Custom Web Design Is the Way of the Future, Not a Relic of the Past

Custom Web Design

Websites are critical for businesses to succeed, so web design is more important than ever. However, the advent of hundreds of design platforms and web builders has sparked a debate about whether custom web design is dead.

Many business owners are using platforms that let you create responsive web designs easily. After all, doing something yourself saves you money. And if you can save money and have a killer website, why wouldn’t you?

The answer is a lot more complex than one would think.

Templates Are Easy – but Are They worth It?

Website builders let you create a simple page from a template or other source. Some platforms even target business owners who aren’t skilled in design; you simply drag and drop elements of the web page onto the template. Others offer a bit more creativity and have coding integrated into their capability.

Typical Wireframe of a Genric Web Layout

While this seems like it would be all there is to it, template websites actually pose a few problems. For example, the templates are relatively bland and overly simple. They don’t allow much room for personalization, and if you want to customize your site, you’re out of luck. You would have to work the with template developers to make changes or hire a web designer to tweak the site. That defeats the purpose of designing your site yourself. And if you’re going to spend money fixing individual elements on your site, why not pay for a custom design from the get-go?

Redesigning From a Template Ruins SEO

A lot of business owners are attracted to the idea of a DIY website platform because it’s fast and easy. You may want to unveil your site quickly so you have a place for visitors to land. However, launching a site now and making changes as your business expands hurts your search engine optimization (SEO). For example, changing content management systems, web hosts, and site design all affect the way your site is indexed and ranked.

Many times, changing a site leads to 404s and other broken links, which confuse search engines and drop your page rank. Unless you know how to analyze and remedy these issues on your own, your brand will be buried under search results and may be masked by your old site. Essentially, you end up paying for something twice – once for the original web template to launch your site and again for a complete redesign when your business expands.

DIY Templates All Look the Same

Custom designers create websites based around your brand. They’re part engineers, part brand consultants, and part sales and marketing gurus. They know what looks good and what consumers look for in a website. They know how to take your brand message and convey it through words, images, and design.

You can tell a web designer: “I want the website for my shoe company to convey action and boldness, but be geared more toward high-end customers,” and they’ll know exactly how to portray that. You don’t get that with templates, because they’re designed to be easy to use as broadly as possible. They’re geared more toward niches and industries, not individual businesses. They really don’t offer much flexibility to get your brand’s unique image across.

All Websites Look The Same

Unfortunately, in a world with thousands of high-end shoe websites, there are probably several hundred that look exactly the same. When you produce anything on a mass scale, it becomes a commodity, and that’s not good for standing out in a crowd. Consider the definition of commoditization: The process of making something easy and affordable by making it uniformand plentiful.

Uniform isn’t a word you want referring to your website. It doesn’t matter how beautiful and user-friendly your pages are; if they aren’t unique, they won’t stay in your consumer’s memory.

Web Designers Tailor Sites to Your Brand

Web designers are always pushing the boundaries. They’re experts in their field. They’re the ones who come up with exciting design trends and make websites do things they never could do before. Because custom websites are created from the ground up, and not from a rigid template, there’s much more room for ingenuity.

Sure, a web template may be easy and affordable, but it doesn’t get to the root of what will make your business successful. When you work with custom web designers, they base the architecture and look of the site on your business goals and branding. Everything on the website is built to align with your business, from the way visitors navigate your menus to the way individual words look on the page. That’s something you’ll never get from a template.

The Web Design Process Periodic Table

Custom Design for Custom Goals

Web designers also work with you in a collaborative environment to make sure your site reflects your brand in every facet. For example, a web designer may come up with a few options for image layouts and color palettes, along with various styles of fonts. These will be carefully thought out, and each option is personally made for you. When you build your own website using a template, you must choose among too many options, which can lead to brand confusion.

It’s like shopping in a mega clothing store. You enter the building, hoping to find a blue shirt for a party you’ll be attending, only to find that the store has hundreds of different types of blue shirts in different styles, shades, fabrics, and cuts. How are you supposed to choose?

