On today’s Explicit Content Podcast I am talking to Luke Hurd who by day works as a Digital Immersion Director at Signal Theory & augmented reality filter creator artist with over 100k followers on In…Read More

In this episode of the Explicit Content Podcast, Jeff Julian and Andy Crestodina talk MarTech and help marketers understand why they should be excited for what these technologies will unlock for the modern marketer.
As tech stacks get more complex and harder to implement, Andy and Jeff pull the curtain of mystery off of the subject and help you cut through all of the noise and help you prioritize what you need.
What in marketing tech has you excited right now?
Andy:
Calendly is great. We’re all familiar and we use them a lot to help us manage our calendar, but things like Drift, chatbots and others can put a meeting on someone’s schedule straight from the website. Andy sees this like more of a revolution.
There’s so much potential in being able to do this directly from the web and further bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams.
Andy has been trying out the app X.Ai which is a virtual assistant that is actually virtual. It uses an Ai powered bot to help manage your calendar with people, letting you off the hook from the time suck of finding that perfect time.
Getting on someone’s calendar directly from a business website can really effect the world of lead generation. Remember that the visitor’s true goal may be to have a conversation with us. The destination for them was never the contact form. Technology can bridge this gap for us all.
Think about your energy companies or you mobile companies. They’ve understood this for a long time. They know what your need is and they make doing that extremely easy for me.
Andy: 2 new conversion technologies without being too aggressive or doing the hard sale.
The real goal is to lead to a conversation, not to fill out a contact. This is classic B2B demand generation.
If you have a sales page on your site w/o a call to action, you just aren’t doing your job. Scroll to the bottom of your service page. Is there a face, a CTA, a verb? Or are you getting to a dead end and a footer. Don’t expect them to scroll back up to the top. This is just good digital and death to “contact for price”.
Answer our questions. Your content must answer our visitor’s questions.
When it comes to chatbots, it means instant interaction. Drift does this. Andy feels like it’s fun and easy to setup. It’s a great starter AI bot and it has an easy system to help you easily program the Ai to be smart. AI allows you to get directly to a calendar widget from the website. It short circuits all of those wasted moments and it psychologically makes the visitor feel like they’ve succeeded. They now know when they will get more questions answered.
People don’t want to be an unqualified lead, so let’s help them tell us what they’re their to find. Drifts system can help lead our users to the things that they’re interested in figuring out. Better for them, better for you.
The Video Player
Everyone knows that they need a video player, but universal players like YouTube doesn’t give us much control to drive the action back to you.
YouTube now doesn’t allow marketers to turn off the suggested videos. It’s the cheap solution and you’ll never generate leads from it.
There’s nothing wrong with putting content that we made onto YouTube, just don’t think that it’s there for conversion. YouTube should always be an alternate version.
You can now make videos that have data collectors on the front, on the back, in the middle and all over. Think about adding a Drift style Ai to inside of a video. As soon as you have their attention, we can get them to convert to a schedule phone call.
This feels like the future of lead generation.
Killer conversion tip: Make your CTA as specific as possible
Minority Report got it so wrong. Nobody saw smart speakers coming except Star Trek.
Jeff is 100% confident that in 10 years VR will be in most houses.
Andy thinks talking to Jeff is like talking to a Precog.
Look what everyone is doing right now. All the large tech brands. You can really tell what is happening by watching how they behave. Facebook doesn’t have cloud so they’re chasing the device and Microsoft knows that the future is Cloud and you can see how they’re focusing their attention.
Jeff’s favorite tech right now is Facebook’s Oculus Quest. Cheaper than a phone and a complete wireless solution. This will change the market and if you are a marketer, you better be picking one up for your team to experience where the future is going.
Listen to the show
Transcripts
Jeff Julian: Welcome back to the Explicit Content Podcast Season Two. How are you doing, Andy?
Andy Crestodina: Good, Jeff, I'm good.
