The worst way to manage a video marketing campaign on Facebook and YouTube is to produce one and then sit back hoping it goes viral. That’s according to Alex McArthur, chief marketing officer for the mattress company Purple, who might know a thing or two given his success in the space, with some of the brand’s ads netting more than 53 million views.

Since its launch 18 months ago, Purple has been running an ongoing video campaign on social media using a quirky education-and-entertainment approach that it claims helped drive $75 million in online sales in 2016. Taken together, Purple’s videos have amassed more than 500 million views.

But the key to the campaign’s success is the majority of those views have been part of purchased advertising. Rather than hoping its video ads catch on, Purple continuously primes the pump by buying social media advertising and placing its videos in front of various target audiences.

« Most companies that go with video either go with traditional TV or they create what they perceive as viral videos, meaning they launch it and hope that it catches on, » McArthur said. « Maybe they try to seed that with PR or partnerships [with] influencers. But the reality is that’s really tough to scale. But you can scale advertising. »

Honing an audience

Since everybody sleeps, Purple can push its video ads out to a wide variety of target audiences, according to McArthur. However, he added that there are events in people’s lives, such as getting married, divorced or moving out of the house to go to college, where people are more likely to be in the market for a new bed.

It’s not that Purple videos lack viral qualities. The company is simply not waiting around for shares to happen.

« We do run a heavy amount of advertising, and a lot of those people end up sharing the content, » McArthur said. « It does have that viral nature to it, but very few of our videos are traditionally viral videos that did not have advertising behind them. »

Purple chose online video as its lead marketing strategy because the medium is inexpensive, helps people get familiar with the brand and allows Purple to differentiate its product, per McArthur.

« The reality is mattresses aren’t a sexy topic to most people, » he said. « So we had to get in front of people and communicate the difference in the product because the material in Purple is drastically different than anything else out there. »

Breaking from the bland

Beyond helping Purple differentiate its product, online video has also been instrumental in differentiating the Purple brand from the rest of the industry, according to McArthur.

« The bedding industry has typically been very bland, » he said. « There isn’t a lot of personality in the marketing collateral. Our story is very different. We have a personality. We try and be approachable and relatable, not stiff and overly professional, and that has resonated with a lot of people. »

In one four-minute video, for example, a woman dressed as Goldilocks demonstrates how traditional mattresses are inferior by dropping a 330-pound sheet of tempered glass on hard, soft and medium mattresses with raw eggs on them.

In the case of the hard mattress, the eggs break because there isn’t enough give. In the case of the soft mattress, the eggs break because it doesn’t offer enough support. In the case of the medium mattress, the eggs break because it doesn’t offer much of either.

And, of course, in the case of the Purple mattress, the eggs remain unbroken.

As of this writing, the Goldilocks video has had more than 53 million views.

Shaping to a social mold

Purple’s video campaigns mesh well with the kinds of content people expect on social media, said Clair Bergam, an associate director at ad agency The Media Kitchen who manages online video campaigns for clients.

« A lot of the content you see on YouTube has that talking head, vlogger, do-it-yourself feel, » she said. « They [Purple] created an asset that played really nicely to the content that consumers expect to get on YouTube. »

« YouTube gives you a platform where you can do something a little weird, » Bergam added. « Making sure you have the platform in mind when creating an asset is the No. 1 step in achieving a successful campaign. »

The average view time for Purple videos is two minutes, according to McArthur.

« So even if a certain percentage drops off really quickly, enough other people are watching to the end that the average is close to two minutes, » he said.

McArthur claims that, in a given week, Purple has as much or more engagement on social media than the rest of the bedding industry combined.

« Some weeks that’s not the case, but on a very regular basis if you add up all of our engagement, it equals more than everybody in the bedding industry as a whole, » he said.

TV’s low-cost alternative 

McArthur said he believes social media video advertising’s low cost and measurability will lead to widespread adoption soon.

« Pushing video on low-cost channels to mass audiences is not something that has been widely adopted yet, but I believe will be in the next few years, » he said. « Where another company might say: ‘We need to spend millions of dollars launching on TV,’ well, for us we were able to get millions of people for pennies on the dollar. »

« Social media is a true platform now, and you can measure it as well as you could with AdWords, » he said.