A custom web designer is like a personal shopping assistant. He or she’ll bring you the shirts in the most flattering styles and shades of blue for you. Designers even go so far as to tailor them to your measurements so they fit you just right. Custom web design is a creative process that pairs artistic talent with technical skill. If you want a website that really resonates with your customers, trust the experts.

The Small Business Marketer’s Content Marketing Guide 2015 [Source]

Built in SEO and Tech Support

One of the most compelling reasons business owners are still looking to custom web design is SEO; practices have changed drastically in the past 20 years and will continue to fluctuate. SEO has become a career in its own right, and optimizing a site for search engines is no longer a matter of inserting keywords into your copy.

SEO in 2015 is a combination of content management, usability optimization, even how you label images. Most business owners who use templates end up hiring SEO experts to fix their websites, which again, defeats the purpose of doing something yourself. When you work with a custom designer, they build SEO into the framework of your site. When SEO algorithms change again (and they will), you’ll be able to rely on customized support – a standard for most web designers.

SEO ROI from Link Building Tactics [Source]

So the short answer is no, custom web design isn’t dead. At least not to businesses that understand the value of a website. In fact, web design may be more alive than ever. Templates have become a commodity, and as such, websites are starting to become homogeneous.

During the next few years, business owners will start to see more clearly the benefits of having customized websites built from scratch. Enterprises that want to stand out will ditch the standardized templates and hire professionals to create pages that truly connect with consumers.

Via: http://speckyboy.com/2016/02/02/custom-web-design-is-not-dead/

Custom Web Design Is the Way of the Future, Not a Relic of the Past

Custom Web Design

Websites are critical for businesses to succeed, so web design is more important than ever. However, the advent of hundreds of design platforms and web builders has sparked a debate about whether custom web design is dead.

Many business owners are using platforms that let you create responsive web designs easily. After all, doing something yourself saves you money. And if you can save money and have a killer website, why wouldn’t you?

The answer is a lot more complex than one would think.

Templates Are Easy – but Are They worth It?

Website builders let you create a simple page from a template or other source. Some platforms even target business owners who aren’t skilled in design; you simply drag and drop elements of the web page onto the template. Others offer a bit more creativity and have coding integrated into their capability.

Typical Wireframe of a Genric Web Layout

While this seems like it would be all there is to it, template websites actually pose a few problems. For example, the templates are relatively bland and overly simple. They don’t allow much room for personalization, and if you want to customize your site, you’re out of luck. You would have to work the with template developers to make changes or hire a web designer to tweak the site. That defeats the purpose of designing your site yourself. And if you’re going to spend money fixing individual elements on your site, why not pay for a custom design from the get-go?

Redesigning From a Template Ruins SEO

A lot of business owners are attracted to the idea of a DIY website platform because it’s fast and easy. You may want to unveil your site quickly so you have a place for visitors to land. However, launching a site now and making changes as your business expands hurts your search engine optimization (SEO). For example, changing content management systems, web hosts, and site design all affect the way your site is indexed and ranked.

Many times, changing a site leads to 404s and other broken links, which confuse search engines and drop your page rank. Unless you know how to analyze and remedy these issues on your own, your brand will be buried under search results and may be masked by your old site. Essentially, you end up paying for something twice – once for the original web template to launch your site and again for a complete redesign when your business expands.

DIY Templates All Look the Same

Custom designers create websites based around your brand. They’re part engineers, part brand consultants, and part sales and marketing gurus. They know what looks good and what consumers look for in a website. They know how to take your brand message and convey it through words, images, and design.

You can tell a web designer: “I want the website for my shoe company to convey action and boldness, but be geared more toward high-end customers,” and they’ll know exactly how to portray that. You don’t get that with templates, because they’re designed to be easy to use as broadly as possible. They’re geared more toward niches and industries, not individual businesses. They really don’t offer much flexibility to get your brand’s unique image across.

All Websites Look The Same

Unfortunately, in a world with thousands of high-end shoe websites, there are probably several hundred that look exactly the same. When you produce anything on a mass scale, it becomes a commodity, and that’s not good for standing out in a crowd. Consider the definition of commoditization: The process of making something easy and affordable by making it uniformand plentiful.