Jeff Julian: So, this is a change for us. The first season we definitely talked about SEO and data and those topics are still continuing to change and I know we'll address them on Season Two shows, but I wanted to dive into the world of technology and marketing technology. Mainly because we would always rant off onto a rabbit trail and it would always have to do with the bigger use of technology on the marketing teams, not just the MarTech stack, but technology in general. And so, I thought maybe we'd just change it up a bit.
Andy Crestodina: Sounds great. I love this topic. It's a ubiquitous topic, it's important. It's covered a lot but not always in ways that help the listener or the reader or the marketer prioritize and fit these things in. Everyone's tech stacks are getting more complex and less integrated and harder to implement. So, I think you and I can do some good work here, just by cutting through a lot of the noise and just filtering out those things that are ... that we can all prioritize.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, exactly. And one of the ways I want to kick off the new show is just to go through something interesting in tech or MarTech that's really kind of got your ear that you're jiving about this month. So, what is that for you?
Andy Crestodina: Well, if you email me and ask me to set up a time to talk, I'm going to reply with a Calendly link which is basically just a little widget that integrates with my calendar and shows you when I'm available. Cool. Everyone's familiar with these. We all use them a lot. Jeff, you and I use these, right?
Jeff Julian: Yep.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah. But to push that forward in the consumer experience or in the user's experience and to put that on a website, to me feels like a bit of a revolution, like a significant change. So, I'm looking at drift, I'm looking at chatbots. I'm looking at video players, now there's a [inaudible] coming out that actually put a calendar widget, a scheduling widget on a website to help that visitor get themselves on the sales associate's calendar right then during the visit. So, that to me is kind of an exciting thing. I'm using it. I'm seeing it work and so, I'm excited to talk about it.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that you can do this from the outside. And I also can't wait til like communications teams start to see this as a way to get on your manager's schedule without having to go through Outlook because it's so bloated and heavy, right? I just want to click a link. I want to see what you have available. I want to hit it in there and join up. Or I want to maybe talk to the CEO or you know, maybe there's some open time. Using a web interface for calendaring and scheduling is just amazing.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah.
Jeff Julian: But it's just at the surface because right now, I can't have a Calendly account and use your Calendly account to say, "Hey, this is where it overlaps," right? I have to look at your calendar and then go dig out mine and say, "Okay, this is where it's a good fit." So, there's so much opportunity for meeting potential with this kind of tech.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, for a while I was using x.ai which, have you seen that one yet?
Jeff Julian: No.
Andy Crestodina: So, basically, you email me, you say you want to get on my calendar and I reply back and say, "Yeah, you can talk to Amy my virtual assistant." But Amy's a robot, so when I copy her, she emails back and forth with you, using natural language, suggesting times and conference call numbers and time zone differences and working it out with you even though she's not an actual person, so it's an AI VA scheduler which doesn't solve that integration gap that you were talking about. But, yeah, absolutely there is opportunity for us all to meet that goal of shaving hours off of our month playing email ping pong trying to find times to talk.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, I've even used it for client work and things like that. "Hey, we need to schedule a quick meeting. I have 15, 30 and 60 minute meetings. I have breakfast meetings." I have all different kinds of links set up so I can just shoot them over to people with templates and get it on my calendar.
Andy Crestodina: The impact on marketing and the use of these as marketing technology is super fun which gets us to that future of lead gen and how to push that forward in the UX and see if we can actually get our visitors to put themselves directly into our calendars before they even leave our websites.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, absolutely. It's the number one issue between marketing and sales team, right? The sales enablement aspect of handing a lead off to somebody else and ensuring that we're not leaving somebody wanting more because they didn't know what to do next.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, there's kind of this inherent problem on websites which is if the goal of the website is to get the visitor to the thank you page, that met our goal as a marketer, but the visitors true goal was to have a conversation with us. You're really, there's a certain inherently unsatisfying thing about contact form which is that the visitor doesn't know, the new lead doesn't know if you're going to get back to them, how soon you'll get back to them, who will get back to them. Every contact form just has a bunch of unanswered questions that go with it that are solved through an onsite chatbot calendar widget, video player calendar widget which I think might be where we all are going to go with our lead gen programs.
