education

How to Maximize the SEO Value of Website Videos

Tim James, COO of Flick Fusion, shares tips on how to maximize the SEO value of your video content.

 

Flick Fusion Video Marketing is a pioneering video technology company, specializing in creating, managing, and distributing dynamic and cost-effective online and mobile video products on the world’s largest content delivery network. Each video is designed to help our clients reach and engage their customers with richer content and greater impact that results in increased sales and ROI. Data, photos, inventory, audio, music, and special offers are automatically combined to create compelling multimedia video solutions that are fast, easy, and affordable.

How to Create Emotionally Appealing Inventory Videos

by Gina Reuscher, Director of Marketing, Flick Fusion

For dealerships that are considering video marketing, or in the early stages of developing their video marketing strategies, we recommend starting with inventory videos. Inventory videos are a great way to attract and emotionally engage car shoppers. According to a recent Gallup study, “businesses that optimize this (emotional) connection outperform competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.”

Emotion sells because it happens on a very instinctive level. People may not be aware of why they’re buying–they just know they feel good about it.

So how do you create emotionally appealing inventory videos? Visually, most inventory videos are pretty straightforward. Typically they’re two to four minutes in length and show the interior and exterior of the vehicle. They should also highlight popular features such as infotainment systems, cameras or hands-free tailgate openers.

Although these visual features by themselves do stimulate some emotion, let’s face it: there’s only so much you can do with lighting or mood effects without getting cheesy. It’s an inventory video after all, not a Hollywood movie.

The best way to make your inventory videos emotionally appealing is to create a custom, unique voiceover track for each vehicle. Most inventory videos, including virtually all automated voiceover videos, simply recite the features and data that the consumer can already see on the Vehicle Details Page (VDP).

To differentiate your dealership and generate a powerful emotional response in viewers, create inventory videos with voiceovers that focus on how owning the vehicle will make the buyer feel.

For each video, identify one or two emotional opportunities that you want to tap into. The emotions will be different depending on the type of vehicle. Then, decide on a specific call-to-action that you want the car shopper to perform during or after viewing the video. Include hyperlinks or an audio prompt for the call-to-action in the video along with phrases designed to generate emotion.

In Barry Feig’s book Hot Button Marketing: Push the Emotional Buttons That Get People to Buy, he uncovered 16 emotional opportunities that drive conversion:

  1. Desire for control
  2. I’m better than you
  3. Excitement of discovery
  4. Revaluing
  5. Family values
  6. Desire to belong
  7. Fun is its own reward
  8. Poverty of time
  9. Desire to get the best
  10. Self-achievement
  11. Sex, love, romance
  12. Nurturing response
  13. Reinventing oneself
  14. Make me smarter
  15. Power, dominance and influence
  16. Wish-fulfillment

To get you started, here is a list of emotions and sample phrases that you may want to incorporate into inventory videos.

Emotion Phrases
Sex Appeal/Desire Imagine how you’re going to look in this car, you’re going to look so good driving this car, this is a sexy car and you’re going to look sexy in it, you’re going to be the envy of your friends/family.
Admiration Your friends are going to love it, your kids are going to love it, your dog is going to love it! You are going to love yourself in this car.
Family Values Imagine your entire family on a road trip in this spacious SUV, imagine how much fun you and your family will have trekking in this vehicle, this is the perfect vehicle for creating that special family bonding time.
Discovery/Excitement Imagine the places you can go in this vehicle. Explore, discover and escape the ordinary, enjoy unparalleled freedom in this adventure ride, imagine escaping into the great outdoors, you’ll forget all your worries the moment you get behind the wheel.
Humor Imagine all the stuff you can fit in here; kids, dogs, hogs, farm animals, circus props, all your wife’s/husband’s old junk. Lots of stuff, you’ll never have to go anywhere without your stuff again.
Smart Buying this car will be the smartest decision you ever made, with this deal/rebate you’ll be walking off the lot feeling like Einstein, buying this vehicle is one decision you’ll never regret, this one’s a no-brainer folks.
Confidence Don’t worry, worry-free, satisfaction guaranteed, no-hassle buying experience. Imagine all the money you’ll save with this fuel-efficient vehicle; imagine all the things you can do with that money! You can go out to dinner, you can go on a trip, you can buy new clothes.
Desire for the best Rest assured with this vehicle you’ll be getting the best in class, highest quality, top of the line, best value, best looking, etc.
Fear of missing out Isn’t she a beauty? We haven’t seen a make/model in this primo condition for a long time, this one won’t last long folks, this vehicle is going to fly off this lot, this vehicle is in high demand, if you want this, don’t delay, this won’t be here more than a few days
Pride You’ve worked hard, you deserve this car, you know you deserve it, you’ve earned it and you’re going to feel so proud every time you slide behind this wheel.

