One of the best ways to improve your craft is to check out what your competition is doing. If you get to know what’s working for everyone else (or at least the success stories), you can avoid many pitfalls when it comes to your own company.
So, when I set out to find out how we could improve our sales and marketing cadences around 6 months ago, I knew that I’d have to gather data. A lot of data.
By the time I was finished, I’d signed up to 281 SaaS companies (including the Montclare SaaS 250 and some of the top startups in AngelList) using the details of a fake Vodafone employee and analyzed the 1,000+ emails and voicemails I received in return.
While I won’t go over everything I learned right now (we’d be here for days) I will highlight five of the core takeaways I gathered to help you convert more of the leads you generate.
If you want the rest of the data (including a Slideshare summary and copies of every email and voicemail I received), check out Inside SaaS Sales – a site we set up specifically to house this data. Otherwise, read on!
#1. Send an email every day
First up, you need to keep in regular contact with any potential lead who signs up. This both reminds them that you’re there and builds the connection they have with you.
Although tactics obviously differed based on the company, the majority of companies (41%) sent us one email per day until they stopped contacting us.
Other companies averaged out to sending one email per day, but instead took a staggered approach. A great example of this is Salesforce.
Their team sent us two emails per day for the first two days, then one email for the following four days, and then one five days after that as one of their final touch points.
This is a great way to strike while the iron’s hot (aka, when the lead first signs up), but to avoid drowning them in sales and marketing emails if they aren’t interested.
#2. Don’t send the same kind of email two days in a row
Although most companies sent us one email for every day of their sales cycle, it’s important to make the distinction between marketing and sales emails.
Too many marketing emails and the lead’s attention could be split between offers or they may not have the drive to take action on your product (depending on your copy).
However, too many sales emails and most people will also be put off. Doing this makes your sales efforts very impersonal, and they will feel like they’re not being valued as a potential customer.
That’s why sales teams on average only sent one email every two days – the rest were marketing emails.
#3. Leave a voicemail (if it’s worth it)
Assess whether the lead’s value is enough to warrant the time and effort to reach out and call them. If so, it’s also worth your time to leave a voicemail if they’re unavailable or don’t answer.
I’ll say straight-up that not every lead is worth following up on in this manner (the resource investment can be massive depending on the number of leads and size of your team). A massive 74% of companies analyzed didn’t leave voicemails, which gives a clear picture of the kind of investment we’re talking about.
If you’re not sure whether voicemails are for you or not, compare the resources you have to the potential gain from the lead.
Does your sales team have time for another call? How much would a call effectively cost in terms of time spent and the sales rep’s wages? What would such a call prevent them doing, and how valuable is that action?
Also, don’t forget to look at how successful voicemails have been for you in the past to get an idea of how likely the gamble is to pay off.
#4. Stick with leads you voicemail for longer
If you have a lead that’s worth voicemailing, it’s also worth sticking with that lead for longer. This was shown by the sales cycle of companies who left voicemails being 160% longer than those who didn’t.
In other words, if these companies left a voicemail, they kept trying to convert us for 1.6x as long.
Now, I know that this data could be due to a number of reasons. It could just be that the companies who had the resources to leave voicemails just had a longer sales cycle. Maybe a few took special exception to us since we were a high-value lead.
Either way, if you think that a lead is worth the investment to leave a voicemail after failing to call them, then chances are you have the resources to stick with that lead for longer. You’ve put the work in, so don’t throw it away at the slightest resistance!
#5. Use (or at least consider) marketing automation
Marketing automation is a fantastic way to save time and money – it lets you queue up your emails long before they ever go out and is an absolute must-have for any team looking to scale.
However, to back up the point, a massive 67% of companies used marketing automation to send their emails. An even more shocking 39% only used automation – there were no salespeople involved.
In short, if you’re not using some kind of automation to take the strain off your team, you’re missing one of the biggest shared tricks in SaaS sales cycles.
Don’t make the same mistakes as everyone else
While all of these points are useful, if you only take one thing away from this post today, take away this.
Don’t make mistakes that someone else has before you.
It might sound simple, but this simple principle will take you a long way in almost anything you do.
Whether you’re looking for a way to improve your sales cycle or you’re trying to build a blog, do your research beforehand and search for what others have to say on the subject. Someone out there will have published their own experience on the topic, and learning that takes you one step closer to success.
Email automation has become the standard approach for marketers all over the world. This summer we decided to ask how it is done best.
There’s only so much you can learn from one person self-reporting their own successes, or only examining the cycles of one or two companies.
We decided to go one step further.
We began a research project where we examined the sales cycles of 281 top SaaS companies from AngelList to Zenefits.
We published an overview of this study at the end of August and launched a micro-site (Inside SaaS Sales) along with PersistIQ where users can browse all our data and access all emails and voicemails which we received.
We learned loads about how these companies structure their sales cadences; when they automate, how persistent they are, who is presented as point of contact, etc etc.