Jeff Julian: I absolutely hope so. I think that the current approach of just filling out a form and sending it off, one, it allows the marketing team and the sales team to be far too aggressive, right? "I just want to see the webinar. I don't necessarily want to chat with you." I can't trigger that intent because nobody puts that in the form, would you like to talk to somebody now?
Jeff Julian: Instead, they say, we'll just make it up and we'll try to hard pressure sales you, right? Or we're going to drip, hit you up five times that week and maybe we'll pressure you into buying, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars worth of software. It doesn't work. We need to have other ways of interacting with the customers.
Jeff Julian: People like cellular companies or your power company, they've understood this for a very long time. Yesterday, I'm sitting at my computer, all of a sudden, the power goes out. I just happened to plug something in at the same time so, first, I thought it was me, but then I realized it was the whole neighborhood. And I've got to go on the mobile app, and report an outage, quick chatbot and I'm done. They get that. I have a need. I want to solve it. But if I'm an agency, or if I'm a paper towel company, how am I interacting with the person who wants to communicate with me in near real time.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, so, I've got two ways. We'll go through quickly here two ways in which websites can be early adopters in the future of lead generation, in which websites can be more satisfying than simply having a contact form and a thank you page. Two new conversion opportunities that by adopting a bit of technology, you'll be making your site, giving them more ways to take that action, without, as you've just said, Jeff, being too aggressive or hard sales because they are going to take that step toward us. We're not pushing. We are just making the opportunity available to them.
Andy Crestodina: So, you've got a sitemap, you've got service pages. There's an about page, a blog, a contact form. And, when we make sitemaps, we put a little star on the thank you page because that's the goal of digital is to get the person to convert, right? But the real goal is to start a sales conversation. They know we need help, they want our help and so the thank you page leads to an email conversation that leads to a scheduling conversation that leads to a phone call usually, right? This is like classic B2B demand gen, whatever. So, if we have a chatbot on our site ...
Andy Crestodina: Well, first of all, the sales page is ... the service page needs to have a call to action. So, let's just get that out of the way first. If you've got a sales page on your website that doesn't have a call to action somewhere on the page, probably toward the bottom, you aren't really doing the basic job of getting the visitor to ... suggesting that the visitor get in touch.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, exactly.
Andy Crestodina: I see these all the time. Scroll to the bottom of any of your service pages and ask, do you see a face? Do you see a specific all to action? Do you see a relevant specific verb? Do these things all have decent visual prominence? Or did you just get to like a dead end with a footer?
Andy Crestodina: So, let's make sure that we've got calls to action on our sales pages because contact us is not a call to action. Don't expect a visitor to scroll back to the top and click contact. At least ask for the lead. It's not pushy, it's just best practices. It's good digital.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, and if you're a SAS based Program 2, put the freaking price on there. Don't make me contact for price. I'd rather you say add to cart for price, for Pete's sake. Just, it's not going to work anymore. We want to know, right?
Andy Crestodina: Right.
Jeff Julian: [crosstalk] it's the lead.
Andy Crestodina: ... answer question. If you don't answer ... The reason, and what you just said is critical because the reason why people don't become leads on websites is because they have an unanswered question. That's the problem with content. That's the problem with sales content, conversion copy, is that it doesn't answer a simple question.
Andy Crestodina: So, yes, we're going to have ... answer the top questions on the page, call to action at the bottom and then, what we're seeing, not a pop-up, we're all conditioned to close pop-ups, but the chatbot in the corner, the little waving hand emoji or a face or something that just tells the person this is the chance to interact with us right now, ask your question, move your hand from the mouse to the keyboard and start typing something.
Andy Crestodina: I'm using Drift. There's lots of them that do this. Drift is actually really fun and easy to set up. If you click on that and answer a ... Then you get in this tiny little playbook. So, the chatbot says, "Do you need help with x or y?" You click on x. Multiple choice questions. You click on x. Well, which of those types ... "How can we help you within that? 1, 2 or 3." You click on number two. Now, if you just met the basic criteria to be considered a more or less qualified lead, the chatbot then doesn't just say, "Click to go to the contact form," it shows you a calendar widget in the chatbot.
