I ran a marketing experiment a few weeks ago, sending out an email newsletter, offering my readers either a blog post or a video tutorial on the same topic (setting and raising your fees). I wanted to see which content format they preferred, text or video. The results were surprising!
- Blog post: 9 things to consider when raising your fees (including your own fears about doing it). You can read the blog post here.
- Video tutorial: Setting and raising your fees
After a few weeks of watching statistics, here are the results so far:
- The FIRST choice they made when they got the email was to choose the video tutorial link (59%) versus the blog link (41%)
- But those initial clicks can be deceiving…because some people clicked on both links. In total, 56% clicks on the video tutorial versus 44% on the blog post.
- When they visited the video tutorial, the vast majority chose to download it rather than watching it online via streaming. It would be an interesting test, to give your audience a video and not let them download it. That way, you can discover: do they finish watching the video? (How many videos have YOU downloaded and never watched???)
- Time spent on the blog post page was over 3 minutes, so they actually read the blog post. The same can’t be proven for the video. If your customer doesn’t consume your content, what’s the point of content marketing? A three-minute blog post is an easier “ask” than a 1-hour video tutorial.
The take away idea
If it’s not too difficult, do both. Write your blog post, then create a video summary of it. Offer your customers both, and see which one they choose.
With this new knowledge in hand, I went back and made three or four video summaries for existing blog posts on my Success Alliance blog, and filmed all those videos all at once. It was more efficient to record them in one sitting, rather than to record a new video each time I write a blog post.
How did I choose which videos to create summaries for? I looked on Google Analytics to find the videos that had the most visits over the past year. There’s no sense creating summary videos for unpopular blog posts, right?
I then posted the video summaries on my YouTube Channel. As part of my new YouTube Channel, I created some short videos (under 3 minutes) which were summaries of existing, popular blog posts. I included a link to that blog post in the description box of the video. We’ll add those video summaries into the actual blog posts themselves in a few weeks, then watch the statistics to see:
1. Which link do they click when we send out an email with both a blog link and a YouTube link?
2. Do they watch the video when it’s posted inside of the blog itself?
I hope this gives you some ideas to chomp on! In the end analysis, it’s easy to see that people have a preference for how they consume content: reading, listening, watching. So, it’s up to you how much content you want to create, and which delivery mechanism works best for you and your audience. Not sure? Run this same test yourself and watch which types of content your customers select.
