Improve Your Video Marketing with Limbik

Troy:
Hi RockStars. Troy Dean here from RockStar Empires, and I have all the way from New York City my good friend, Zach Schwitzky. Hi, Zach, how you doing?

Zach:
Great. How are you?

Troy:
I'm very well, man. Thank you for joining us on the blog here. This isn't … We don't even actually have an official podcast here. This is just like a video blog we're going to put up. We're probably going to roll out a podcast at some point, but this is minimum viable blog at the moment, so thanks for being a guinea pig. Hey, for those that don't know you, tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background is.

Zach:
Yeah. Name's Zach Schwitzky. As Troy mentioned, here in New York, founded a company recently called Limbik focused on video analytics and engagement. Before that was founder of a company called Newlio, which did survey analytics, and before that I was doing some media and entertainment consulting after a very brief career in baseball ended.

Troy:
Who were you playing for?

Zach:
The Arizona Diamondbacks. A very brief stint. As they say, I had a cup of tea.

Troy:
Had a cup of tea. Love it. I went to Fenway Park in Boston a couple of weeks ago while I was out there, and watched potentially the most boring baseball game in the history of baseball. It was the Boston Red Sox and the Minnesota Twins, and I was expecting the Red Sox to win. Like the Red Sox are just one of those … If I was going to support a team, it'd probably be the Red Sox, and the Minnesota Twins beat them 2-1. Those 3 home runs, by the way, were hit in like the first 2 innings of the game, so the rest of the game was just like, “What's going on?”

Zach:
You were waiting for something to happen.

Troy:
Yeah, waiting for something to happen, and not much happened. Anyway, so video analytics and engagement, so tell me … I mean, it seems like online video is kind of this juggernaut that is never going to end, and everyone's kind of jumping on the bandwagon. Why should … Why do video analytics and engagement matter? Why should we even be paying attention to this right now, with everything that's going on online, everything that we're supposed to be kind of juggling as entrepreneurs, why does video analytics and engagement actually matter?

Zach:
I think it matters for a couple of reasons, right? As you said, it's extremely popular and only getting more so by the day, and the analytics side of it is important for a couple of reasons. One, we look at attention as the new currency, right? There's so many different things happening, and different things that could potentially distract people. I think they say you get fractions of a second when people land on your site to grab their attention, so when looking at … Using or looking at videos, it's really there to capture people's attention; understanding how well you're doing that, and then having the tools to improve is obviously of necessity and huge benefit right now. Then I think the second piece is when you look at like website analytics, it started with, “How many people do I have on my site, and how long are they spending there,” but if that is the extent of what you have, I don't think you'd be satisfied. You want to go a lot deeper and say, “Is it working or not?”

What we found is that, when it comes to video, it really can be, for a lot of people, like a black hole. I know how many people clicked “play,” and maybe I know how much of my video was played, but certainly I don't really have an idea if they were paying attention to it, or if it was moving the needle and ultimately getting people to, one, pay attention, and ultimately take whatever action I want them to take as a result of watching my video.

Troy:
What's, because I know that Wistia and Vimeo, Vimeo just upgraded their analytics, they've launched Vimeo Business. I know that those, and YouTube apparently gives you some analytics as well. I've never managed to kind of figure that out, but what do you think the problem is with the current video analytics solutions out there?

Zach:
Yeah, so I think the problem is, they're not analytics companies, right? They do something else, whether it's YouTube and Vimeo more as a social network specific to video, or Wistia, Brightcove, Ooyala, that are really enterprise-hosting providers that have some different functionality, analytics being one of their secondary offerings, and so kind of look at it as a, “Oh, by the way, here's some data,” and it's all pretty much the same, regardless of the provider. How many people clicked “Play,” how much of the video or the content was played, and then maybe a level or 2 deeper than that. Really, when you think about other things specifically online, like a website, your hosting provider for the site, and the people that built it, and your analytics provider, are probably 2 or 3 different entities, right?

The way Limbik is approaching this is, saying, “We don't want to be your hosting provider. There's plenty of companies out there that do that really well,” but to layer on top of that, an analytics provider, in this case Limbik, can really help you understand, “Are people actually paying attention to your content?” and then to answer that important, “Well, why do I care about this? What does this data actually help me do?” is layering in some tools that actually allow you to say, “I'm going to take this data and now improve the performance, or in other words optimize my video to capture more attention, and ultimately get whatever it is I want people to do, to actually do it.”