In this article, I’m going to pull apart their use of automation in email marketing and dig down into the data to give a few examples of how companies do it in practice.
How many emails do top companies send?
Our analysis was of 1183 emails, so the volume was pretty high to begin with!
But what do we find each company doing?
Companies very rarely send one email before backing off. This kind of soft touch approach negates the purpose of running an email campaign of any sort. Yet, throughout our research, we found that some companies still take this approach.
In fact, 25% of companies we studied only sent one email before backing away and leaving the customer alone. The majority clearly favor a more persistent method, but those readers who aren’t employingemail automation can at least take solace in not being alone in that approach.
This article is going to focus more on the 75% – the ones who make an effort to run a marketing campaign, and particularly those which choose to segments of that.
The average company attempts to follow up for 9 days. Given a focus on midweek rather than weekend, this accounts for essentially 2 business weeks.
Within this period, we’re looking at an average of one email a day. Companies typically send one email a day until the end of their cycle – which varies depending on the company.
A business like Slack choose to hit a short sharp campaign with 3 outreach emails in quick succession. This is in keeping with the general trends across marketing drip campaigns which we found typically consists of three emails – a radically different approach to the more sales-oriented measures, particularly those utilizing a high touch sales method.
We’ll look a little closer at Slack’s approach later on in the article.
Should I be automating my email marketing?
Automation has quickly become the hot game in town, but not every company is joining in just yet.
We found that 65% of companies hand you over to an automated marketing campaign.
This still leaves a number of companies without an automated approach, but it is clear that the movement is toward greater use of automation potential.
It is important to note, however, that automation and non-automation are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we found that 53% of the emails we received were from automated campaigns rather than sales people, but often these would both come from the same company.
If we take the example of Salesforce, we find that the automated emails are sent out and then followed up on by a real salesperson.
If you look at this automated email below, you will see a clear attempt to provide generic value:
Whereas, if you contrast that with this email afterwards, you’ll see a much more personal attempt at outreach from a dedicated sales person:
This demonstrates the importance of remembering to keep a human touch where it is appropriate to your business.
It isn’t necessary to automate every step. For a service like Salesforce which can charge its customers reasonably high amounts of money, it is clearly of value to them to build automated emails while also leveraging the personal attention given by a salesperson.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Use automation wisely.
What email marketing providers are companies using?
When companies did use marketing automation, they weren’t building it all from scratch themselves.
Like you would, they searched the market to find existing tools they could use to improve their automated workflows to deliver value to their customers.
What I found marginally surprising was that these companies tended to use the same tools that we all use, rather than some gold plated premium service.
As we can see, MailChimp dominate the list by some distance, seeing off both Marketo and HubSpot despite the two putting up a good fight.
This is a resounding success for MailChimp and suggests that they’re a good option for small businesses who want to get started with marketing automation. I know from experience that the system is intuitive, so maybe it’s a good place to start.
What tone of communication is most common?
Running an email campaign is so much more than just lining up a workflow and clicking send.
Like any other aspect of your product, you need to consider how it is structured, who it is aimed at, and what its purpose is.
If we look again at the Salesforce example given above, we can learn a few small things from a tonal perspective.
The automated email is personal and opens with a clear statement of Salesforce’s value, followed by a straight question directed at the reader. This keeps the email feeling personal despite the automation, and the statements are general enough to apply to anyone with as much as a passing interest in Salesforce and their service.
Salesforce focuses on using clear and easy to understand language with a gentle sprinkling of statistics to help drive the value home. Across the board there was a trend toward clarity and an avoidance of overly technical jargon or typical sales-speak.
One interesting thing we discovered in our study came from looking at whose name was attached to the emails. The Salesforce example has a generic team for the marketing email and “Strategic Accounts” for the more personal sales email. But that isn’t always the trend.
We found, first and foremost, that sales campaigns through email tended to have two potential points of contact. One of those contacts often had “Sales” in their title, and these were likely the first to reach out.
The use of higher positions was interesting, with CEO or Co-Founder being used to give the email more gravitas. I’m personally not sure how well this tactic works as it strikes me as possibly dishonest, but I’m sure some CEOs are hands on with their approach to certain emails – just I’m not sure why the CEO is taking the time out to email me personally…
What is the purpose behind each email?
A further consideration when looking at the content of the emails is the purpose of an email. Ignoring “verify your email” and other miscellaneous items, the purpose of an email was typically split into one of these three categories:
Encouraging you to use it more.
Upselling you to a premium service.
Describing technical capabilities.
We’ve already seen examples of the last two from Salesforce. Describing technical capabilities was left to automation, while upselling was given to a real salesperson.
My favorite example of the first approach comes from Slack:
And a second, but this time with pizzazz:
The emails are both short and sweet with a clear purpose.
Slack have enough faith in their product that they know the most important first step of their customer journey is to get teams onboarded and using it. As such, this is their focus. Their sole focus.