Nick Barber, a Forrester analyst who specializes in video technology, added that online video can be measured second by second.

« If we notice a big drop off in the first few seconds, then our intro clearly was not engaging, » he said.

So far, Purple has produced just shy of 40 videos, some of which have had more than 20 versions tested before settling on a final cut. Also, some of the videos have had more than 20 introductions and so-called « outros » tested, according to Purple.

McArthur said that with social media advertising it’s possible to spend $100 to test a video and see if it works and, if not, to tweak it and spend another $100 on another test.

« When you find the experience people like, you can really scale it, » he said.

Statistics first. Market analysts report that people are up to 85 percent more likely to buy products when they see a video of it. Seventy-one percent of marketers swear by video marketing for ensuring conversion. Video marketing was the apple of 2016’s eye. 2017 carries forward the love.

To put it simply, video marketing has a great future because it has a high potential for small businesses. Especially since a great percentage of people spend a better part of their time online, the chances of them sharing interesting videos or visual content is indeed high. Needless to say, your startup can grab many eyeballs by swinging along the trending tide. However, if you are still wary of using it for your business because of its complexity quotient, initial investment, and other factors, read on.

Image: Shutterstock

Big on the idea, small on the budget

The greatest things in the world are simple in their communication. Just because you want to make a video, it does not mean that you need to squeeze every last penny from your savings. For example, to make six-second to 10-second video, you can use a good smartphone which offers good features in the video recording department. You can later fix the clip on the editing or production table. You can also invest in a decent camera and a tripod.

Additional tip: Whenever the need to shoot presents itself, let the word be heard inside the whole office. There’s a high chance you might fight a keen videographer in your art director, a photographer in your marketing department, and even an enthusiastic designer in the errand boy. You can also create DIY tripods and ladders with the help of your team. This will not only bring team members together and give them a chance to do something new together, it’ll also help you save a lot of money. If you stick to the same people, sooner or later you’ll have yourself a team of multi-faceted employees.

Be quality conscious

Never mistake poor budget for poor quality. If you do, the audience will feel the same. And, intoxicated by variety, the new-age customer will not think twice before moving onto a video that took care of how it would be perceived by its viewer. Quality is the key to conversation. Quality of the idea, quality of experimentation, quality of inspiration, quality of courage, quality of novelty, quality of simplicity, you name it – the overall quality of your video can make your relationship with new and potential consumers.

Calculate ROI with ease

Having made your investment in video, your number one priority will be measuring whether the resulting additional sales justify the cost. It’s impossible to determine exactly why each sale was made, but there are plenty of tools available that will give you a strong indication of your videos’ effectiveness.

For instance, Google offers a free, simple URL builder that lets you to add tags (known as UTM parameters) to URLs leading to your site. With these, you can use your Google Analytics account to track visitors to your site according to specific locations. Similar tools are available on YouTube and Facebook. Additionally, paid tools like Wistia offer a fully comprehensive tracking experience.

And, patience continues to be a virtue

Do not expect instant success. Do not plunge into an ocean of gloom if the initial response is slower than you anticipated. Not only will this come in the way of the quality of your future videos, it’ll end up making you waste your time. Until and unless it’s a Beatles reunion video, don’t expect a million views within hours of posting a video. Or for that matter, expect nothing even for weeks.

Start out with an intention to do something new, something different. Start out to bring teams members together. Start out to give yourself a break. The best content is not always born of desperation. Often it is born out of freedom. When you create something without another goal to achieve other than ‘joy’, you will invariably do what you love best. And what makes you best makes you unique. Therefore, it’s a good idea to wait not only for those results that will catapult you into the big league, but even those that will bring together the entire team.

Also read: How videos can transform your content marketing strategy

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The rise of live video over the last year or so has given content marketers a powerful new weapon to add to their armory. To add to venerable email marketing, blogging, social media and static video content, marketing professionals can now add a format that brings a whole new set of benefits. Live video is urgent, interactive and exclusive. It’s also demanding. And while it’s effective by itself, it achieves its best results when used as part of an integrated marketing plan.