Uniform isn’t a word you want referring to your website. It doesn’t matter how beautiful and user-friendly your pages are; if they aren’t unique, they won’t stay in your consumer’s memory.

Web Designers Tailor Sites to Your Brand

Web designers are always pushing the boundaries. They’re experts in their field. They’re the ones who come up with exciting design trends and make websites do things they never could do before. Because custom websites are created from the ground up, and not from a rigid template, there’s much more room for ingenuity.

Sure, a web template may be easy and affordable, but it doesn’t get to the root of what will make your business successful. When you work with custom web designers, they base the architecture and look of the site on your business goals and branding. Everything on the website is built to align with your business, from the way visitors navigate your menus to the way individual words look on the page. That’s something you’ll never get from a template.

The Web Design Process Periodic Table

Custom Design for Custom Goals

Web designers also work with you in a collaborative environment to make sure your site reflects your brand in every facet. For example, a web designer may come up with a few options for image layouts and color palettes, along with various styles of fonts. These will be carefully thought out, and each option is personally made for you. When you build your own website using a template, you must choose among too many options, which can lead to brand confusion.

It’s like shopping in a mega clothing store. You enter the building, hoping to find a blue shirt for a party you’ll be attending, only to find that the store has hundreds of different types of blue shirts in different styles, shades, fabrics, and cuts. How are you supposed to choose?

A custom web designer is like a personal shopping assistant. He or she’ll bring you the shirts in the most flattering styles and shades of blue for you. Designers even go so far as to tailor them to your measurements so they fit you just right. Custom web design is a creative process that pairs artistic talent with technical skill. If you want a website that really resonates with your customers, trust the experts.

The Small Business Marketer’s Content Marketing Guide 2015 [Source]

Built in SEO and Tech Support

One of the most compelling reasons business owners are still looking to custom web design is SEO; practices have changed drastically in the past 20 years and will continue to fluctuate. SEO has become a career in its own right, and optimizing a site for search engines is no longer a matter of inserting keywords into your copy.

SEO in 2015 is a combination of content management, usability optimization, even how you label images. Most business owners who use templates end up hiring SEO experts to fix their websites, which again, defeats the purpose of doing something yourself. When you work with a custom designer, they build SEO into the framework of your site. When SEO algorithms change again (and they will), you’ll be able to rely on customized support – a standard for most web designers.

SEO ROI from Link Building Tactics [Source]

So the short answer is no, custom web design isn’t dead. At least not to businesses that understand the value of a website. In fact, web design may be more alive than ever. Templates have become a commodity, and as such, websites are starting to become homogeneous.

During the next few years, business owners will start to see more clearly the benefits of having customized websites built from scratch. Enterprises that want to stand out will ditch the standardized templates and hire professionals to create pages that truly connect with consumers.

Via: http://speckyboy.com/2016/02/02/custom-web-design-is-not-dead/

One Thing Is Killing Content Marketing and Everyone Is Ignoring It

Content Marketing Strategy

A few weeks before the start of the New Year I led a workshop on content marketing for about 50 small-business CEOs and operations managers. They came from all different industries. Some were consultants. There was a plumber and a representative from an HVAC company present. Pest management? Check. A few small manufacturing companies, a nonprofit, and a jewelry store rounded it out. In other words, it was a diverse group of companies.

What wasn’t diverse were the ways they were marketing their companies. Most had e-newsletters. All of them had Facebook pages. Every one of these senior leaders was concerned about search engine rankings.

Another consistent characteristic? Not one of them was happy with their marketing. This is not unusual. It’s predictable that senior leaders are often disappointed with their marketing. Why? Mostly because they believe it should be easier than it is. They also feel they are just one secret-sauce answer away from Utopia. I mean, how hard could it really be? (Don’t answer that.)

And that’s what I heard about their content efforts as well. Their blog posts weren’t getting much traffic or converting. Their email newsletters weren’t getting opened. Their customers were ignoring them on social media. Finding themselves on the first page on a search engine listing was equally hard.

