I am always happy to hear our clients express excitement about their new website. As Client Success Manager, I am the team member who trains each client on how to use Boxer CMS, then remain their contact as questions and support needs arise. Because of that relationship, I get to hear many testimonials, things like how a new site has positively impacted the client’s business and or how the client loved working with everyone on our team.
Up until now, we have obtained written testimonials, but reading a testimonial just isn’t the same as seeing the expressions and excitement straight from the client. We decided it was time to capture some of their feedback on film. Through this medium, we would also add a very important video component to our digital brand ecosystem.
Prior to Factory Week, we worked with 2355 productions to film and edit the testimonials. We had the video files in hand, but needed to upload the files to our youtube channel and optimize them for search engines.
This simple task was put on hold as our pre-Factory Week schedule was jam-packed. As Jeb always says, it’s good to schedule a few “quick win” projects alongside some of the more intense goals like building a video game in one week. This was one of those quick wins.
Throughout the process of creating these video testimonials I realized how close I had become to our clients, and I’m honored that Rita from Noble and Todd from Dr. Todd’s enthusiastically agreed to endorse us on video. But don’t take my word for it watch the videos below!
This is the first installment of a new series that SmallBox will be running to highlight some of the cool things our clients are doing. We’ve worked with such a diverse array of businesses over the past few years, the variety is almost mind-boggling. We work with such a wide variety of companies and industries. From an HR and Employee Benefits company to a company that specializes in delivering top-quality, low-cost flooring products like vinyl plank flooring, we feel like we have a million stories to tell about our clients, and no one to tell them to but each other. So we thought we’d try sharing a few of these stories with you, dear reader.
We’re kicking off the series with a post about Floors To Your Home because we feel that the way they are building up their internet presence is a model for how really effective national e-commerce brands will work in the future. We think that the way that Floors To Your Home is going ‘above-and-beyond’ right now will be ‘the new normal’ in the future, as more of the total retail pie shifts from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce and the space becomes more competitive.
No. 1: “More than words”
Great content and lots of it has been the new model for a while. And Floors To Your Home has great content. When most companies talk about ‘great content’ on their site, they are referring to the text on a page. Design is important for user experience, text is important for SEO purposes. Text is also important for user-experience, of course: if the text is not helpful or interesting to the user it will alienate your customer. So you have to have the most informative, interesting text on the market or your not going to get anywhere. That’s your baseline. But Floors To Your Home decided that wasn’t enough. So they added video tutorials to their main pages. Visit their site and you’ll see their tutorials ranging from how to lay laminate flooring to their explanation of the difference between engineered hardwood flooring and solid hardwood flooring we think that floors to your home has positioned themselves not only as the most affordable flooring site on the internet, but also as an authority and resource for aspiring DIY-ers to get a feel for flooring.
We’re hoping that–sometime in the foreseeable future–whenever you have a question about flooring, you’ll type it in to the search bar on your laptop or your smartphone and Floors To Your Home will be right there on page one to provide you with all of the answers. Like for example, what was the difference between solid hardwood flooring and engineered hardwood flooring? I mean what is it exactly? Obviously the one is engineered, and the other solid, but what does that even mean? [Snapping fingers] It’s on the tip of my tongue…
Luckily, Mr. Kahn’s answer is at my fingertips as soon as I type the question into the Google Search Bar:
There are a number of tangible, measurable benefits to putting really great video on your site.
First, it hooks visitors, causing them to spend more time on your site and to engage more deeply with your brand. This increases Google’s ‘time-on-site’ metric, which is becoming more important as user-experience becomes more central to the way that sites are ranked. Secondly, if your visitor is still in the early research phase, just toying with the concept of laying new flooring in their home, if your video was the one that convinced them that they could ‘do-it-themselves’ your brand will be top-of-mind when that visitor decides to make a purchase.
No. 2: Brand Digital Ecosystem
Floors To Your Home is one of our first clients to become fully invested in a new integrated marketing strategy that SmallBox is calling our ‘Brand Digital Ecosystem.’ Floors To Your Home is thinking outside of the box and beyond the borders of their website about new ways in which their online brand can be enhanced.
So what is Vyou? It is pretty much formspring meets youtube. The premise is that people can ask users questions by typing a query into a form field. The questions can be asked either anonymously, or with a name attached for registered account holders. The user receives a notification of the new question, and the user responds in a short video.
It’s a neat little site that I was introduced to it when I was following the creator for an animated show that I enjoy. I thought it would be interesting to sign up and get a sense of how I could possibly include this new social Q/A service into my web life, and also to share my conclusions with all of you!
I found my first day that it was pretty exciting. VYou tweeted out my name and soon I had a flood of questions to answer from people all around the world. Most of the questions were inappropriate or obviously spam, but I got a few good ones. But after that initial day, even after tweeting it a couple times, I haven’t gotten a single new question, and I haven’t really been interested in asking Courtney Love any questions (it looks like she doesn’t use the site much anymore anyway). I looked and most of the interesting people on Vyou have already stopped answering questions months ago. Therefore I was left without much reason to visit the site again.
Ask Courtney love about sobriety! Its all she talks about!
Which is sad because I think its a great idea. I just think it needs some help. I think it will probably die out unless one of these things happens:
The site gets some buzz and people start using it again,
They partner with formspring, who already has a strong user base,
Justin Bieber signs up.
I think it would be a great service for promoting various projects. I would love to ask a cinematographer how shooting is going on the newest movie he is working on, ask a member of my favorite band about their latest recording session, or have an artist show a sample of what they are working on. Simply put, Its a great way for you to ask questions directed at people you wouldn’t normally get a chance to interact with.