These phrases are just suggestions. Feel free to brainstorm and come up with your own! It will take some practice to feel comfortable producing custom inventory video audio tracks, but with time it will become second nature.

One thing is certain: creating inventory videos with emotional appeal will be worth the effort. Emotion plus a call-to-action will convert more shoppers into buyers because emotion sells.

 

A Primer on Video E-Mail Response

So, you’ve decided that you want to send video responses to internet leads, but you don’t quite know where to begin. Well, first, congratulations! You have made an excellent decision that will engage more of your customers, build rapport faster and elicit increased responses. Now to the nuts and bolts of how best to do this:

Technology – The simplest tool you need to create video is probably right in the palm of your hands. You may even be reading this blog on it, right this minute. I’m talking about your phone. These days, most smart phones have pretty impressive video capabilities. On the other hand, perhaps your dealership is willing to invest in a little dedicated video equipment. That is great as well. The biggest thing to understand is, regardless of whether you’re shooting video from your smartphone, or from an expensive camera, you need to ensure that you’re familiar with all of the settings that the camera offers and how to use them. Read your manual. And, In the case of an expensive camera, pay attention primarily to the Exposure Triangle (ISO, Aperture and shutter speed). Understanding these three features, and how to manipulate them, will help you produce great looking quality videos.

Deliverability – I am frequently asked about the best way to deliver videos to a customer via e-mail. Should the video be embedded in the e-mail or linked? Well, embedding a video inside an email sounds cool. But, “sounds cool” isn’t functional because only a few e-mail clients would actually play the embedded video. In addition, many spam filters flag e-mails that contain embedded video as spam. This means that most of your customers won’t even see them. A video is worthless if it doesn’t make it through spam filters. Because of this, your best option is to utilize a video landing page and insert a link to the video which is embedded in the landing page.

Creativity – Creativity is an important piece of any video marketing strategy. First, decide how you are going to utilize your video content. Are you going to build a library of stock video responses to send to leads? Or, are you going to personalize each one? Perhaps a combination of the two? Regardless of which strategy you choose, there are advantages and disadvantages to each. That being said, each one can be effective if it is implemented properly.  Here are some fundamentals that apply universally:

  • Use the word “VIDEO” in the subject line.
  • Use e-mail to support your phone call strategy, not replace it.
  • The focus (i.e. the call-to-action) of the video should be to get the customer to call you.
  • SMILE! There is nothing worse than seeing a video with an unhappy face.
  • Use a video landing page that contains the video you created for the customer along with additional supporting videos such as your dealership’s value proposition video, your salesperson’s introduction video and perhaps even some video customer testimonials. Sell the dealership. Sell yourself. And sell the car. All at the same time.

Hosting – One of the most important pieces of the puzzle for an effective video marketing strategy is where your video is “hosted.” All of your video content, including your video e-mails, should be hosted on the same platform so that you can track the viewing data of your shoppers across all touch-points and match that shopper with their history within your CRM. This also allows you to deliver “viewer specific” content to your shoppers based on their history and/or geo-location. Hosting videos on the same platform allows you to see if the prospect you sent the video email to watches another one of your videos on your website, cars.com, AutoTrader, Facebook Video pages, a blog, through another e-mail, etc.