Troy:
Yeah. All right, let's walk us through some of the details. Like what does that look like? How is it different to what I can do with Vimeo or Wistia?

Zach:
We look at it this way, right? Wistia is a perfect example. They have engagement is one of their core metrics, and that's the percentage of your video that was actually played. Very important. Much more important than just looking at the number of plays or views, but just because a video's playing certainly doesn't mean that I'm actually paying attention to it, right? Case in point is, I, plenty of times throughout the day, have a video playing on the left side of my screen and sending email or playing solitaire on the right side of my screen, or I have the video muted, or I have it playing in a tab that's not visible. We said, “Let's go a step deeper than just looking at whether or not the video was playing, and say: Are people actually paying attention to it?” Our core metric around attention we've called the Limbik Rating, and that factors in a couple of different things. Is the volume on, and to what level? Is the video playing in a tab that's visible?

If we're seeing clicks or swipes on the screen, are they happening away from where the video's playing; and so we're able to aggregate that data, and really in a very simple and standardized way say, “Here's the percentage of your content that people were actually paying attention to.” When everything else is driven off that, it makes your decision-making or understanding a lot easier, and then as I alluded to earlier, having the tools to actually do something with that information, increase engagement or attention, and get people to action or conversion. That could be anything from an email gate, so getting their contact information so you can reach out to them after the fact, or driving them to action with a call to action, or asking questions to understand more about what they want from you or your company or future content. There's a lot of different ways to optimize video, but we believe that that really starts with an understanding of how well has your video performed to begin with.

Troy:
Right. There's lots to unpack here, so I want to dig into this a little bit. Engagement, so we talk about engagement, and I've … Full disclaimer, I've been using Limbik. We've used it on one video as an experiment so far. I like it. I've got a Limbik Rating of 17.4. I don't know if that's good. In fact … Well, I think it is, because I think you tell me what the benchmark is, so I think we're a little bit above the benchmark, which is nice; however what, so … In talking about engagement, so let's say, let's pretend that the only thing you guys do is tell me the engagement of my video, and let's say I publish a video that has really low engagement. My job, then, as a video marketer, is to go back and watch that video and ask myself:

“Why are people not engaging with this video,” and then go and set up the studio, spend a day making another video and publishing that, running an experiment, emailing my list, driving some Facebook ads to it, and then measuring, again, how that video compared to the previous one. Now, if that … I mean, that's pretty good, but there's a few other tools that I can use in Limbik, which speed up that process, right? …

Zach:
Exactly.

Troy:
… so, talk to me about reactions.

Zach:
Yeah, so if you think about the way that we consume content, not just online but offline too, and the example we use often is, if you go to a movie and you walk out of the theater … Let's say you saw it with a friend or your significant other. Very rarely, I would say, likely never, do you walk out and say, “I liked it, or I didn't like it, and that's the end of the conversation.” Right? There's some nuances there. There are certain pieces of the movie that you liked or didn't like, or stimulate conversation after the fact. When you look at, like YouTube, for example, they give the viewer, the audience, a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down or nothing at all, right, but if you click thumbs-up, it's limited to once per view of that video;  so you're essentially saying, “If you click thumbs-up, I liked this entire video,” or that's how I interpret it if I'm the owner of that video or that content. What reactions do is allow you to let the audience react to the content as they're watching it moment by moment, right?

At different points in the video, I might be able to say, “I'd like this, or I don't like this, or I think this is funny or interesting.” The reactions are customizable, so as the content owner, I can dictate those emotions that I feel are important, or I want to understand, if they're being stimulated as people watch my content, but from a data standpoint, it's really interesting to see where specifically is my content driving attention or engagement or response. To your point, Troy, that's very helpful from an optimization standpoint, whether you're looking to optimize existing content or go create new content. Because you can see that at the 15-second mark, for example, is where people were really interested, but at 25, they weren't, there was a significant drop-off; so I should be conscious of how long my videos are, how long I take to get into key points that I'm trying to make or talk about.