That plan should have four elements:

1. Audience Building

Hit the « live » button on Facebook, and your audience members will receive a notification telling them that someone they know is broadcasting. That’s even more powerful of an interruption than telemarketing — it’s a call from someone they know. But only a small share of the audience will be free to participate at that moment, and the larger the number of people who receive that notification, the bigger the actual audience will be.

The first part of a live video marketing plan then is audience building: Line up followers so that when you’re ready to broadcast, you’ll have people watching and participating. There are all sorts of techniques for rapid audience building on social media, but one of the most effective is the strategy followed by YouTube magician Julius Dein. Dein partnered with other pages to share content, forging agreements with larger pages as his own audience grew. He went from zero to 6.5 million followers within a year. Make that growth part of your live video marketing strategy.

2. Brand Definition

What you say on your live video broadcasts will be important, but how you say it will be equally as important. The live video broadcasts created by Benefit Cosmetics are informal, friendly and tongue-in-cheek. The videos produced by Sephora are still casual but they’re more controlled and polite. It’s more like a gathering of women who lunch. Both broadcasts closely match their company’s brands.

Before you start planning your live video content, you’ll need a good understanding of the nature of your brand: its colors, its voice, its appearance, its style. If you haven’t created those elements already, you’ll need to lay them out and make sure that your company’s design matches the branding. And if you have defined your brand, you’ll need to ensure that your live video presenter, the background that appears behind him or her, and their choice of words all match exactly how your business presents itself.

Live video marketing is an extension of brand marketing. If it fails to extend the brand, it will fail to come across as authentic.

3. Relationship Building

No other content format can match the interaction between brand and audience than live video can build. It happens in real time and audience members actually get to hear their name spoken from the brand they admire.

That interaction is at its strongest when the audience member doesn’t feel as though they were picked out of a crowd but that they’re part of a community. The name-checking and question-answering that can take place in a live video should follow consistent and regular responses in comments so that audiences are accustomed to seeing each other. Social media provides an opportunity to bring the followers of a brand together, and they give the brand an opportunity to introduce those fans to each other. By the time your brand is welcoming people by name on a live video, the other audience members should be excited about seeing someone who feels like an old friend.

The marketing plan into which you’re introducing live video needs to include personalized interactions, whether that’s through comments on social media, carefully targeted emails sent to segmented lists, retargeted advertising or a combination of all of those tools. To make the most of live video’s interaction benefits, make sure that those measures are in place and active before you start naming viewers on live videos.

4. Calls To Action

The benefits of social media content are often described in vague terms like “branding” and “marketing.” It’s only when you start making use of Facebook’s advertising platform that you begin picking up stats that you can use to measure ROI and trace sales directly back to campaigns. The call to action that lets you turn interest and engagement into sign-ups and sales tends to take place in the right column or in the special offers pushed into sponsored posts.

Five people have been injured, two seriously, in an attack by a man armed with a chainsaw in the Swiss town of Schaffhausen, police say.

Central parts of the town on the German border have been sealed off, as police are searching for the attacker.

Police and ambulances are on the scene and rescue helicopters are circling overhead, police spokeswoman Cindy Beer is quoted as saying by Swissinfo.

The police say the attack is not related to terrorism.

Police have released a picture of the alleged suspect, who is still on the run, but have not named him.

They have warned that the man, who is about 190cm (6.2ft) tall, with an unkempt appearance, is dangerous.

Local shops are also shut, and people have been told to avoid the area.

The police say the alarm was raised at 10:39 local time (08:39 GMT), when an armed man was reported to have entered office buildings in Schaffhausen.

At a news conference, police said the attacker was believed to be driving a white VW van, and reassured the public that a large number of officers had been deployed in the area.

Schaffhausen is the capital of the Swiss canton with the same name.

About 36,000 people live in the historic town.

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

In reality, while the changes made the measure somewhat more palatable to the White House, they mainly provided a face-saving way to back down from a confrontation it was sure to lose if the sanctions bill reached the floor of the House. The Senate passed the original version of the bill, 97 to 2, and Republicans and Democrats expected a similarly overwhelming, veto-proof majority in the House if it came to a vote.

Not only would a veto by Mr. Trump have presumably been overridden by Congress, but White House advisers conceded it would have been politically disastrous. While other presidents might also have resisted legislation taking away their power to have the final say on sanctions, for Mr. Trump such a stance would be untenable given investigations into whether his team colluded with Russia during the election.