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Ultimate Guide: 11 Sign-Up Strategies for Building Your Email List

Changing course

I’d heard enough. After the last complaint, I stopped my presentation. This is something I don’t normally do. I’ve been doing this particular workshop for a while, and the flow works well with small businesses. The last thing I wanted to do was alter course.

But I did alter it with this one simple question, “Is the content you are creating and distributing for your customers any different than anything else out there?”

I looked around at the business leaders. You could have heard a pin drop.

I repeated the question.

“Is the content you are creating and distributing for your customers any different than anything else out there?”

I then rephrased and asked the question to each one directly. I asked the jewelry store executive with the e-newsletter if what they sent to customers was any different. They sent coupons and articles that you could find literally anywhere.

I asked the plumber. He promoted content from the manufacturer on his YouTube page and his blog. I also found out that about 300 other plumbers used that same content.

I asked the financial consultant. He said he purposely kept his articles general because he didn’t want to give away any intellectual property without compensation. “How’s that working for you?” I asked.

“Not very well” was his response.

At one point in the workshop, I told them that if they aren’t going to take this seriously, they should all just go out and buy advertising (and I meant it).

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The One Content Marketing Question You Need to Ask (That May Scare You)

Why should your customers care?

For the rest of the morning, we focused on answering one simple question: “Why should my customers care?”

That e-newsletter you are sending out. Why should they care?

Your Facebook post? Why should they care?

Your blog post, video or (God help us all) Snapchat?

You get the point.

Our job, as marketers, is not to create more content. It has never been about that. It’s about creating the minimum amount of content with the maximum amount of behavior change in our customers (hat tip to Robert Rose). For that to be possible, what you are creating has to be valuable, useful, compelling and, yes, different.

Marketers: Create the min amount of #content with the max amount of behavior change in your customers.CLICK TO TWEET

The content tilt

Somewhere along the line, we marketers became infatuated with the tools and less concerned about what we put inside them. This, my friends, has got to change.

Of the six-step process of the Content Inc. model (from my latest book), the most important step is the second, the content tilt.

The content tilt is that area of little to no competition on the web that actually gives you a fighter’s chance of breaking through and becoming relevant. It’s not only what makes you different, it’s so different that you get noticed by your audience. That audience rewards you with their attention.

The content tilt is what will separate you from everyone else in your market area. Andrew Davis, author of Town Inc., calls this “the hook” – a simple twist on a familiar theme designed to entrap or ensnare your audience. Without “tilting” your content just enough to truly have a different story to tell, your content will fade into the rest of the clutter and be forgotten.

How to find your tilt

The real goal of this little story was to get you to ask the question – Is my content different? The majority, like over 99% of marketers, do not have differentiated content. They are not telling stories that are different.

If you are like most marketers, then, your next question is “How do I make it different?”

One question marketers should ask before creating #content: Is my content different from my competition?CLICK TO TWEET

This is easier said than done, but it is possible to tell a different and compelling story looking at different data points. Here are some things to consider:

• 
  Audience – Are you really niche enough with your audience? “Pet owners” simply is too broad as a target audience. What about “homeowners who like to travel with a dog in their recreational vehicle and live in southwest Florida”? That may be too niche, but probably not. To be truly relevant with your story, you need to focus on a very specific reader. As Stephen Kings says in On Writing, you should think about this person every time you create content.

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Wonder What Content to Create? Try a Customer-Journey Map [Template]

• 
  How you tell the story – Content marketing has been around for years and has been called many different things. But we at the Content Marketing Institute were the first to call it content marketing. That made a difference in how the audience responded.

• 
  Platform – One of the HVAC contractors in the workshop told me there are a thousand blog posts a day on energy efficiency. We also learned that there were few, if any, podcasts about saving energy. Opportunity? I’m not sure, but it’s worth a look.