Jeff Julian: Nice.
Andy Crestodina: Get on Stephanie's mail letter. Yeah. So, right there, on the page, you haven't left the page. On the page, there's a calendar widget which completely short circuits all of that email ping pong and scheduling back and forth.
Andy Crestodina: So, the visitor is able to really psychologically solve their problem for today by knowing that they've reached out to and connected with and they're now on the calendar to talk to a service provider or company that's going to help them somehow.
Andy Crestodina: So, that chatbot down there at the bottom with the simple multiple choice questions, basic playbook and then a calendar widget, is probably one of the main things that we'll start to see as like, if you put this on your site now, you're a bit of an early adopter, but this might become like classic, common, normal interaction that we all see on service pages all the time.
Jeff Julian: I completely agree. I think there is tons of opportunity here. There's tons of ways you can get people in to that chat cycle or those pages. You know, if you're giving a presentation, putting a link in the URL or a text to a shortlink or something like that to get them to link out to that page. Let the user decide how far they want to be gated.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, and if they don't want, so, their decision. It's empathy and it's user directed experience, user focused design. And if they're ... and they don't want to be an unqualified lead for you. And you don't want them to be an unqualified lead. Yeah, if they say, "I'm not interested in x. I want y." Or, you know, "I choose option 3." You can tell them right there that your best way to help them is with a piece of content instead of a conversation with an associate. So, the playbook can direct them toward different types of things including, you know, they are just sort of a less qualified lead and you know that based on their answers. What they want help with isn't your main focus.
Jeff Julian: But they're still there and you can help them which will then give you more brand affinity and ultimately, is a win.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah. Instead of a bounce, you're got a reader, you've got a blog visitor, which is better for them and better for you.
Jeff Julian: I knew of several companies in Kansas City that when you called in, let's say you got the contact number off the website, you called in and you had a project that you wanted to talk to somebody about, the secretary or the office assistant or whoever would vet the person up front to make sure there was at least a $250,000 budget or they would just say we're not interested. I would always say, "Are you kidding? There's so much opportunity in just being able to talk to the person and drive them in a direction." They might not have it now, but guess what, we're all in it for the long game, right? So, in 10 years, they may have that $250,000 budget and they're thankful that you pointed them in a direction. And they might not be comfortable with the original solution they went with at that scale.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, you have no opportunity to do any kind of value demonstration. You're either a 0 or a $250 grand, like, "You're not going to talk to me first?"
Jeff Julian: Yeah.
Andy Crestodina: Like, "Do I have to write an appeal for you to be able to have a conversation?" That's just unfriendly.
Jeff Julian: It is. It's just ridiculous. And I could see people blocking, you know, you want to block the spam. You want to block the agencies that are trying to sell to other agencies but yet they did research on your agency, you know. But you want to block those guys out, so that's why you have the questions up front, but still you want to offer a value.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, well, if the way we just described that, what Jeff and I just talked about, the sales page, the call to action, the chatbot, the playbook, we've got a visual on enterprisemarketer.com. So, just go to the site, click on the podcast, you can find this episode. Take a look and we're got like a little diagram that shows you everything we talked about just now and what we're going to talk about next which is the video player.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, absolutely. With video adoption, one, it's leaving YouTube, right? Because it used to be everyone was like, "I want to get into video, I need a YouTube account." But that won't necessarily let you control who's up next in that playlist or what you're standing up next against when you do a search, right? Just the Momo thing that happened recently, right? People have malicious intent and they also want to steal a lead that you helped generate. So, looking at Vimeo, or Vidyard, or Brightcove or somebody else, and building content that lives in other content repositories besides yourself, you really need to control that player so you can then drive that call to action back to you.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, what do you think of the new change in YouTube where you cannot disable, you can't turn off suggested videos?
Jeff Julian: Yeah, I don't like YouTube for anything beyond consumer based entertainment or informational videos that are purely from an I want to help people or have fun with people perspective. From a B2B perspective and all these other ones, it's the cheap solution. You will never generate leads from it. It's like being excited about having a Facebook page because you've got 10,000 likes. Well, 10,000 likes means 100 hits, right, or views.