Make certain that your video hosting platform knows what it is doing and can serve up real-time marketing/re-marketing content, or special offers, all based on rules that you can set, in order to return the best results. You can even geo-target your competitor’s lot. This means that if a specific shopper ends up visiting your competitor, but then decides to come back and watch your video e-mail just one more time (or any of your videos for that matter), you then receive a notice that they are on your competitor’s lot, while your video throws up a last chance offer to entice them over to you, before they buy elsewhere.

I hope this blog provides some useful data on the fundamentals of implementing an effective video marketing strategy. With the right tools and technology, you’ll find that it’s not that complicated at all.

Use Video to Increase Service Upsell

It’s widely known that video walkarounds, email responses and other types of video attract more attention from car buyers and better engage them once they reach out to you. But, one of the biggest mistake I see most dealerships make is to neglect the service department in their video marketing efforts.

Most importantly, utilizing video in your service department is a key part of a complete Video Marketing Strategy, and an easy way to capture your service customer’s viewer profile (data) to match with your CRM records.  In other words, you can know if your service customer is also watching your inventory videos on touch-points such as AutoTrader or Cars.com, in addition to your own website, Facebook pages, Email Campaigns, Blogs, etc.  You can then leverage this knowledge by sending targeted messages to that service customer that include videos with offers specific to their vehicles of interest, while passing that data to your CRM to queue the customer up for Sales Follow Up. Essentially, the targeted messaging occurs via your existing videos in “real-time,” based off the data gathered from your video views. It’s re-marketing just as you would have through a Google Ad Campaign, except you are using your own videos and your own data.

Video can dramatically increase the service department’s footprint on your website and serve as a useful resource for your customers. It is also an excellent way to educate customers and increase service recommendation acceptance.

When customers drop their cars off for a scheduled repair, one of their biggest fears is an unnecessary upsell. Unfortunately this fear can create resistance to any repair recommendations. A short video created by the service adviser can help to alleviate this fear and provide “visual proof” that a repair is really needed.

Videos are far more effective than photos because the service adviser can explain how the old part is worn and compare it visually to the new part, along with an explanation of how important it is to get the repair done now. Additionally, advisers can mention the potential impact and costs of related problems that could be caused by not completing the service now.

Creating an upsell video simply involves two parts: the “why you need it” and the tutorial. The “why you need it” portion of the video plants the seed in the customer’s head that they had better get this taken care of soon or they are likely to end up with a more expensive repair, stranded on the side of the road, or possibly even in an accident.  The tutorial section shows how much work it really is to fix this issue, the cost of the parts, and the time involved with the fix; thus, justifying the cost of the repair.

Once the upsell video is created, the adviser can text it directly to the customer so they can see the video on their mobile device and make a quick decision. You can remove additional fear and the “oh they’re just trying to up-sell me” mentality from the customer by delivering each video on a landing page that contains your Value Proposition Video, Service Manager Introduction Video, and a couple of Testimonial Videos so that the customer can quickly see that you have their best interest at heart and can be trusted.

If the customer refuses the additional service, send them a “how to” (on the same landing page) so that they can appreciate how serious you believe this service is, and that it needs to be completed ASAP (even if they prefer to do it themselves).  The more you can help the customer understand that this about “their safety” and that you aren’t just trying to sell repairs that aren’t necessary, the more likely the customer will trust you and approve the additional repairs.

These type of videos also create content on your website and increase the odds that your dealership will show up in service related searches (VSEO). You never know when someone searching for an answer will stumble across your service video and make the decision to choose your dealership for their service repair.

In Marketing, Consumers Want to Know What is In It For Me

by Tim James

 

People aren’t watching your commercial or video because they want you to sell them your product. They’re watching because they want you to sell them a solution.