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU:
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• 
  Subject matter – Using tools like Google Trends, you can uncover breakout terms for which there are few instructional resources. Take this quote from Jay Baer as an example:

It’s like, ‘Hey I like knitting, and I’m going to start a knitting blog.’ Really! There are 27 other knitting blogs. Why would anybody read yours? What is different? What is unique? What is interesting? Why would anyone stop reading the knitting blog that they’ve been reading for the last three years and read yours ever? And if you can’t articulate that, you need to go back to the drawing board. And most people I find who haven’t been doing this for a while just don’t go through that competitive calculus, and it’s dangerous.

From the subject matter standpoint, knitting might be too broad. Are there certain types of knitting that are underserved, where you could be the leading expert in the world?

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Stop Sounding Like Your Competition: How to Find Your Content Tilt

What if your content was gone?

Let’s end with this thought.

Let’s say someone rounded up all your content and placed it in a box like it never existed. Would anyone miss it? Would you leave a gap in the marketplace?

If the answer to this is no, then you have a problem (and this article is directed at you, bub).

We want customers and prospects needing … no, longing for our content. It becomes part of their lives … their jobs.

Today, it’s harder and harder to buy attention. You have to earn it. Earn it today, tomorrow, and five years from now by delivering the most impactful information your customers could ever ask for. “Good enough” won’t win the battle for customer attention. Be great.

Via: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/02/killing-content-marketing/

The Average Costs for SEO Services

With such a wide range of prices for SEO services it can be very confusing when you are looking to hire an SEO firm.

If you have ever shopped around for SEO services you most likely received prices ranging anywhere from $99 month to $20,000 per month depending upon your industry and goals. With such a big difference in pricing; how much should you be paying for SEO? 

Here are the five most common pay structures SEO companies use when establishing price points for your project and the average prices you should expect to pay. 

Hourly – If you are looking for a few hours of guidance, a review of particular pages, or you just want someone to review what you are doing briefly each month, hourly pricing may be a practical way of being billed. When you speak with an SEO professional, you should expect an hourly price of no less than $100 per hour from an agency or $50 per hour from an individual.

Monthly Pricing – By far the most common pricing model, you should expect to pay at least $750 per month to retain a trustworthy SEO firm. If you are looking for a specific service such as link building, you may find some good agencies from about $500 per month. What most clients do not realize is their monthly investment is directly proportional to their results. If you are spending $750 per month and your opponent is spending $1,500 per month, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle. When you speak with SEO companies, they should have some background knowledge on your industry, competition and goals. Understanding those factors is the only way to create a plan that is actually going to get you the results you want to see. Beware of cheap SEO providers who offer services for just a couple hundred dollars per month. They are likely to cut corners and put your site at risk because you are easy to replace.

Project Pricing – This pricing structure is like monthly pricing with a crystal ball. As an SEO agency, if you work in certain fields often, you get pretty good at estimating the time and work needed to rank a website and generate traffic. Instead of signing up for ongoing SEO services at a monthly fee, the SEO firm will provide you with an estimate outlining the monthly cost of their services and how many months they need to complete the job. This will give you a total project price and often times, a few payment options. 

A La Carte – If you are looking for a very specific service such as Google + Profile optimization, this type of pricing may work. It also comes in handy if you want to add something to your ongoing services. If you are not sure about the price point for these items, ask the SEO firm what goes into the service and how long it will take and that should help you understand if you are paying a fair price.

Pay for Performance – The number one reason consumers hesitate when buying SEO services is the fear of not seeing any results from their investment. To overcome this objection, several companies started offering pay-for-performance pricing. While in theory this sounds like an excellent pricing structure, when you look at it from a business standpoint, you can see why it is not. If you sign up for three keywords and the firm only gets paid when you rank; what do you think they are going to do? Anything it takes to rank your site quickly. The strategy worked really well prior to 2012, but I would not want to put my website at risk with this type of service in 2014.

Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

BEFORE YOU BUY

When you are looking for an SEO company to work with it is imperative that you focus on the quality of the service you will receive and the ROI potential, not just the cost. 

Hiring a “cheap” SEO company could prove to be the most costly mistake your business will ever make, just ask some of the many website owners who have had their sites destroyed over the past couple of years just to save a few bucks per month.