If you contrast this with a company like Epicor, who provide niche industrial services at high rates, you find Slack can stick to a few small emails rather than the high touch email and voicemail sales approach.
Use an email marketing approach suited to your business
So, there you have it.
We’ve looked at how many emails you should send, when you should automate them, what provider you can use, what tone to employ, and what purpose you should put behind your email.
But the key point is this: choose an email marketing strategy suited to your business’ needs.
If you have a small number of very high value clients, don’t operate like Slack.
Tailor your emails to your audience and your business objectives. With a little iteration and effort, you’ll have a campaign flourishing in no time!
What keeps an innovative startup ticking over? At Process Street, we’re a huge fan of using the software other SaaS startups put out there in conjunction with the ever-dependable big names.
Here are the 18 SaaS products we use at Process Street, and why we think they’re the best options out there.
Analytics: Mixpanel, Google Analytics & Jetpack
For analytics, we use 3 different products for slightly different purposes.
Mixpanel is for in-app analytics. We use it to track trends, user engagement and sign-ups, getting an overall picture and week-by-week comparisons and helping us reduce churn by noticing patterns.
Google Analytics is our go-to source for tracking conversions and referral traffic. This means we can measure the effectiveness of the content and the promotion separately.
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that simply tracks the views on pages. The only time we use it is to get a current view of page traffic since Google Analytics can take 24 hours to update, but Jetpack does it instantly.
Project Management: Trello & Basecamp
Trello is used by marketing, development, growth and support teams as the main home for tasks, attachments and status updates. During the employee onboarding process, we add new hires to the team boards and make a personal board for them which contains their first round of tasks and helps them get into the habit of using Trello.
Basecamp is the tool of choice when collaborating with designers. When we had our site redesigned by Koombea, Basecamp was the ideal tool to neatly store resources and collaborate over designs until the iterations were moved into InVision to be prototyped.
Personal Productivity: WorkFlowy & Evernote
WorkFlowy — a tool for taking quick notes — is the best way we’ve found to make both simple notes and complex plans. Project proposals and plans go into WorkFlowy, where it’s easy to structure complex ideas because of the way the app’s designed:
Evernote is where we keep everything from rough notes and screenshots to entire blog posts. With its Zapier integration, it also turns into a way to add text to any other app just by tagging the note.
TaskPaper is a fancy text editor disguised as a to-do list app. Anyone who has kept their to-do items in a TextEdit file will like the added functionality, including tags, smart search syntax and projects. Other popular choices include Any.Do, Wunderlist and Todoist.
1Password is a password manager that keeps every password you use safely encrypted in a vault protected by a master password. It lives up to its name because one password is all you have to remember. While Chrome’s ‘remember this password’ feature is good enough, 1Password is usable cross-browser, OS and device.
External Communication: Intercom & Close.io
Intercom is our favorite customer support tool. All of our support conversations and in-app messages to users goes through Intercom. It’s easy to keep up with the tickets, loop in other departments and get notified when high-ticket customers reach out.
Close.io is an awesome CRM. It’s built around search, meaning that you can create complex search queries and narrow down lists of hundreds of thousands to exactly what you’re looking for. We use it for sales and marketing outreach, as well as managing all content communications.
Internal Communication: Slack & Appear.in
While Trello is great for storing and organizing tasks, Slack is our main tool for internal communication. Its IRC-like interface makes it easy to chat with groups and individuals. Plus, the integrations with Slack, Intercom and the other tools we use.
Appear.in is a permanent video chat room, which means you sign up and get a fixed URL your team can pop in and out of at any time. It’s much better for us than Skype, because you don’t need accounts or to initiate/end video calls at all.
We break projects down into processes and assign these processes to teams and individuals. As they progress with the project and automate their workflows, we can easily get an overview by just looking at the Process Street dashboard.
Email Marketing: MailChimp
MailChimp is the home for all of our automated and one-off email campaigns. Every blog post email and product update goes through MailChimp, where we can track opens, clicks and trends. For me as a content creator, opens and clicks are a great signal that a topic has resonated with our readership.
Since these readers came into our product and read our content, there are parallels across a few topics, like productivity and processes.
Content Promotion: Mention & Buffer
Mention scours the internet for brand mentions and backlinks, which means that when we’re linked to we get a notification and can then promote the post, both as a ‘thank you’ to the author and to maximize the exposure of a piece we’re being featured in.
When we’re linked or mentioned, we then add the post to Buffer. Buffer lets you tweet the same link across multiple accounts (we have 12 linked up in there) in one click, and queues the posts up so they go out at the best time for your audience to see them.
Content Writing: Google Docs & WordPress
The Process Street blog is built on the perfect blog builder, WordPress. WordPress is ideal for drafting in a visual editor with a preview — much better than working with pure HTML.
For guest posts, or collaborative work, we use Google Docs. In-line comments and suggestions make it great for working with writers as an editor. When you’re done you can copy a sharable link and forward it to the target publication for review. I haven’t found an easier way to collaborate and share articles.