Really, again, it's specific to the type of content, but it's very helpful to understand much more than, “I liked or I didn't like this video in its entirety,” the nuances of how your content is making people react as they're watching it.

Troy:
I set up some reactions in my video. I think one was, “I like it.” One was, “I love it.” The other one was, “This is boring.” I've actually had five people say that the video was boring, which is cool, that's good to know. Out of 270 unique viewers, I'm okay that five found it boring. What I did learn is that lots of people love it, lots of people really like it, and so then what I did is, at the end of the video, I also added one of your features, which is a question or like a poll, and that question was, “Do you want to see more videos like this, and if so, what is the subject that you would like to see more videos about?” It was phrased a bit better than that. The reason I like this is because if someone makes it all the way to the end of the video, they're a really engaged viewer, and so …

Zach:
Absolutely.

Troy:
… they're the people that I want to serve. I'm not really interested in serving the people that bounce after 10 or 15 seconds. I'm really interested in serving the people that make it all the way through, because they're highly engaged. What I really like about this is that I was thinking that people in my audience like to see under the hood, and look at the processes that we use to run our business. That was my theory, so that was one of the questions, one of the topics I gave them, is, “What do you want to see more videos on? Marketing? Processes?” There's some other things, and processes won hand down. That was like the clear winner by that 60% of people that made it all the way to the end want to see more videos around processes. That in itself has actually, is informing our entire content strategy.

Not just our video strategy, but the blog posts that we're putting out, the infographics, the flowcharts that we're designing now are all around us open-sourcing our business processes and sharing those processes with the audience, which I don't think I could have got that information from any of the other tools that I was using.

Zach:
Well, it's such a great point you bring up, right? Because on one hand, it allows you to go out and learn things that you may not have otherwise learned, but in a lot of cases, it's about validating what would otherwise be an assumption, right, to your much earlier point about, it just expedites the process of things that would have otherwise taken much longer to do. A lot of times, that's the type of thing that can be significantly helpful, specifically in business. We look at that all the time as to say, “We think we're right, but if we're wrong, and it's going to cost us two weeks, or two years, and a whole lot of money, because we have to go back and now fix something when we could have just gone out there and asked the people that we're trying to talk to, or engage, or sell to, ‘What do you want,' and then deliver that sort of on-order, on-demand, it can create a lot of efficiencies in the way we go about our day-to-day.”

Troy:
Now, there are two features that you guys have just rolled out, which I'm really excited about. I'm just sort of starting to play with them. One is, let's talk about email gates, to begin with. Explain what an email gate is for those that don't know.

Zach:
Yeah, so it's a very simple email capture. If you're inclined, you can ask for first and last name, and the interesting thing about the email gate, is you can present it before, during, or at the end of your video. Again, depending on the type of content and what it is that you're looking to achieve, will drive when that's most applicable to present it, but it's a great way to say, “Not only do I understand how people, individually, are engaging with my content, now I can actually get their contact information so I can follow up with them later.”

Troy:
There's one cool feature that you've got, too, in that, is that you allow people … There's an option that you can tick to allow people to skip the email gate and just say, “No,” and continue watching the video, which I … That's a really nice usability … Follows the kind of permission marketing ethos from Seth Godin. It's like, “I'd like … Give me your email address to see the rest of this video, or you can just tell me to nick off and watch the rest of the video anyway,” so that's kind of nice. I like that one, thank you for that. I know you guys are kind of MVP at the moment, but I'm assuming that at some point, those email addresses will integrate with whatever CRM I'm using so that I can drop them into some kind of email campaign?

Zach:
Yeah, absolutely. We want to make sure that we are part of that feedback loop so you can use whatever tools you're using, and benefit from the enhanced analytics that we can provide specific to your video content.

Troy:
Also, from an entrepreneur's point of view, I imagine that integrating with some of the services like an Ontraport or InfusionSoft will allow you to reach out to those companies too, and say, “Hey, this might be really helpful for your audience. We should talk about promoting it to your users.”

