Using Interactive Video to Drive Video Testing on a Budget

Every marketing professional knows there is never enough budget available to create all of the content, design all of the assets, configure all of the campaigns, and run all of the media buys you’d like. Great ideas often exceed a team’s financial ability to execute, and with video marketing that challenge is even more pronounced. Video content can be expensive to create and then difficult to update after the fact. Once you’ve got your final version, you live with it.

Or do you?

Interactive video can change the entire budgeting and ROI evaluation for video marketing. Because interactive video players like Mindstamp deliver an interactive layer on top of the core video asset, it’s simple to test many variations of interactions on the same underlying video. The result is you can run many campaigns, evaluate multiple CTA design concepts and test many different content treatments without changing the video itself.

Let’s say, for instance, your goal is to get the viewers of your video to click on an element in the video that will open another website or URL. You could easily test four different interactive elements that might drive the click you want, including:

• A Button - Buttons are big, obvious and clear in their usage. A viewer watching your video will immediately know you want them to click it. You can easily change the button’s location on the video, what a click on the button does, the design of the button, the size and more. With buttons alone you can test dozens of potential layouts and configurations of the video call-to-action. You can pause the video for a period to encourage a click or even make the click required.

• An Image - Images, including animated GIFS, can jump out from the video at the perfect time to drive a click. This could be an image of a product you want the customer to buy, a custom button design you want to test (outside of the standard Mindstamp button function), or a more visually engaging call-to-action. Rather than incorporating the clickable element directly into your video, you can leave the space available and test multiple different designs, color schemes and layouts by adding the image on top of the video.
• A Hotspot - If your video natively includes the elements you want your viewer to click on, you can activate that portion of the video with a hotspot. Within hotspots you can test using distinct labels, turn the hotspot indicator on and off, and use other indicators on screen to direct the viewer to the right behavior.

• Clickable Text - HTML-based clickable text allows you to create any number of banners, unique text sizes and color combinations to drive viewers to take an action on your video. These call outs can be unique to the content on the screen at any given time to test a number of moments in the video and combinations of text to achieve the targeted result.

In combination, these four elements create a limitless set of potential interactive experiments to run on top of your existing video asset. No need to go back to the agency to update your video. Instead, you can build your campaigns, tailor your content and modify the design of the interactive elements to maximize the viewer outcome you want, and through that the ROI of your video marketing.

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