How Moz Does Video

transcript

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com

How Moz Does Video22 ways Moz uses video to help our mission, marketing

efforts, community, and our team.

This Presentation Is Online Here:

bit.ly/mozdoesvideo

Some transparent data about the performance of videos in our marketing efforts

Moz’s Video Stats

Whiteboard Friday in 2014:

Three Items of Note:

#1 – Incredible engagement vs. average visits

#2 – 500K pg. views is ~1.4% of all traffic

#3 - Higher bounce & exit rates

The Top Whiteboard WB Friday Pages in 2014

These are from Cyrus Shepard, not Rand!

Our Video Projects with the Most Plays

Whiteboard Friday dominates this list, but marketing videos (those we put on home, product, & help pages) are strong, too.

Our Most Watched Videos

Videos like the ones from our homepage and the Mozbar get lots of views.

Our Most Watched Videos

Surprisingly, the most successful WB Fridays we’ve ever done are only 4-6X more watched than the middle of the pack.

Our Video Content Follows a Similar Pattern Each Time:

This pattern is consistent for each WB Friday – a few days or weeks of traffic, followed by a long tail of ongoing traffic. SEO is huge for that tail.

Our YouTube page doesn’t do anything close to these quantities. We’ve trained our audience to watch on our site, so YouTube for us is more of an alternate distribution channel & branding play.

How Video HelpsOur Mission

Moz’s Mission:

Help People Do Better Marketing

>Help Moz Get Customers

Our Video Content Is Built to Help…

marketers answer specific, tactical questions

support marketers in their pitches to their managers, teams, and clients

marketers avoid pitfalls and dead ends

introduce new voices in our industry and expose marketers to their wisdom

people keep up with the rapid pace of change in the web marketing field

on very rare occasion, show off our products to potential customers

For all the content we create, we first ask:

Is this helping people do better marketing?

Perhaps ironically, this leads to

More successful marketing overall.

How Video HelpsOur Marketing

When we first started with Whiteboard Friday…

it actually performed worse than average blog post content in text form.

The first WB Friday, featuring horrible resolution, a handheld whiteboard, bad audio, and a mediocre presenter.

But, we stuck with whiteboards and videos, and eventually, we got good at it.

Today, video content is huge for every aspect of our marketing.

Videos Help Our SEO:

Video XML Sitemaps & authorship, plus lots of links & authority mean our video content shines in search results. The fun images don’t hurt either

Videos Help Our SEO:

Text transcripts, still images, and lots of social love help give videos the right mix of elements to perform highly in search results.

Videos Help Our Visitor Loyalty:

Loads of WB Friday love is in these buckets

Videos Help Our Thought Leadership:

Videos Help Our Social Media Efforts:

Videos Help Our Product Demos:

Video is one of the best ways we can show off the features and value of our software & tools.

Videos Help Our Subscriber Content:

Moz Academy is a video training center modeled off the success of WB Friday

Videos Help Build Our Personal Brands:

This leads directly (but untrackably) to invitations to conferences, to interview requests, to press, and indirectly to links & social shares, all of which power our inbound marketing flywheel.

Videos Achieve Higher Engagement & Recall than Any Other Form of Content We Produce:

How Video HelpsOur Team

We Record Internal Events and Make Them Accessible on Our Intranet for All Mozzers to Consume:

We held a “ship it week” (aka hackathon) and all of the presentations of projects were recorded so Mozzers could watch them.

We Have a Special Series Called “Shared Thunder” Where Experts Internally Share Their Projects

Even complex, technical projects can be parsed by almost anyone at the company with a desire to learn thanks to this repository.

We Create Internal Videos to HelpMozzers with Processes

These videos help new Mozzers learn the processes we follow and make institutional knowledge more scalable and transferrable.

We Use Video to Help Put the “F” in TAGFEE

We’ve done a number of videos for events like April Fools, Halloween, and others. It’s fun for our team and our readers.

This One Might Be My Favorite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liCu5YJYYEg

How Video HelpsOur Community

Video Drives Conversation & Interaction at High Rates

An interaction isn’t just a “comment” – it’s a chance to build a relationship and a fan.

Video Helps Us Build Relationships With Guests

For years, we’ve been privileged to host folks from all over the world and across the marketing industry.

We Work to Recognize Others in Our Videos

Recognizing the work of others is a wonderfully empathetic way to earn recognition for Moz, too.

Five of My Big Takeaways

If someone judged performance & metrics by our first two years of videos, they’d have shut down WB Friday.

Video cannot operate in a silo. Huge benefits are derived from the connection between SEO, social, video, & events.

The flexibility of video to adapt and help across the company came because we invested in dedicated resources.

We’ve NEVER had a “viral video.” But we benefit more from video than any of the marketers/founders I’ve talked to who’ve had that “viral” hit.

While we can + do measure ROI on video via analytics, much of the value is both serendipitous and largely unmeasurable – events, branding, loyalty, etc.

Via Liz Climo

Moz Peeps chasing the “viral video”

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | rand@moz.com

bit.ly/mozdoesvideo