– See more at:

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2014/11/18/the-average-costs-for-seo-services.aspx

Should You Hire an SEO Firm or Do It Yourself?

There are two ways to get seen on Google. You can either pay for ads that will display on top of search results, or invest in search engine optimization (SEO) to appear organically below the ads.

If you choose to go the advertising route, it’ll cost you at least $1 to $2 per click, but it can be more than $50 per click, according to WordStream. In fact, the average small business that signs up for AdWords spends between about $100,000 to $120,000 per year to be seen via paid search.

SEO, on the other hand, can be much more sustainable for small businesses. If you have the means but you don’t have the time, you may want to pay for a firm to take over your SEO campaigns.

WHY HIRE AN SEO FIRM?

When you invest in AdWords, it’s a short-term solution. However, if you hire a good SEO firm with a portfolio of positive results, they’re going to be focused on more long-term goals and work with your business to organically build traffic.

SEO is a full-time job, which is why many small businesses choose to hire firms instead of doing it themselves. Firms dedicate all of their energy and resources to the task of improving your SEO.

A decent SEO firm will charge between $5,000 to $10,000 per month, according to Brian Honigman (also read, “The Average Costs for SEO Services”). At this price point, you’re working with a company that has a staff of experienced content managers, Web developers, copy editors and analytics experts. The average cost of paying for specific services like website and SEO audits is $1,000 to $3,000. Link building costs $250 to $2,000 per link, and copywriting is 75 cents to $1 per word.

If you do hire an SEO firm, make sure that they’re up to date with Google’s requirements. Though no one can pinpoint exactly what algorithm Google uses to rank sites, it is known that they are looking at mobile optimization and the authority and relevance of your content.

Your SEO firm should be concentrating on building up your site overtime. SEO is not a quick fix, and it can take months upon months to see results. When you add too many keywords to try and rank higher in a short amount of time, you may end up getting penalized by Google.

Your firm should also have a solid client list and a great track record, and talk about the importance of website content. If a firm is all about littering your website with relevant keywords and not even discussing content marketing, find another company.

Just because you hire an SEO firm, it doesn’t mean that you should step away from SEO efforts completely. Your whole team has to be involved in the process by thinking of content to create for your business and analyzing your analytics. You must always monitor your firm, and make sure you’re getting what you pay for.

WHY DO SEO ON YOUR OWN?

At this point in time, you may not have the available funds to invest in an SEO firm. Or, you’ve had negative experiences with SEO firms in the past and you want to try it on your own for a while.

If you dedicate time to improving your SEO, you may see better results than a firm would provide. After all, no one cares about your business more than you do.

Another option, aside from doing it on your own, is to hire an SEO team member, which is a big investment up front that can lead to a huge pay off. This person will be much more invested in your company than a firm and know your business inside and out. You can see your analytics whenever you want, and personally consult with your specialist anytime. If you’re not ready to take on a full-time team member, you can hire a consultant for $100 to $300 per hour.

There are many resources available online for improving your SEO. After all, this is the age of DIY. If you’re choosing to go on this path, here are a few pointers to give you a head start.

QUICK TIPS FOR GETTING STARTED WITH SEO

 

1. Create content that will attract your demographic to your website. Start a company blog that incorporates engaging images and video along with text and internal links to your website. Promote your blog and content on all your networks including your social media sites, since that’s where people are clicking through to content nowadays. Make sure content on your blog is unique and can’t be found elsewhere.

2. Incorporate keywords into your posts, but don’t go crazy. Make sure they fit in organically within your piece. To find out which keywords are best for you, use an SEO keyword research tool.

3. Utilize all the SEO tools within your website builder for your blog posts. Include tags, make sure your search engine description is filled out, come up with an enticing headline, and use a descriptive URL.

4. Focus on getting linked on high-quality websites. According to Felix Tarcomnicu, an effective method is to monitor your competitors’ backlinks and aim at getting links placed on those same sites. You don’t want links on any website, especially ones that see little traffic.

5. Make sure your page is loading fast enough with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Otherwise, Google may penalize your ranking if your site loads too slow.