Alternote is an Evernote plugin that makes it bearable for content writing. Since I like to have all of my resources nearby, I can create a unique tag for each blog post, then use the Web Clipper to save sources with that tag. Here’s an example:
Data Management: Airtable
There’s probably over 100,000 records in our Airtable database.
Everything from keywords to contacts lives there, and that makes it easy for us to reference and link together everything related to Process Street.
We moved to Airtable after the frustration of managing data with Google Sheets set in. Spreadsheets littered between accounts, with random titles and dodgy permissions were making for a terrible data management experience. With Airtable — especially when you link it up to Zapier — you’ve got a far more efficient user experience.
SEO: Ahrefs, Moz & SEO Spider
Ahrefs an SEO powerhouse. You can use it to research keywords, monitor backlinks, and, what we love most about it — track every keyword a URL is ranking for. When we’re running campaigns to rank specific keywords, like we did with employee onboarding, Ahrefs provides the single best status update on that project within a few seconds of checking.
Moz is a tool we only use for bulk keyword difficulty checks because Ahrefs is the better tool for us. In addition to keyword difficulty, I personally have Mozbar installed for Chrome which lets me quickly check Domain Authority (a rough guide as to how much weight a backlink holds from that domain).
SEO Spider crawls URLs and looks for broken domains. Even with a free account, you can get 500 results from just pasting a domain in. You get to see how many 4xx errors are on that domain, and which links are broken. Then, you can start doing broken link building (as detailed in our marketing processes guide).
File Management: Google Drive
Google Drive is where I keep my Google Docs, graphic assets like SVGs, and upload any large file to share with my team.
Its Trello integration means you can attach any file that’s already inside Drive, saving you from uploading it in multiple places.
To see why we use Google Drive instead of Dropbox, check this comparison.
App Integrations: Zapier
Zapier connects every app I’ve listed here together. Impressive, right? Every app linked together means you can transfer data between them and automate a ton of boring work. For us, it’s a better version of IFTTT because it has more features.
Here are some of my favorite examples, featuring apps like Evernote and OneNote:
JIRA is the home of our planned features, user stories, and dastardly bugs. Developers can add, track, prioritize and assign issues to their team, then feed that information to a live Slack channel.
For example, whenever a new feature is pushed to the live server, a Slack channel gets updated with the feature’s new information and we can do a short write-up to announce it and test the feature to hunt bugs.
The reason for this is when we are looking at a customer in the CRM we want to be able to see not only the sales emails but all the support conversations they were having too.
This can be done quite easily with other Help Desk Tools or via the API but I wanted to build something quickly that didn’t require developer time.
I first setup a Zap using Intercom’s “New Message” Zap that triggered an email to my inbox which then Synced using Close’s 2 way email sync, which worked fine but only worked for the first message that was sent, it didn’t track the whole conversation which can last for days and contain lots of valuable information for sales. This basically meant sales still had to open both Intercom and Close.io to get a full picture of the customer.
Integrating All Intercom Support Tickets with Close
Step 1: Create a Webhook Zap in Zapier and get Custom Webhook URL
Go to Settings -> Integrations and click “Add Webhook Integration”
Here are the topics I am passing in the Webhook:
New Message from a User
Reply from a User
Reply from a Teammate
Note added to Conversation
Conversation assigned to Teammate
User Unsubscribed From Email
User tagged
User untagged
New events
Here is the text export (I assume you need to swap out my ID numbers):
Subject:
Body:
And that’s it! This was just my first attempt, it will probably get cleaned up a little but at least the core data is being passed. If you have any tweaks’ I’d love to hear them.
I am thinking about a marketplace that would help buyers who know nothing about cars evaluate if a second hand car is a good buy or not.
You could create a profile and post the 3-4 cars you are considering.
Post details of their make, model, price and pictures or a video of the car and the engine.
You could then post a bounty for a mechanic to help you out, with a reward of say $50 (or whatever you choose).
Then similar to 99 designs, mechanics from all around the world could submit their reviews and advice on the cars.
Giving you questions to ask, feedback on your pictures and prices, links to other cars or whatever you may need to help you make a decision.
At the end of the process, you reward the most helpful mechanic the $50 prize.
I imagine this would be a great way for mechanics from all around the world to earn some extra cash and an easy way for buyers to protect themselves from getting ripped off on a shitty car that could potentially cost them thousands.
If you know of anything like this or are interested in building it let me know in the comments 🙂
I’ve been using videos to market our startup Process Street for the last few months and have been getting some great results with video bringing in a steady flow of views, leads and customers.
Now, you might already be aware that video is an important marketing tool in today’s online world — that’s why products like PowToon exist — but the way I use video might be a little different. See, I’m not using video in a traditional sense of putting it on my website and using it to convert customers or explain ideas (although I do that too), I’m using these videos as pieces of content to rank in Google to bring in organic search traffic.
Why Video is Awesome
Creating videos in this way is similar to creating blog posts or landing pages for SEO, but with some important benefits.
