A tutorial and examples of adding captions and subtitles to videos
In the past, there were four main things that needed your attention in order to optimise your online videos for search engines; video title, description, category and tags. These things still apply but now there is another really useful tool. Closed captioning means that the content of your video is available in written word format which is something that search engines can read and identify.
What is closed captioning?
Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a screen (e.g. on a TV programme or online video) to provide additional information to what is already being presented.
The reason it is termed ‘closed’ captioning is that only viewers who choose to activate them will see them. ‘Open’ captions are visible to all viewers.
Some people use the terms ‘captions’ and ‘subtitles’ interchangeably. However, captions are slightly different as they aim to describe what…
Tips to remember when creating an animated video for your business
In Part 1 I showed some benefits and examples of using animations for online marketing.
In Part 2, I will look at some tips to help make your animations effective for marketing. This is what I've found from the ones that worked well and not so well.
Tip #1 Remember - it’s not live action video. Be imaginative!
One of the benefits of using animation over live action video is you can create something engaging and high impact.You can make things happen that would be outside the realm of a typical corporate video production budget.
Many people approach an animation thinking they will need a main character who talks to the audience about the company in a setting consistent with what the business does. If you want to be this literal, you may as well hire a film crew to do a live…
10 goals you should be measuring on your B2B website using Google Analytics
Having a good method for quickly reviewing the effectiveness of your B2B website is really important as the majority of your time and effort will be spent trying to get people onto your website as early on as possible in their purchasing cycle. Once prospects are on your site it’s then up to various factors around the quality of your content that must work together to get the visitor to convert into a lead.
How important is your website as part of the overall marketing strategy?
“Our website gets over 10,000 visits a month which is really good” or similar is a comment I often hear from marketers, but probably have no idea about how many actually convert into leads or data capture for further opt-in marketing. Whilst traffic is easy to measure and most of the holds no value, it…
Boost SEO x53 - and other great reasons to use animation in your marketing
There are all sorts of names for it – explainer videos, corporate video, marketing videos, animated web videos…. cartoons for your company - I prefer to call them animated videos! But, whatever you call them, their popularity in digital marketing strategy is growing.
Once animation was limited to those with massive six figure production budgets, but current technology means you no longer need a big studio or access to television broadcast channels to create and distribute animation.
In theory, anyone can have one written, designed, storyboarded and produced tailored to your marketing needs.
Four major reasons to use animation in your marketing
Increased conversion rates – 64%- 85% of people are more likely to purchase after watching a product video. And, on average, people will stay 2 minutes longer on…
Four tips to increase Facebook ad efficiency
Your Company is running ads on Facebook and so far you got a decent click-through rate, but where is the conversion?
We’ve found this is one of the more common issues confronting Facebook advertisers.
In this post, I’ll give some tips on to how to switch this scenario around and make your Facebook marketing more efficient.
A large Scandinavian hardware chain, active in the Nordic countries and the UK, wanted to boost its Facebook fan page activity last Christmas. Its campaign aimed to drive traffic to its web shop. At the time of the campaign, most of the company’s fans were its employees. In just a month, the number of fans went up from 2,000 to over 11,000. And, for the first time, the fan page experienced organic activity; people commented, liked offers and…
An introduction to setting Goal Value in Google Analytics
Goals in Google Analytics (GA) open a multitude of interesting and thought provoking questions when analysed properly.
In this post I'll show how to select the right goals, showing why it's so important to apply a value to those goals to help with data-driven decision making.
What is a Goal?
Within Google Analytics you have the ability to setup a specific action or interaction that can be used to calculate the flow of users within the site. You can setup funnels or just a single step funnel which Google Analytics can use to create a goal. Key to the principle behind goals is to understand what the users having been doing, in what order and trying to get an understanding on the the value generated to the business of their visit.
Which Goals do I need?
The…
2 examples of a technique to use for retail SEO
Advice to create quality content is a recurring theme from Google. It’s the recommendation every time someone raises a complaint about their latest algorithm. It’s also what Matt Cutts recommends in response to almost any question from the broad brush, like ‘What’s the best way to rank higher” to narrow focus such as ‘how do we avoid duplicate content’.
If you have already created well-written content on your site describing your products and services, and cracked the keyword conundrum, (appropriate use in page titles and headings, not too many, not too few, plus a smattering of synonyms) you may be wondering what else you can do. One approach is to look carefully at your product pages; earlier this week on Smart Insights, Jimmy McCann showed 5 tips for optimising product…
Are you taking apps seriously in your marketing?
The big mobile manufacturer and software brands, like Apple, Google and Samsung, are adding more and more functionality to mobile phones. From games, to shopping, travel, social and even health. We also know that the by 2014 we're expecting more surf time to be on a mobile device (iPads included) than via desktops PC's.
comScore have pulled together analysis of mobile usage including a list of the top apps and there are some surprising observations. It is interesting that iPhone and Android users differ more than you might expect. The most important point is that apps are what take up most of the consumer's mobile minutes. 82% of our media time is spent with these mini-applications and it's only growing.
Note Android with the most unique visitors, important to remember when planning…
A checklist of 7 questions for the perfect brief
If you have decided to go to a production company to bring your corporate video to life, it is important that you clearly communicate to them what it is you want. You need them to understand your concept and buy into it so that they become as passionate as you are about making a success of the video.
As background, see these examples of B2B corporate videos and different formats compiled by Rene Power.
Based on my experience of what is sometimes missing, here's a checklist of questions that will help you write a great corporate video brief:
1. What’s the purpose of your video?
You need to communicate the goal of your video to the company. Is it to launch or support a specific campaign? Is it an attempt at solving a…
Every website owner wants to know how visitors behave on their website, but how do you get all that information and how can you improve your pages with it?
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics can give you some good information about previous pages and the most popular links, but to show interactions in detail, additional tools are often useful. It’s these specialist tools that I focus on this review.
For more background on applying heatmaps to improve sites, see these two tutorials:
Using Heatmaps to Optimize your Site (Referral Candy - shows examples Click, Scroll and Mouse movement heatmaps)
Using Clickmaps to Understand your viewers - a nice summary of why and how to use heatmaps
There are various ways to collect more information about the behaviour of visitors on your website.…