Administration officials said that Mr. Trump supported the array of sanctions that have already been imposed on Russia over the last three years since its annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. While he has talked of improving relations with Moscow, aides noted that he had done nothing in his first six months in office to lift the sanctions.

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But aides prepared a plan in the early days of his administration to reverse some sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama in his final weeks in office in retaliation for Russia’s meddling in the election. The plan discussed by Mr. Trump’s aides was throttled after Republican congressional leaders publicly and privately warned against it.

The stand-down on the sanctions fight came at the start of a week in which the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner; and his former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, are all set to talk with congressional investigators. White House aides on Sunday sought to explain the president’s assertion on Twitter on Saturday that he has the “complete power to pardon” his relatives and advisers — and possibly even himself.

Jay Sekulow, one of the private lawyers representing Mr. Trump, said the president was simply asserting his authority after a Washington Post report that he was discussing it. But Mr. Sekulow denied that pardons were being considered. “We’re not researching the issue, because the issue of pardons is not on the table, there’s nothing to pardon from,” he said on ABC.

Asked if Mr. Trump could pardon himself, Mr. Sekulow said it was a matter of debate among legal scholars. “From a constitutional, legal perspective you can’t dismiss it one way or the other,” he said. “I think it’s a question that would ultimately, if put in place, would probably have to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court to determine constitutionality.”

Still, even as Mr. Sekulow said pardons were not being considered, a senior administration official acknowledged that the president has raised the matter.

“I’m in the Oval Office with the president last week; we’re talking about that,” Mr. Scaramucci said on “Fox News Sunday.” “He brought that up. He said, but he doesn’t have to be pardoned. There’s nobody around him that has to be pardoned. He was just making the statement about the power of pardons.”

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Mr. Scaramucci said the Russia investigations were a distraction. “I worked intensely on that campaign, and I think that the Russian situation is completely overblown,” he said. “I was falsely accused of things related to Russia. I know other people are being falsely accused of things related to Russia. And I’m confident that tomorrow when Jared Kushner speaks, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed in saying this to you, it’ll probably be the last time that he has to talk about Russia.”

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Police in San Antonio found eight people dead and 20 severely injured inside a tractor trailer in a Wal-Mart parking lot early Sunday morning in an incident local officials described as a “horrific” human trafficking tragedy.

Late Saturday night, someone from the 18-wheeler approached a store employee in the parking lot to ask for water, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said at a news conference. After coming back with water, the employee called police, who found eight dead bodies in the back of the trailer.

At least 38 people were found in and around the truck in the parking lot off Interstate 35 in San Antonio, about 150 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Eight were pronounced dead at the scene and are believed to have suffered from heat exposure and asphyxiation, police spokeswoman Romana Lopez said.

Seventeen of the vehicle’s occupants were rushed to hospitals with life-threatening injuries. Another 13 had non-life-threatening injuries. At least two of the occupants were school-age children.

National Weather Service. The truck did not appear to have air conditioning or water on board, said San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood.

« It was a mass casualty situation for us,” Chief Hood said. “Each one of them had heart rates over about 130 beats per minute. They were very hot to the touch…. You’re looking at a lot of heat stroke, a lot of dehydration.”

The driver, whose identity has not been revealed, was taken into custody and will face state and federal charges, McManus said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan said in a statement. “These networks have repeatedly shown a reckless disregard for those they smuggle.”

In fiscal year 2016, Homeland Security Investigations initiated 2,110 human smuggling investigations, which resulted in 1,522 criminal convictions, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said.

“So long as I lead ICE, there will be an unwavering commitment to use law enforcement assets to put an end to these practices,” Homan said.

Jarvie is a special correspondent.

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UPDATES:

11:45 a.m.: This story has been updated throughout with Times reporting.

5:50 a.m.: Updated to report 20 people were in critical or serious condition.

4:15 a.m.: This article was updated with background on a 2003 case.

3:55 a.m.: Updated with Saturday’s temperature.

3:25 a.m.: Updated with the driver’s arrest.

This article was first published at 2:50 a.m.