Blog Posts About: marketing

The Woot! service (known for their one-day, one-deal offers) has always been know for their light-hearted and fun communication style. It's a quality I love to see in companies.  Any company that's prepared to be a little silly and not take itself too seriously has an opportunity to find loads of adoring customers and fans on the web. In the context of boring corporate announcements, these companies seem like the life of the party.

Thanks to their business model and adoring fans, Woot! was recently acquired by Amazon. So what do they do in the face of being acquired by a huge corporation?  They make their announcement in the form of a rapping monkey.  I love it.  It tells the story, it's clever and fun and it feels like something Woot! should do.

If that's not enough for you, check out the hilarious email from their CEO.

Via: Laughing Squid

I'm the first to admit that we haven't done a great job on the much-requested Common Craft t-shirts, etc. 

But we do have stickers! 

If you'd like a few (supplies are limited), please be like the person below and send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Common Craft

P.O. Box 18322

Seattle, WA 98118-0322

We'll look forward to hearing from you!

A big congrats to Instruxion (the company behind Animated Explanations) for being awarded the Platinum Seal of e-Excellence in Europe, which recognizes companies who have a track record of innovation. Of course, we see this recognition as further proof that video explanations are a valuable and productive element of marketing and education. Animated Explanations is based on Brussels, Belgium and a member of our Explainer Network of video producers.

Here's the description of the award from the award website:

The European Seal of e-Excellence rewards ICT and Digital Media companies with an excellent track record in innovation marketing. Awarded annually since 2003 by the EMF and its Partner Organisations, the Seal is widely known for recognizing companies with:

1. innovative products and services;
2. excellence in the marketing thereof.

Again, congrats to Geert and the Instruxion team!

If you've been reading for a while, you've seen us write that a secret to a strong explanation is putting the subject in the context of someone's life.  Don't just talk about what it does, talk about how it fits into their world - how it takes away pain or makes something easier, faster, better.

Recently I've been reading the Malcolm Gladwell book What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, which is a collection of his past articles from the New Yorker. One of the articles is called The Pitchman and focuses, in part, on Ron Popeil of Ronco.  You may recognize his name from late-night TV, where he's often seen pitching a new kitchen appliance like the Veg-o-matic or the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie BBQ. He is a classic pitchman - a pro.

Though I would never call myself a pitchman, there is an element of the skill in creating explanations. Think of a commercial or an exhibit on the floor of a fair or trade show. The pitchman only has a limited amount of time to attract attention and hold it long enough for value to be clear. Common Craft may not sell Ginsu knives, but we do specialize in making value clear, in about three minutes.

There is a section of the story that struck me as particularly apt for explainers. Ron Popeil discusses pitching kitchen gadgets and how VCRs were marketed... 

You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it's not at all hard to use.

Thirty years ago, the video cassette recorder came onto the market, and it was a disruptive product too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That's because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers... and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All VCR makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure.  Any pitchman could have told you that wasn't going to work.

These days I see a lot of companies acting like VCR makers - handing over a gadget and focusing on features - without indicating how it fits into the lives of customers. Perhaps we all have something to learn from Ron Popeil.

NOTE: If you're interested in learning in-depth about the skill of explanation and how to make Common Craft Style videos, check out our online courses at the Explainer Academy.

It's too easy to just put up a web page and hope for the best. I can certainly attest to this practice for most of Common Craft's existence. However, as we've moved into ecommerce and built some traffic, I've become much more data oriented and learned more about things like "conversions" and "A/B testing."

Many web-based businesses have the same goal: drive traffic to your web site and then convert that traffic into some desired action.  This is called conversion - converting traffic to sales, contacts, newsletter sign-ups, etc. is a big deal and something that's important to understand.

I've been keeping an eye out for data on how videos work in this process.  My guess was that video is an asset - if you can get people to watch a video about your product or service, they may be more likely to take an action.

I recently spoke with my friend Chris Savage at Wistia.com, who is very data-oriented.  Wistia is a start-up that makes it easy to privately/securely share videos and measure the results.  Wistia uses videos on a number of their pages and I asked Chris about the impact of videos in terms of conversion. His response:

We consistently get 3-4x better conversion ratios when we have videos on a page. Visitors convert in less time and there tend to be more opportunities.

Andrew Angus, who runs Switch Web Video (a member of our Explainer Network), recently wrote a blog post on the impact of testimonials on conversion rates and included some information about the role of video as well. 

If you have a video on a webpage you are much much more likely to convert that visitor to a lead as compared to a normal web page. I have seen figures that show video landing pages convert 2 times to 6 times better then a normal webpage.

Andrew wanted to find out how much testimonials matter on landing pages - the first page a visitor sees. So, he set up two landing pages, one with testimonials and one without. Thanks to Google's Website Optimizer, he was able to test one page vs. the other (called A/B testing). Andrew's results:

The page with testimonials on it beat the competition by 158%! That blew me out of the water and is a huge difference for the business. Just think about it… rather than 7 people out of a 100, a much larger 17 out of 100 would contact us. This changes the game for our business and means we are much busier since we started using this new landing page.

So, I think there are a couple of lessons here:

1. Video may play a positive role in giving people a way to learn about your product and take the desired action.

2. Take a look at your "landing page" - the page that people see first, and consider how video and testimonials can help your conversions.  

Of course, I must provide a shameless plug for the members of the Common Craft Explainer Network, who can help you create short and simple video for your landing page. 

Thanks to John, Maureen and the folks at Sticker Giant for their help with these little guys. We're planning to carry them with us at conferences, etc. If you see us at SXSW or anywhere else, ask for one!

Would you like a sticker?  Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Common Craft

P.O. Box 18322

Seattle, WA 98118-0322