Firstly, YouTube videos rank well in Google. Like really well. Since YouTube is owned by Google, and is already an extremely high authority site, chances are that a piece of content you put on YouTube will rank higher than your own site, especially if your site is new and doesn’t have much authority.
Posting content on YouTube also lets your content be discovered when people search YouTube, which is the second biggest search engine in the world, bigger than both Bing and Yahoo. Moreover, optimizing your videos to rank in Google automatically optimizes them to rank in YouTube too, bringing an additional traffic stream you otherwise wouldn’t’ve had.
But what is really great about ranking in Google search is that it’s search traffic, the best kind of traffic for a product like mine, which is solving a very specific pain point for businesses. This kind of traffic brings us customers from huge enterprises which I otherwise would have had a hard time identifying and marketing to.
How I Rank YouTube Videos
In this post I will explain the process I use to optimize and rank my videos in Google. Here are a few examples of terms my videos are ranking for in Google:
The amazing thing about ranking videos for these kinds of keywords is that, even though they might not have a ton of traffic, they are VERY targeted visitors, people searching for that exact kind of product.
I am not going to talk about how to make a video in this post. If you want to learn more about creating videos, I recently wrote a post on how to create a startup explainer video plus PowToon has a number of great tutorials on their blog.
In this post I will show you how to optimize your videos and get them ranking for your target keywords.
On Page Optimization
The first thing you should do before uploading your video is prepare you keywords, title and description.
Keyword Research
When ranking YouTube videos it’s good practice to target multiple long tail keywords in the video. This will bring in more traffic as you rank for multiple terms with just one video.
For example, this video I did on checklist software is ranking for Checklist Software, Checklist Software Tool and Checklist Template Software.
You should find a keyword to target based on the content of your video. This is pretty easy: type a few variations into the AdWords Keyword Planner tool and find the one that ranks the highest. There are a few tricks you can do to find keywords that have low competition, but for the sake of this guide I am going to a assume you already know what keyword you want to rank for before you created the video.
For our example, lets use “Tree Removal Miami”
Tree Removal Miami
Once you have your primary keyword, it’s time to get to work building a list of secondary keywords and constructing a title and description for your video.
Below is a video I made for a friend teaching him the process of keyword research and constructing the title and description. In the video I walk through two example keywords “Tree Removal Miami” and “Electrician Miami”. The video is an over the shoulder of me doing it, and runs about 30 minutes if you need a detailed explanation.
Take your primary keyword and put it into the AdWords tool, then pick 3-6 other keywords that have the highest search traffic and are related to your product. You can also use Uber Suggest to find the most common searched for terms after your keyword.
This is the keyword list I came up with for Tree Removal Miami
tree removal miami
tree removal cost miami
tree removal service miami
tree stump removal miami
palm tree removal miami
tree removal services miami
emergency tree removal miami
tree removal company miami
tree removal miami FL
tree removal cost miami FL
tree removal service miami FL
tree stump removal miami FL
palm tree removal miami FL
tree removal services miami FL
emergency tree removal miami FL
tree removal company miami FL
Video Title
Use the keyword list to construct the title. Weave in as many of the keywords as you can with the title still making sense and not looking like spam.
Tree Removal Service Miami FL | 555-555-5555 | Low Cost Emergency Tree Stump Removal Company
Video Description
The description should include ALL your keywords, woven into legible paragraphs that again don’t look like spam.
Tree Removal Service Miami FL | 555-555-5555
Low Cost Emergency Tree Stump Removal Company in Miami FL. Get lowest cost services on your emergency tree removal.
We guarantee the lowest tree removal cost in all of florida for tree stump removal. Contact us today for a free quote from the most reliable tree removal company in Miami FL.
Video Tags
For the video tags, just copy and paste in your keyword list. Easy.
Advanced Optimization
There are also a couple of advanced optimization techniques that I hear good things about. They are:
Transcript (adding a written transcript to your video can help the search engines crawl the video and give you higher rankings)
Annotations (again adding more text to the video helps with search)
I haven’t tested these myself yet but so far I have been able to get to the first page of Google for a number of terms just using the methods above of optimizing the Title, Description and Tags then doing the off page optimization steps outlined below.
Off Page Optimization – Backlinks
Now your video is uploaded and optimized, it’s time to start ranking it. Ranking a YouTube video is pretty similar to ranking any website where the main ranking determinant is the number of backlinks you have pointing towards that video. YouTube has another factor however and that is the number of websites that have actually embedded the video, making it slightly different to creating backlinks for traditional websites.
Here is a list of YouTube ranking factors in order of importance:
Embeds
Links with Anchor Text
Links without Anchor Text
Social Signals
Below are the strategies I use to rank my videos on YouTube. Keep in mind that these are not all the strategies that exist, and that there are many ways to get backlinks and embeds.