Andy Crestodina: Right, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Julian: They're not going to promote anybody to you until you hit a pretty decent sized threshold of subscribers. But even then, you have to play their games to win.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with putting the stuff that you've made on YouTube as like an also kind of strategy you know, to put stuff ... So, you worked on your videos. You can put them over on YouTube just don't expect to get traffic from them. It's just like an alternate ... It's like making a good webpage and then making a PDF version of it for anyone that wants to, if they happen to want to download or print. I think of YouTube as that way, now. If it's conversion content, put it on a paid player and if you want to put it on YouTube, great, but that's an alternate version of whatever you made as the core function on your website isn't going to be YouTube anymore. You can't turn suggested videos off, so the person is going to be watching cat videos on your website. It's not a customizable player.
Andy Crestodina: And what's happening next, here's the trend, here's the future of lead gen with video players. What's happening next is they make these video players now where they're truly interactive and partway through the video, it can give the visitor an option for what to do, pause and choose. So, you can have a video that goes through and at minute one, or at a minute thirty, they can click in the video to go deeper into the site. So, it's navigable video.
Andy Crestodina: You can make videos that have collectors up front. You can make videos that have email collector at the end, or now, what I'm really excited about, I just heard there was ... Amanda, you know, you and I have a mutual friend, Amanda [Gant 00: 18: 23], got a demo from this player called 23, have you heard of this one?
Jeff Julian: No.
Andy Crestodina: Super nice people. It's a video hosting streaming platform, but they've got a ... They're coming out with a video player that has that same calendar widget in the player-
Jeff Julian: Nice.
Andy Crestodina: ... when the video's done. So, if you add like a Drift style chatbot or a 23 style video player with a collector, to any normal page with a normal call to action, you've added two new unobtrusive conversion opportunities for your visitors just, and not just opportunities to convert into a form submitter, but an opportunity to convert into a scheduled phone call. This, to me, feels like the future of lead gen.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, exactly, because you start to get some of that intent, right? If they watched your video on customizing WordPress and they watched it all the way to 30 and they want more information from you, they might be perfect for your WordPress SEO plugin or something like that. Or, if you're a dealership and you're showing about customized exhaust pipes and they've watched five different videos and you can track that, yeah, popping up the, "Hey, do you want to talk about what we have in stock? We have an awesome sale going on." Those are all awesome ways that we've traditionally looked at email and abandoned carts or page history in email as a way to do that but now, you get so much data, we can start doing that in real time.
Andy Crestodina: What you just said there was subtle and I think, very powerful because if your call to action is something like, "Ask us about what's in stock," you're implanting in the visitor's mind the opportunity to get specific information which is much more likely to trigger that conversation and that scheduled phone call so I think that you kind of just slid that in there, Jeff, but that's killer conversion tactic is to make the CTA as specific as possible.
Jeff Julian: Oh, yeah, if you watch a Durango video, like I drive, man, tell me about your Durango stuff, right? You can make some assumptions and then you can say, "Oh, was I completely off? Well, then let me know what you do drive."
Jeff Julian: There's great ways to discern what people are looking at when they're working with your content but you've got to have so much control over that player which means they have to land on a property that you have the ability to insert your components in. I think that's the key piece of it.
Jeff Julian: Because us getting excited about video players, that's awesome, but what happens when they're on their TV and they're watching the video player? Hey, you know what? I could trigger the caption to pop-up if they're watching through one of my players and I could say, "Ask Alexa about what we have in stock." And we can have an Alexa Skill that they can then download.
Jeff Julian: There's so many ways you can interact with people now using technology and that context can go around to all these different devices and platforms as long as you have somebody that's bringing it back home to a hub to say, "Here's all the interactions we've done so far." That's like the power of AI and some other things start to come into play.