A solid SEO plan is crucial for your business to succeed. Whether you hire an SEO firm or take it on yourself, make sure that it’s a priority for your company.

– See more at:  http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2016/01/31/should-you-hire-an-seo-firm-or-do-it-yourself.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

How to Measure Video ROI: A Beginner’s Guide

Any modern age marketer worth his salt is under substantial pressure to prove the R.O.I (return on investment) behind his marketing activities and endeavors. Awash in endless reams of data from dozens of sources, and countless different metrics or signs he/she can measure, it’s no wonder that online video presents somewhat of a conundrum.

Even though it’s clear that video is dominating the internet (70% of internet traffic will be video by 2017) and becoming the hottest commodity in the marketing world, there’s still no definitive measurement for discerning business impact, which understandably makes marketers antsy and fearful. All too often we hear the sentiment that “no video is better than a bad one.”

“Any discussion about video R.O.I should begin with a clear agreement about business objectives.”

There are also many marketers who don’t think critically enough about objectives and just somehow expect that their video content should “go viral” (More on this unrealistic expectation later…). Any discussion about video R.O.I should begin with a clear agreement about the business objectives of the video, and a focus on a narrow specific goal for the video’s content.

However, there are straightforward methods and tactics that you can begin to utilize in order to better understand and measure the impact of online video, which will take away some of the mystery and bring it into the light. Here’s a beginner’s guide:

#BASIC BITCH LEVEL

Tracking Views: Number of views is the most basic and obvious indication of success for online video (the greater the number of views = the better distribution you have, and the more likely it is that you have a good video.) Still, you can get more specific analyzing by the number of paid views (PPC, YouTube pre-roll, Facebook campaigns etc) vs organic (# of shares on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Remember though, that in the world of B2B video, a low number of views is not necessarily a bad thing, if you’re getting views from the narrow target you’re looking to convert (which is usually the case for B2B marketers.)

#INTERMEDIATE SALLY

Attention Span Data Tracking (AKA retention): Rather than looking at the total number of views, it’s important to know exactly how long people were viewing your video for, and if they even completed it. You can begin to measure this information using free tools inside YouTube Analytics. With this, you can identify drop-off spots as well as the most engaging parts of your video, and even tweak your content on the fly. This can also be done on Vimeo and other video hosting solutions I discuss later.

Check out this video on what’s available in YouTube analytics:

Measuring Engagement: Engagement is a buzzword, but it basically means the level of interaction with your video, and it’s the next step in understanding the effectiveness of your video beyond the generic view. Specifically, you should look at:

• Shares/Retweets/Likes/Favorites etc: # of times your video has been liked, shared, re-tweeted, favorited, etc. across social media platforms.


• Subscribers/Followers: After you release a video, do you see an increase in subscribers on YouTube or followers on Facebook?


• Comments: It’s not enough to look at the numeric tallies of “likes.” You should also dig into YouTube and Facebook comments and analyze what people are saying about and responding to in your content.


• Press Coverage: Is anyone writing about your video in an article or blog post? Are people making reaction videos or parodies?


• Click Through Rates: For example, A/B test emails (one with video content and one without) and measure the click through rate.

#BEASTMODE

Obviously, when you tie a video to a specific action or goal your business is trying to reach, this is when you can begin to show real R.O.I (Though of course, the above-mentioned metrics are also important in gauging the overall value of your content.)

One easy way to do this is to establish a simple, clear goal for the video. None of this wishy, washy “I want to go viral!” nonsense. This kind of thinking is naive and unrealistic, because if you don’t have viewer reach millions of people to begin with, it’s unrealistic to expect one video to solve this problem. You should aim to have the purpose of your videos to be similar to the purpose of your text-based assets. For example, a video could have a goal of: collecting info from prospects, reassuring a prospect as they move down the sales funnel, or explaining a product before purchase.

More specifically, let’s say you want to produce a video that will cause visitors to sign up on a landing page form. You can do two things. The first is to A/B test the landing page, and see which one performs better–the one with the video, or the one without. Research has shown that adding a video to a landing page can boost conversions by up to 80%.