In the world of online marketing, oftentimes marketers forget this very basic concept. Think of it as painting pictures when selling. The idea is that you want to tell the consumer why they need a feature, so that the consumer will visualize how each feature will make their life better, easier, more efficient. How it will make them more money, or provide a solution to a need. It’s not uncommon for salespeople to go on and on about the features of a vehicle. It has this type engine. It’s safe. It has Bluetooth, etc. They may as well (and some probably are) read the window sticker to the customer. Great salespeople, however, understand that the customer doesn’t necessarily care about the fact that the vehicle has Bluetooth, unless it’s tied back to how it benefits the customer.

Mr. Customer, one of the great features on this vehicle is that it has Bluetooth functionality. This will allow you to connect your cell phone wirelessly and accept or make phone calls without taking your hands off of the steering wheel. Which will make your commute for you and your family safer.

Consumers may watch dozens of video walkarounds in their car-shopping journey. If you’re doing live video walkarounds of your vehicles, consider this: How would you do a walkaround for a customer right in front of you? Why would you do your live video walkaround for your website and VDP’s any differently?

Create more memorable videos that capture a customer’s attention and sell the consumer on why they need the features of each vehicle. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t talk about the vehicle’s features. What I’m saying is that you’ll create more powerful videos if you tell the consumer why those features are important and highlight the impact each feature will have on their lives.

How A Dog May Have Just Reinvented Pre-Roll Video Ads

by Brian Cox

We all know how annoying pre-roll video ads can be – especially when they have nothing to do with the video content we’re about to watch. Many people hover their mouse cursor over the countdown just itching to click “Skip Ad” the second that option is available. As reported by USA Today, the insurance company Geico, may have found a way to keep people around to watch.

In a nutshell, Geico used only the first 5 seconds (the amount of time someone would have to watch before the “Skip Ad” option appears) and stated, “You can’t skip this Geico ad because it’s already over.” In the background a family acts as if they are frozen in time at the dinner table. On screen is a dog that then proceeds to eat everything on the table while the actors stay as frozen as possible (although you can tell that they aren’t). It’s actually very well done and pretty amusing. The trick is that the Geico logo is on screen the whole time so, in essence, you’re watching the whole ad. The article reports that, on March 3, the ad had “logged more than 725,000 unaided YouTube videos in one day.” That’s pretty incredible.

The reason this ad is seeing so much success is simple. It is one that every dealer or marketer should take note of – they had a strategy. The producers of the ad, the Martin Agency, knew they faced the same challenges and had to solve the same problem that every other company utilizing pre-roll video does – How to stop people from clicking “Skip Ad.” Most companies fail this challenge as not many of these pre-roll video ads tempt anyone to stick around and watch.

So, rather than try to answer the question which most marketers have been unable to, they chose to think outside-the-box. With just 5 seconds to convince people not to click “Skip Ad,” rather than putting the meat and potatoes of the ad AFTER those five seconds, (which is how most traditional pre-roll is organized), they chose to put it BEFORE.

Then they got creative…

What would make someone continue to watch an ad – that’s not supposed to be an ad – after the “Skip Ad” option appeared? From the buzz this has generated, it would seem that a dog having a good old time tearing up everyone’s dinner from atop the table was a winning formula.

I suspect that the success of this campaign will cause other companies to start using those five seconds in other creative ways. The important thing to remember is that simply throwing video onto the Internet is not effective – and it’s not video marketing. Without a strategy in place to make your video marketing efforts successful, you may just be wasting your time.

The Most Important Metric In Gauging Video ROI

by Tim James

The question most pondered by businesses when advertising is perhaps the most important:

“What is my ROI?”