Zach:
It's a great point. You're absolutely spot on, and one of the exciting things for us, right now, Limbik works with any YouTube or Vimeo video. Part of our motivation for that was saying that having access to enterprise-like or type analytics and video marketing features should not require you to have to pay significant dollars for hosting and bandwidth. Let's keep your videos at YouTube or Vimeo, and layer on the Limbik player, essentially take full control and do some of the cool things we've been talking about, plus the analytics that you're going to get, but … Yeah, you bring up a great point, that we don't want to compete with the Wistias and the Brightcoves, and the Ooyalas, even the Vidyards of the world. Because what they do provides great benefit, especially from a hosting and bandwidth standpoint: If we can layer on top of, or be part of the process with those companies, it's a great opportunity for us, and we feel like a huge value add for people that are already working with those great companies.

Troy:
Yeah, yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about the other feature dynamic CTAs in a moment, but before we do that, just to be clear: When you use Limbik, you take a video that you're already hosting on YouTube or Vimeo, and you paste that URL into the Limbik interface, and then Limbik spits out its own embed code that you then put on your website, right?

Zach:
It's that simple.

Troy:
Perfect, so don't be confused, kids. You don't need to host your videos with Limbik. You can just use this on your existing … If you've got an existing bank of videos on YouTube or Vimeo, you can just start using, I mean, the Limbik player, and start getting really good, actionable insights on that video content, which is awesome. We've got so much video content, and we just don't know if it's engaging, or if people are liking it or reacting to it in any way. Talk to me about dynamic CTAs, because this is really exciting for me.

Zach:
Yeah, we're excited about this one too. A CTA, let's say, typically, is at the end of a video. “You've watched my content, now I'm asking you to do something or take action. Go sign up for this, or buy something, or subscribe, or even watch my next video,” so we do offer that. You can put a clickable link, or … A clickable message, at the end of your video, to inform people what you want them to do next, but what we realized is most people, and this is a general statement, but most people that are watching video don't end up making it to the end. Therefore, they never see your call to action or have the opportunity to do what it is … Whatever it is you want them to do, so we said, similar to like the YouTube annotation, you should have the ability to put a call to action throughout the video. Right? Doesn't have to stop or interrupt the video. You can just layer it on, and it sits in the bottom-right corner. Then we realize that how do you actually know where the best point in the video is to put that?

Do it put it at the halfway point, or the 75% point? Obviously, the more data you have to see where drop-off occurs, you could manually go in and move that around, or, in the case of dynamic CTAs, let Limbik do that for you in an automated fashion. The way dynamic CTAs work is, you put the, it's custom text with whatever link or URL you want people to be able to click, and then you decide where you want that call to action to start, right? Let's say, for argument's sake, the 30-second mark in your video. Then as people start watching and engaging with your video, Limbik automatically moves that call to action to 1 second before your steepest point of drop-off. Basically, in other words, we're saying, “We're going to make sure, at any moment, that the majority of the people that are engaging with your video actually have a chance to take the action that you want them to take.”

Troy:
That is awesome, and I can see so much potential for that. The mind boggles in terms of what you can do with that. I know we spoke about this when I was in New York, and I know it's something that's not … I'm not going to ask you to make any promises that you can't keep, but one of the things that … I don't know, you were kind of talking about this on the roadmap in the future, but one of the things that I'm really curious to see, if it's possible, is to kind of program these like choose your own adventure videos. Where I can introduce a video for 60 seconds and then say, “Hey, if you want to learn how to generate more leads, click this button. If you want to learn to generate more referrals from your existing network, then click this button, or if you want to learn how to run Facebook ads, click this button.”

Based on the button or the action that people take, it scrolls to either a new video or a part of that video that is relevant. Is that something that is even technically possible, at some point?

Zach:
Yeah, and what's cool about it is, so one, it's in our roadmap, and a lot of that is because of the early conversations we've had with you, so thank you for that; so, yeah, you're absolutely right that it presents some really interesting opportunities. The thing that we're excited about with that is, you can do it sort of proactively, so saying, in your example is, “You've gotten to this point now. Do you want to go learn more about A or B?” Right, and take them, choose your own adventure, but you can also let this stuff happen more organically based on the implicit behaviors of people. Right? If you find that they're more engaged with something, or if they're reacting a certain way, you can let that dictate what they see or have the opportunity to interact with next, so …

There's a lot of very cool things that we can do, and ultimately to bring this back full circle is, really everything that Limbik is about and stands for, and wants to provide to our users is, the ability to capture and keep more attention, and ultimately get more people to take whatever action it is that you want them to talk.

