PPC advertising and website optimization to drive sales. His face is as big as his heart and he loves to help businesses achieve their online potential. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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