Submit to Social Media Properties
Share on personal Google+ and company
Share on company Facebook page, like it, share it
Share it on twitter company account
Retweet on your own account
Submit to Onlywire
Onlywire is a service that lets you manage over 30 web 2.0 properties from one control panel. It’s awesome to get a quick backlink shot of 20-30 links to any post or video you publish. Submitting your video to Onlywire won’t move the needle much but it takes just a second to do and the more links the better. I use Onlywire quite a bit as I use it to build links to every Web 2.0 post, guest post, video, forum post, profile, etc. that I create. This is a really easy way to get a quick link boost.
Plus you can pay someone on Fiverr to set it all up for just $5, an effective, cheap and automated way to do social bookmarking submissions.
I talk about submitting to Onlywire a lot in the rest of this post. This is not a necessity though, merely a shortcut. There are other social tools to help you manage various social networks, or you can simply submit to them manually for free. However, Onlywire is the easiest tool I have found, and it’s what I use in my business.
Post on Site
Create a blog post or landing page on your website. A general rule for a landing page is that it should have 300-500 words of unique content. The keyword should be included in the title and the body. The keyword should be linked to the YouTube video, the video should be embedded onto the page and you should also link out to an authority site. To beef up the page further, add the keyword into an h1 tag and as the alt text of an image.
This formula should be followed when posting anywhere, including your site, other blogs you own, or Web 2.0 sites.
Here is a quick checklist:
300-500 words unique content
Keyword in title
Keyword in body
Keyword anchor text linked to video
Embed video
Authority link
H1 tag with keyword
Image with keyword in alt text
Once you have published your post to your site, don’t forget to promote it. Submit it to social bookmarking sites, Onlywire and across the web. If you are looking for more places to promote your content, try this checklist.
Post on Blog Network
Create a blog post on a personal blog or other site you own. If you don’t own any other web properties, now might be a good time to create a blog. Having a second web property such as a blog is a great way to get additional exposure and backlinks for your videos.
I have a few older blogs that are still around and have some decent authority so I use them to write posts and embed my videos in, like this one I did on standard operating procedure software.
Once you have published your post to your blog using the same format as above, submit it to Onlywire.
Submit to Profiles
Company profiles and business directories are another great way to get embeds for your video. Depending on your niche you can embed your video onto your LinkedIn page, Angel List profile, or Yelp listing.
These are great quick ways to not only get backlinks to your videos but also to generally increase your branding as a company.
Remember to submit your profile pages to Onlywire to get some secondary link juice.
Guest Post
Write related guest posts for other sites and find meaningful ways to link or embed your videos into the guest post. This is one of the most powerful ways to get links to your videos. In fact, I am doing it right now with this post. Another example of a guest post where I embed and link to a number of my videos is this post I did for the Startup Chile blog.
Remember to promote your guest posts too! Submit them to social bookmarking sites and Onlywire.
Another great way to get embeds, links and views for your videos is to publish them on your Web 2.0 sites like the ones listed below. Use the same format as when submitting to your blog or website.
There are a lot of different Web 2.0 sites available, and it can take a bunch of time and resources to post on all of them, so I have broken them down into Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites. Start with the Tier 1 and, if you have the time, keep posting onto the Tier 2 sites.
Whether you are posting on Tier 1 or Tier 2, every time you create a new post, make sure to submit it to Onlywire.
Keep on Linking
As you continue to write content, do presentations, post on forums, etc., remember to keep linking back to your videos when you can. The more links you can get back to your videos the better they will rank over time, so keep on plugging them wherever you can.
If you do the linking optimization tips above and actively work on generating links and embeds to your YouTube videos, they will rank in Google and bring in a targeted, free flow of traffic.
Tell us about your YouTube ranking experiences in the comments below!
If you’re building a startup of any kind, chances are you’ll need an explainer video.
Explainer videos are short 1-3 minute videos that help spread your message and teach people what your product and company is all about. A startup video can help explain difficult to understand concepts and, if you’re lucky, can go viral and give you a bunch of traction — as was the case with Dropbox.
In this post, I will break down how I created our explainer video (above) for less than $300, and how you can make your own for even cheaper.
There is a huge benefit to being in control of your own explainer video. The first and obvious benefit is cost. Doing it yourself is much cheaper than hiring a professional firm like Revolution Productions which can charge between $500-$20,000 for a video. Not that these companies don’t have their place — a great explainer video can significantly boost your conversions and sales. But be careful investing that kind of money into your video before you have product market fit and some traction.
Another reason is, as a new startup, the chances that your company, product or idea will be exactly the same in 6 or 12 months are pretty small. If you’re doing product demos in your explainer video, it is likely you will have updated the look and feel of your product. For example, maybe you’ve added extra features you want to show off, or you’ve discovered a new lucrative market to go after. Whatever the case, startups iterate quickly and pivot often. Paying $5,000 every time you launch a new feature or target a different market can get expensive quickly. But, if you control the video yourself, you can easily swap out new screen captures or slot in new features, allowing your videos to grow with your startup.
