Making “The Funny” Work For Your Marketing Plan
When you shop online, the last thing you want to worry about is the actual process of shopping–what designers call the “user experience”. Yet the energy and work that goes into making your online shopping experience seamless is vast. That’s where Elastic Path comes in. Elastic Path is an e-commerce platform that works with companies to help them sell goods and services in the best way possible: the easy way.
Making Movies
In 2007, Capulet was invited to spearhead a short video series for Elastic Path, a tall order when you consider how hard it is to make e-commerce compelling. After all, e-commerce is the kind of thing most consumers don’t want to think about. A customer wants in and out with their product. That’s where we decided to start: the point of sale and what would happen if shopping in a real-world store was just like shopping online.
We produced seven videos for Elastic Path. All seven were shot in one day and we cast an outgoing executive from Elastic Path and local actress Mercedes Dunphy to star in them. There’s a nifty jingle, and the second video proudly features a turnip. They’re short, sweet, and designed to make you think about your online shopping experience and what it would be like if all of your shopping experiences were the same. Are we the next Scorsese? (No.) We’ll let you be the judge. Here’s the first of the seven videos called “If Only Search Engines Could Understand What We Want”:
Upping the Ante
It doesn’t hurt to add a little extra incentive and encourage your viewers to share your videos. That’s why we ran a contest asking people to embed Elastic Path’s videos on their own sites. Those who did entered to win a $100 Amazon gift certificate. Contests may be inevitable when encouraging people to share your content, but they also work.
In the end, finding “the funny” in your online shopping experience was key to building a video series that stands out.
Getting Results
Elastic Path used the videos to entice more visitors to its new blog, and as eye candy at industry events and trade shows. Jason Billingsley, the co-founder and vice-president of innovation at Elastic Path Software at the time, was pleased with the results. He’s quoted in this Financial Post article about creative online ideas:
“The blog got more popular in the search engines, which bought in more traffic, and more people saw the videos, which generated more links, which generated higher rankings in the search engines, and the cycle continued,” Mr. Billingsley says.
The firm then capitalized on the extra traffic by bringing in another blogger who blogged on its site more frequently. It increased the number of subscribers to its blog from 100 to about 2,000 in seven months.