It doesn’t matter whether we’re discussing television ads, radio, 3rd party leads,

that gorilla on top of your building, or the contest you’re running on social media; all roads lead back to the ability to answer that one simple question. Dealers and their vendors use call tracking numbers, unique landing pages, and a plethora of reports to justify the monthly expense of any given marketing campaign. Some dealers swear that a product or service works, while others might complain that it does not.

In the case of video marketing, if you don’t believe or are unsure about its effectiveness, there’s one simple metric that you should take a look at:

Inventory turn.

You’re already keeping track of this. You know the average length of time a new or used car sits on your lot. You might even hold your used car manager accountable for this. This isn’t something that sits in the pile with all of the other reports. It’s something that is vital to the dealership’s profitability and, more importantly, the bottom line. Flooring costs can get quite expensive. The longer a car is kept in stock, the less profit it’ll make. In terms of time alone, that vehicle is depreciating daily. That’s where video marketing comes in. It can make your vehicle stand out and engage online shoppers better than any other form of media.

If you have a comprehensive video marketing strategy in place and are executing on that strategy (taking the videos, making them engaging, getting them on all of the key touchpoints), take a look at your inventory turn to gauge its effectiveness. What was it before video marketing? What is it now?

The bottom line is that any dealership marketing strategy has one simple goal: selling more cars. Video marketing done right will speed up your average inventory turn. And the ONLY way it can accomplish that is by bringing in more customers who are buying your vehicles more quickly. And that’s the only answer that matters.

Why Video Is Important For Your Marketing Strategy

by Brian Cox

When businesses ponder how to increase their presence on search engines, they typically turn to SEO strategies. Content marketing has always been a large part of any SEO strategy. It’s a given that the more fresh, relevant and unique content you produce, the better chance your online properties will have of showing in search engine results. According to an article by Search Engine Land, in the past, when considering an SEO plan, the primary type of content marketers thought of was text. As consumer behavior changes, however, visual content is becoming increasingly important.

According to the article, a Google study that tracked consumers’ points of influence on their path to purchase, found that 64 percent of consumers were influenced by video they saw on YouTube – 2/3 of which were “how-to” and “product visualization” type video. These videos match the content type that auto dealers use. In fact, according to the study, 60 percent of consumers reported that online digital marketing factored into their path to purchase. And a recent article in the Wall Street Journal reported that experts are now advising marketers to move 10% to 25% of TV ad dollars to online video.

Today’s vehicle shoppers have many decisions to make along the path to purchase. A consumer who visits an online shopping portal will typically be presented with a list of vehicles that meet their criteria in order of price, lowest to highest. They will then start filtering out vehicles from those results based on such things as mileage, condition, vehicle descriptions and pictures and video provided by the dealer. Vehicles with no (or poor) descriptions or ones that lack photos and video have a greater likelihood of being passed over. Vehicle description pages that contain rich details including images and video stand a far greater chance at seeing customer engagement. It’s hard to believe that anyone would disagree with this very basic assessment.

The same idea translates to search engine optimization. The goal, obviously, in any search engine optimization strategy is to be found whenever a consumer makes a relevant search. According to Search Engine Land, however, that’s not what the real goal is (or should be). Simply showing up does nothing except satisfy a marketer or SEO practitioner’s ego. The true goal is click-through-rate. The more opportunities you can provide a customer who is searching for a vehicle to find your dealership and/or vehicle (i.e. the more times you appear within a given search), the greater the likelihood will be that they will click on a link to your content versus your competition. To accomplish this, you must have a presence on all the consumer touchpoints in every medium possible – video, images and text – thereby offering more content for a search engine to crawl and deliver within the results.

The bottom line is that consumers are using more resources than ever before when shopping for a vehicle. Ensuring that the type of content a consumer wants to see is present on every touchpoint is essential to increase web traffic and consumer engagement. Don’t get me wrong, simply throwing money into video marketing is not what I advise. You would be wise to invest in a comprehensive video strategy that maximizes the exposure, quality and effectiveness of your video content. It will make the difference and allow you to dominate all of your online marketing channels.