If you can go a step further and assign a dollar value to each lead generated, you can even begin to come up with a rough dollar R.O.I by comparing the cost of the video to vs. the value of the leads produced.

When the goal of your video is even more explicit, such as “compelling the customer to purchase this product,” (for a video on a specific product page), it’s possible to get even more accurate with ROI.

BEASTMODE PLUS

As summarized above, there are many free metrics and actions to take to figure out ROI on your video content using existing basic tools.

However, for those marketers with lots of video assets and a robust video marketing strategy, it’s worth taking a look into paid video marketing platforms.

Rather than the public video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, these private platforms are centered around specifically identifying your video viewers and their engagement behavior, and tracking it across a huge array of data points. And the best part is that these platforms can be integrated into an organization’s existing marketing automation or CRM system (such as Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, etc.), giving you full engagement data down to the individual lead level. They also have a host of other great features like “email gates” for prompting viewers to give contact info before watching a video, etc.

Some of the most popular platforms out there today are Vidyard, Wistia and Vzaar.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s understandable that in the modern marketing landscape focused on hyper vigilant awareness of data, analytics and KPIs that video content can seem nebulous and risky. And while it’s true that video is a different animal, there are practical ways to start measuring and proving it’s ROI, as we’ve outlined above.

As stated before, any discussion about R.O.I should begin with a clear agreement about business objectives, as there are many goals which can be achieved with video–increasing brand awareness, increasing sales, prompting sign-ups, or even just explaining a product. These objectives will determine the type of video content needed. It’s really not enough to just broadly say “I want my video to go viral.” You will see much more ROI on your video when you set clear, narrow and specific goals for your content.

Check out this video on what’s available in YouTube analytics:

LinkedIn open-sources WhereHows, a metadata management tool

LinkedIn today announced that it’s open-sourcing a piece of its software called WhereHows, which allows anyone in a company to learn about and share information on data that company has under management. The software is now available on GitHub under an open-source Apache license.

LinkedIn has many systems for storing and processing data, including Teradata’s data warehousing technology, the open source Hadoop distributed file system, the open source Hive data warehousing software, and its own open source Pinot real-time analytics software. It’s not trivial to know exactly where a kind of data lives. WhereHows can help with that, because it lets people run wide-ranging searches across everything, and people can post about the data for which they have knowledge.

Rather than viewing data, WhereHows lets people track the specific types of data that are available. In other words, it’s a tool for discovering and managing metadata. WhereHows is available to people at LinkedIn in the form of a user interface and an application programming interface (API) for developers. It serves up information on more than 25,000 publicly shared data sets from HDFS alone. It also takes into consideration flows of data through multiple tools; so, for example, it surfaces 150,000 flows from its open source job scheduler. But instead of LinkedIn keeping the software to itself, the company is opening up and sharing it for other companies with complex systems to use and even build on.

“We are open sourcing WhereHows on GitHub, as well as our discussion group, to share our work with the broader data community,” LinkedIn staff data engineer Eric Sun wrote in a blog post. “We highly encourage contributors from different companies to create new features and commit important bug fixes. Though metadata management tends to be tightly coupled to other components in the company, we will continue to try to refactor LinkedIn-internal integrations into WhereHows into generic templates or plugins in open source.”

This is hardly LinkedIn’s first open source contribution. Pinot became available last year, and before that, there were Azkaban, Kafka, Samza, and Voldemort.

But data discovery, or the data catalog, is a whole other type of software. Many proprietary tools are available. For instance, startup Tamr came out with something last year. So the WhereHows release could be a big deal for companies with complex data infrastructures. In return, LinkedIn could easily find people willing to improve the technology and maybe even join the company’s ranks.

LinkedIn wants to enhance the software by giving it integration with tools like Kafka, Samza, Gobblin, and Nuage, and it could also add in information on joins between different types of data, wrote Sun.

Documentation for all parts of WhereHows is here.

More information:

via LinkedIn open-sources WhereHows, a metadata management tool