Ninja Tip: Upload your explainer videos to YouTube and title them with keywords you are targeting for your business. Don’t call the video “Product Name Explainer Video”. Here you can see the first explainer video I made (which I actually did at the same time as my Startup Chile video), is ranking on the first page in Google for its term “business systemization”. Since your explainer video will get lots of views from the homepage of your website and will be embedded around the web (in your Angel List profile, for example) it should rank relatively high in Google and YouTube search results and will continue to bring in leads even after you stop using that version of the video on your homepage.
Double Ninja Tip: Add an annotation to your video telling people they are looking at an “old version of the product” and linking to your homepage. This will significantly increase click throughs to your site and will give you some grace if your early videos are lower quality.
With that being said, let me get into the details of how I made our explainer video.
1. Script
The script of your explainer video is easily the most important part. Even if you’re paying an experienced company to make your video, you will still want to write the script, or at least be heavily involved in its design, since nobody knows your product and market better than you.
The two most common types of scripts in the startup world are “the user story” script and the “problem and solution” script.
The user, or “Meet Bob”, story takes a viewer through the journey of a user like this video from Med Climate:
A “problem, solution” video is similar to the one I did for Process Street. State the problem your customers are facing then show how your product can solve that problem.
Here is another problem-solution video by Zen Cash.
In both cases, you’re first stating the problem, then the solution derived by your product. The rest of the script will depend on your product, but focusing on the benefits and uses of your product rather than the features is a good rule of thumb.
If you’re really creative and super pro, you can do something new and exciting like the Dollar Shave Club video below, but careful with these: if executed poorly they can look amateur. If you’re not a video pro, it’s best to keep it simple.
Neil Patel at Quicksprout wrote a great article on how to write a script for your explainer video, check it out here. If you want some inspiration, check out Startup Videos, they have 100+ pages of videos you can browse through.
2. Audio
Audio is the second most important element after the script. A great video can be ruined by poor audio. For the Process Street video, I recorded the audio myself. I mostly did this because I had recently purchased a new microphone to make various videos and was itching to use it. If you’re interested, the microphone I bought was the Yeti Blu — I got it from Techworld in Santiago for about $180 USD but they go for about $100 on Amazon.
If you don’t want to spend that kind of money on a microphone just to do one 2 minute video, you can easily pay someone on Elance to record it for you. The quality will be better and it will be MUCH cheaper. For $20-50 you can get a 2 minute video recorded. Just post a job looking for voice talent and you will get a bunch of applications from real professionals who have done commercials for Fortune 500 brands. They will submit their ‘demo reels’ from which you can decide on the type of voice you want.
For most people, paying a specialist is the way to go. I think the audio quality on my video is the major weak point. While it’s still pretty good (I’d give it an 8 out of 10) it’s not AS good as professional voice over done in a studio. One benefit of doing it myself is that it is easier to make changes when needed so it really depends on your situation and what you want.
3. Video Storyboard
The storyboard is a series of images that make up the scenes in your video. Here is where you’ll decide what visuals you want to match with the audio track you produced in the above step. This will differ depending on how you decide to create your video: animations, real humans, slides and screencasts are the most common elements in an explainer video.
Check out the below video to see how Pixar storyboards entire animated movies:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/7LKPVAIcDXYwidth=”550″ height=”420″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen=”allowfullscreen”>
For the Process Street video, I broke it down into two elements, animations and screencasts. I then decided which screencasts I wanted for which parts of the script. For inspiration on animations, I turned to VideoMakerFX. I basically browsed through their templates looking at kinetic words and clips that I thought would fit into my script.
4. Animations
Animations in startup explainer videos are very popular these days. For the Process Street video I used VideoMakerFX, a great tool that makes it simple to create cool-looking animations. It has hundreds of pre-designed animations targeted at explainer videos that you can easily customize the look of, changing the text, colors, backgrounds and animations.
VideoMakerFX costs $97 which is relatively cheap compared to paying for a professional video. It lets you create as many videos as you want, and you can even use it for other videos, like this one I did on how to create a blog.
There are a number of other tools that do animations as well. The powerhouse is Adobe After Effects, an expensive, complex tool targeted at professionals. You can make the process less painful by using pre-made templates, but there is still a decent learning curve. Other tools to check out include PowToon, GoAnimate and Wideo.
If you really want to go ghetto you can use Powerpoint and record your screen (see screencasts below) as you go through the slides, or better yet, use SlideBean (also a Startup Chile company) to add a bit of animation to the slides.
5. Screencasts
A screencast video is basically a video recording of your computer screen. Screencasts a great way to show off your product, they speak a thousand words when trying to convey features in the short time-frame of your explainer video. I make a lot of screencast videos, they are great for demo and marketing videos.
I use Camtasia to record my screen generally on a PC, but TechsSmith also offers a free product called Jing which lets you record up to 5 minutes of video. This is more than enough for a 2 min explainer video. A quick search and you will find a bunch of other free tools for screen recording on both Windows and Mac.
