How Video Marketing Became a Vital Component of Our Product Launch
If you’ve only dabbled in video as part of your marketing plan, I’m here to tell you now’s the time to dive in headfirst.
Earlier this month, we relaunched our main product — JotForm 4.0 — and unveiled a completely redesigned version built for mobile devices. As part of the marketing strategy for our product launch, we knew we wanted to include video content.
Video delivers a unique experience compared to any other medium. Viewers are able to temporarily immerse themselves by engaging both their sight and sense of sound. Even when watched on mute, captions can hold onto people’s attention and allow them to follow along.
The Preparation
In planning our approach, we decided to create two videos in different styles — one live action and one animated video. We had experienced success with both types of videos before, in case studies and general highlights, and didn’t have an obvious preference. We also wanted to have a backup version in case one video didn’t turn out exactly as we hoped.
Sidenote: Creating multiple videos obviously requires a bigger investment. For companies on a limited budget, creating one video may be the only option, which means it’ll be important to do a little more planning. Try out different types of graphics in emails to your users and see which style gets more clicks. Even though you’re not directly testing a video, it can give you an idea of the best direction to take.
Producing video content also meant laying more groundwork than compared to, say, putting together an email. Whether you’re working with an in-house videographer or a third-party company, it takes a lot more resources to redo content when you’re in the final stages, and will often cost you extra. So it’s vital that you do as much planning as possible and communicate your goals clearly in advance.
For our live action video, we worked with a videographer who had helped us with a couple of previous projects. But even before we scheduled a date to shoot the video with him, we had to:
1. Write a script (and finalize it… remember, no changes!)
2. Put together a storyboard
3. Scout possible locations
4. Hire actors (or recruit friends and colleagues like we did)
5. Prepare props (for us, we needed to prepare versions of our product that would be used in live screen shots)
On the day of the shoot, we made sure we got enough footage for a 1-minute long video, which added up to about an hour’s worth of footage. That might not seem very long, but consider the time it takes to set up equipment for each shot (about 15–20 minutes), the time it takes to get from one location to another, and the time it takes to pack everything back up each time.
For our animated video, we contacted another company we also had experience with working on a previous project (hello, Wyzowl!). We had an extensive kick-off call with them to go over our goals for the video, talking points we wanted to cover, animation styles we liked, video length, and the process that would follow. The next month* was a regular stream of questions and feedback, reviewing drafts, storyboarding, listening to voiceover options and such, until we had the final product in our hands.
*Although it only took us a month, I would highly recommend starting on a project like this sooner. Wyzowl was accommodating enough to work with us on a tight schedule because they already had an idea of our style and voice, but more realistically, it should take at least six weeks to produce a video from scratch.
The Moment of Truth
On launch day, we ran a YouTube ad campaign with both videos and set a modest budget. We figured YouTube’s optimization algorithm would decide which video performed better and it would help us determine the winner.
By noon that day, we had already reached more than 80k impressions and 11k views. It also turned out that our animated video was far outperforming the live action one, with a 20% higher click rate, which led to a higher serve rate by YouTube.
The Results
Using our YouTube campaign results, we decided to include a link to an embedded version of the animated video on the landing page for our product launch.
- Since the landing page has been live, 24.8% of our page visitors have watched the video
- By the end of our one-day YouTube campaign, the cost fell to $0.02 per view
- Even with our one-minute video ads, over 10% of our viewers watched the entire video
- The campaign drove more than 5,000 visits to the landing page that day
Our main goal of the video campaign was to drive awareness. Because of this, our primary metric for success is the number of views we received. To us, that represents the number of new people with whom we were able to share the message of JotForm and what we do. If our goal was engagement, we would go further down the funnel and look at metrics like the clickthrough rate. In terms of clicks, we saw a 2.2% clickthrough rate at a cost of $1.07 per click (lower than most of our search network ads)!
I’d call it a success.