Troy:
Yeah. Awesome. Hey, a little bit off-topic, what's … I know that our audience loved this kind of stuff. As an internet entrepreneur, what is the biggest challenge you have right now in business? What keeps you awake at night?

Zach:
Focus. There's a whole lot of stuff going on, and it seems, when you're talking about juggling, trying to build launch products and companies, and hire and retain key people, and manage investors, and go out and find new … There are just so many things going on, and literally by the minute that you could have four things coming on your plate that you didn't anticipate. We here in New York, and in our office, say, “Hack your way to relevance,” which is basically our way of saying, “Let's pick out the one thing that matters most, do everything we can to achieve it as quickly as possible. Then we can move on to other things.”

Troy:
Yeah, and it's funny, because that changes, as you mature, as a company, like I kind of, I … We've just started a new company, and because so … I kind of always wish we were starting things, because when you start thing, it's like when your company matures and you've got hundreds of customers, keeping them happy and keeping them retained, and minimizing churn … That's a whole bunch of other kind of headaches that you got to solve, whereas when you start something, it's like, “I love this scrapping around in the dirt, looking for the worm. I love that kind of, the hacky way to relevance thing.” Because once you're relevant, it's like you've got to stay relevant. You got to stay engaging, and that's a whole other ballgame, and that's hard.

Zach:
Yeah, and it's sort of like success always being a moving target. How you define it today is very different than how you're going to define it once you achieve successes you understand today, so you're absolutely right. It's sort of, defines something that is achievable, go do it, and then move on to whatever's next, and if you're motivated like us, the fun is in playing the game.

Troy:
Yeah. Absolutely. Hey, are you familiar with Leo Laporte up at This Week in Tech?

Zach:
No.

Troy:
Leo Laporte, when I was in San Francisco, we drove up an hour and a half to Petaluma, and we visited Leo Laporte's studio. He's got a podcasting studio up there. He produces live streams and produces about 15 different podcasts, video podcasts, shows a week. He's got about 25 staff working up there. It's a major, a major operation. It's so inspiring. I'm going to introduce you to the guys at This Week in Tech, because I think they would be really interested in looking at what you guys are doing, because This Week in Tech is basically like uncovering new technology on the internet, and I think they'd be very interested in, and they've got a huge audience up there, major operation. I'm going to try and make that connection and see if I can get you guys on This Week in Tech, because I think you'd be a perfect fit. I actually went up there and sat in the studio and watched them record an episode of the podcast live. It was fascinating stuff, so … Check out T-W-I-T.tv., twit.tv. Check it out. It's a serious operation, man. I'll make an introduction.

Hey, the other good thing about Limbik is, you guys have got this crazy offer for our community. Talk us through that. What does that look like?

Zach:
Yeah, just for you, because you're such a good friend of the company and been such a valuable asset for us, 12 months free for anybody that comes through our boy, Troy.

Troy:
Awesome. That's awesome. I'm going to put the link under this video. It's Limbik, spelled with a K, so it's L-I-M-B-I-K .io. If you sign up and enter the code rockstar, you are going to get 12 months of Limbik access for absolutely 0 dollars. Limbik, by the way, I know where the name comes from, but share it with our audience. What's the name about?

Zach:
There is a little story back there. The limbic system in the brain controls emotional response, so a little bit of a play on words. We put a K to sort of make it our own, but yeah, we figure video is all about capturing attention and driving response, so there's a little bit of a parallel there.

Troy:
Is that what Seth Godin calls the lizard brain? Is that that kind of the … No, that's the amygdala, isn't it? It's the, yeah, the amygdala is kind of a lizard brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's all about the survival and sex impulse, which is … That's what causes shiny object syndrome, right?

Zach:
It's all about motivation, right?

Troy:
Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. Hey, Zach, thank you for spending some time with us here at RockStar Empires. I wish you guys all the best. I love what you're doing at Limbik. I'm going to continue to use the video player, and we'll get our audience to come over and start using the video player as well to give you guys some feedback, and look forward to catching up next time I'm out in New York.

Zach:
That's wonderful. We look forward to it, and we'll take great care of everybody.

Troy:
Awesome. Take care, man.