Hudson Legal Web Video #2: Hitting Our Reality Stride

The second installment of our online video series launched a few days ago. As I promised on my video #1 reflections I thought it would be useful to dive deeper into what we have learned during production.

Piggyback Your Shoots
Hudson has offices spread out all over the US. Coordinating the production of a video shoot in those offices on a monthly basis could become a full-time job. It takes a lot to schedule hotels, and flights, schedule the subjects of the videos, etc. So, at Cantaloupe’s suggestion we chose to shoot 2 locations that are in relatively close geographic proximity (New York and Philadelphia) to capture content for 2 videos at once. This has been immensely helpful as we have refined our email marketing approach and other promotion tactics instead of being in the field shooting video #3.

Get into an Editing Rhythm
We went through a lot of iterations in the editing of video #1. Having never done a series like this, we spent a lot of time trying to establish the tone and overall storyline for the series. Much of the back and forth was properly setting up the viewer to know what the series would be all about. With video #2, the editing process was FAR easier. The production team knew what to do with the second story based on learnings from the first piece. Their initial edit was 85% of what we needed, and we had only some minor tweaks from there. We knew the team was in a rhythm, which made things much more smooth.

Use a Video Timeline
In the editing process, I found it really helpful to build a full timeline of the video with minutes/seconds counters and text explanations of the scenes. It was then extremely easy for everyone involved in providing feedback to reference specific times and sequences in the video.

Track Video Effectiveness
Cantaloupe provides us with a really compelling backend tracking tool called Backlight. Within Backlight, we can see exactly how many people have viewed the video, how many viewers made it through the piece and how many dropped out at what point in the video. This helps inform us on the right length for the segments and where we may have missed the mark on content. Have a look at the graph shown below. You can see how many seconds into the video users start to trail off and stop watching.

Screen capture from Cantaloupe Backlight stats tracking.

Promote the Video via Email
Of course, once you spend time creating a video masterpiece, you’d like to attract as many viewers to it as possible. Part of it is to regularly email prospects and customers about the video. We send out nicely formatted emails to people who hopefully “follow” the series to let them know another video is out there. I thought the promise of seeing video content at one point in the web cycle would have caused astronomical open and click through rates. The first piece we sent we received a 15% open rate and 20% of the opens clicked through to watch the video. I don’t have any idea yet whether those are good or bad stats. If anyone has that information, please let me know.

The email marketing teaser to encourage you to watch the next video in the reality series

I’m excited that Video #2 is live because it shows the real story of Hudson’s people in a very real way. Now that we’ve hit our reality stride, I can’t wait to see where this takes us.