For your screencasts, record the actions you want based on how you designed your script. Typically showing off various features of your product as the audio track explains it. You can speed up the video and add effects such as tilts and zooms pretty easily in most editing software. I recommend doing this, as a little bit of movement makes things look professional and hold the viewers interest.
6. Music Track
To polish off your video you will want to pick a music track to play in the background. A background music track will keep people entertained and give your video a consistent, less choppy feel.
Pick something with a tempo and theme that matches your video and product. Don’t pick some overly fast happy music if you are selling a serious B2B product, and don’t pick a dull slow track if you have a cool, fun consumer product.
If you want something more specific, the guys over at Envato have you covered again with their premium audio library Audio Jungle that has a ton of cool tracks you can buy for around $10 each. VideoMakerFX also includes a small library of audio tracks you can use for free once you own the product. That’s actually where I found the track for our video.
7. Putting it all together
To edit everything I used Adobe Premiere, part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. I already pay for Adobe so this was the obvious choice. I have also edited videos in the past using Camtaisa — it’s quicker for screencasts and the interface is easy to use.
Otherwise, Windows Movie Maker and iMovie will both get the job done. All you need is basic scene arrangement, clip speed control and transitions. There are probably a bunch of apps on the iPad that can do this too, but I haven’t tested any of them.
Don’t get scared by the editing part. Some of these programs can seem confusing, but really it’s quite simple.
First, record your audio and import it into your editing tool. Next, add your screencast segments in the correct positions making sure to match up audio to the time of the clip (you will probably need to speed up your screencast clips to do this effectively). Then, fill in the gaps with animations or slides until you fill out the whole audio script.
Once the animations match up to the audio you’ll want to do a few quality control runs before you continue further (with transitions, music, etc).
Watch the video 2-3 times and look for things like thin lines around the edge, image quality and brightness consistency. If you are using different audio tracks (like a video intro for example) make sure your audio volume is level across the whole video.
If you get stuck on any of these parts, there are plenty of YouTube tutorials teaching you the different controls in most video editing programs.
Next, you should add a call to action to the end of your video. This should be fairly long, somewhere between 15-45 seconds. If you watch through my explainer video above until the end, you’ll see that I prompt the viewer to enter their email. This is important for two reasons. First, it tells the viewer what to do next, increasing conversions. Second, it stops the YouTube suggested videos from popping up and distracting your viewer with what is probably one of your competitors videos. Actually lots of people don’t use YouTube to host their explainer videos for this reason and instead opt for a service like Wistia or Vimeo. Personally, I like to host my video on YouTube until it is ranking for my target keyword, then either release a new video or switch it to Wistia.
Once you’re happy with the core structure of the video, add your final zooms, tilts and transitions.
Finish up by adding in your audio track, reducing the volume and fading in and out at the beginning and the end.
Final Thoughts
And there you have it, a completed explainer video! If you calculate all the expenses above you might come to something like this:
But since I already own Camtasia and Adobe Creative suite, my cost was $279. And remember, I can use the microphone and software to create other videos so really the cost is even lower over time.
You can do this cheaper however, by using a combination like:
If you use any of the above to create an explainer video for your startup I would love to see it. You can leave a comment or reach me on Twitter or Google+. If you want to see more posts like this, subscribe to the Process Street Blog.
This post originally appeared as a guest post on the Startup Chile blog.
iPad / Touchscreen TV positioned at front and around the store with a search bar / filters to filter down all items in the store.
There is a real-time map of the store with all the items in the store, and as you filter down, they break down and show you the location in the store of the item so you can easily find what you are looking for.
You can filter down men/women, colors, style, type, size etc… select tags, type in search etc…
User can easily search for any item in the store and be guided straight to it.
User can also download an app to their own phone and use that as a map around stores.
User can also search for all stores in area using the tech to see if items are available in other stores, can search from any device.
Store experience:
Store purchases “security tags” similar to the ones that beep now. Tags are smart tags with geo locators.
Store sets up a geo fence so no need for expensive alarm beepers. Tags beep when taken out of geo fence, also alert is sent to store / security.
Store set up iPads around the store so people can search, store also entered into wider search network.
Store scans barcodes of items and then attaches tag. Users can access that data through search.
Monetization:
1. Selling security tags
2. Selling monthly recurring to store for software / support
3. Making advertising / affiliate commissions from wider search network
4. Transition into POS and merchanting, take a commission on all sales.
Opportunities:
– Could crowd fund the product since its hardware (maybe? as its b2b)
– Clear acquisition targets (Google/Amazon/eBay)
Costs:
Lots of hardware bullshit to deal with
Selling won’t be easy
Medium-High switching barriers exist
If you are interested in getting traffic for your startup, you should definitely watch the videos from the recent 500 Distro.
500 Distro is a conference where they gathered some of the greatest minds in customer acquisition, retention and growth hacking to do 20 min sprint presentations on a number of different topics.