Andy Crestodina: Wow, that's good, too. You just slipped that in there. You did it again. So, what a great idea, right? Because I use Google Home and I'm watching, like, I don't know, like Lego construction videos with my three-year old. And at the end of these videos, they have these tiles, those cards that I can't click because it's on my TV, but I'm calling these things up with a smart speaker. If there was a caption on the video that I could just talk to my speaker, maybe that's how to do conversion from a home TV played video.
Jeff Julian: Oh, yeah. Well, think about this. How Minority ... I was talking with somebody the other day. Minority Report was completely off, right? We know pre-cogs and things that got together and all of a sudden, they could see the future, but they did not see the smart speaker coming around because pre-cognition is what Amazon could do. It was saying, "Hey, look, the last time it got heated, we heard some stuff go down," because it's ultimately your way into, you know, an environment. Thankfully, we don't have companies that do that kind of stuff, but we do have the ability to have people yell out commands to us as a company, as a B2C or a B2B brand that let us, you know, turn around with Skills or turn around with ways to interact with them when they're using non-traditional digital assets to consume our content.
Jeff Julian: Because I am of the 100% opinion that the next 10 years will have more VR headsets in our house. That's going to throw out the need for some of these AR realities, like Alexa and other things when we are consuming content that way. But now, we have two approaches to doing it, so we have to have one delivery system for allowing that and that will be interacting with Alexa and also interacting with Oculus mic and some of these other approaches to give the users feedback immediately.
Andy Crestodina: You know, I know we're going to wrap up here, but I want to ask you a question. Tell me if this is possible. If I'm playing a video on my TV and there's a smart speaker in the room, is it possible for the audio of the video to talk to the smart speaker?
Jeff Julian: There's usually a trigger word, like, Alexa or computer, or whatever and if you set that off, usually, it's a bad thing, right? It gives you, you look at Alexa like, "You idiot, Alexa, that wasn't me." And you've seen people make Alexa and Google talk in a loop to each other, right? Those are the kinds of things that you probably wouldn't want to do.
Andy Crestodina: Yeah, you can't make like a YouTube video that people will play from their TV and inside the YouTube video, you say, "Hey, Alexa, order some more fabric softener," and then it gets charged to their account.
Jeff Julian: But, imagine this. So, we do live in a world where you can build apps for all these things. You can build apps for Fire Stick, you can build apps for Apple TV now, there's an ecosystem for all those things. There are players out from Brightcove, from Vimeo, from Vidyard, that are HTML5 compliant and they will actually work in some of those environments. So, while you're watching, if you will download the app that I have, so, like, MasterClass, that's one I really use a lot.
Andy Crestodina: Really?
Jeff Julian: While I have the app all over the place, I can interact with you through that app because you're using my player. My player can run my scripts. My player can discern what you've looked at and how far you went. So, then I can interact with you at key points by inserting upsell ads or some other way to get you maybe to go to the full time subscription or something along those lines.
Andy Crestodina: Nice, yeah.
Jeff Julian: But it's, you have to be able to control that data. You can't just run it off YouTube because YouTube will never give you access to that person. They don't want you to be able to communicate with them directly. They want you to use their comments because it's their ecosystem.
Andy Crestodina: I love talking to you, Jeff.
Jeff Julian: But the world of VR changes that because no one will own the playground. Everyone builds it like Minecraft. Minecraft was such an amazing thing for Microsoft to buy, because they were the first to see how the next generation could live in a virtual world. So, you spend four billion dollars on something like that because you've got the world of these 10 year old kids that will be 20 year old kids by the time you're VR environments are ready and you can see that they put a fire pit in their kitchen instead of a stove. Nobody would write software for that, right? Nobody would write AI to determine that, but a kid would. And a kid might think that's fun. And, so, you can find out how the minds are shaped. Now, you build this world, or people put the Oculus on, and right now you sit in one place and you look around and that's all the environments are. But they'll start to see some motion in there, right? And then, when you have that, then businesses, commerce can come in and build little tiny ecosystems that live in this world, too.
Andy Crestodina: I feel like I'm talking to a pre-cog. I feel like you just came back from some future date and you're just kind of giving us a glimpse into what it's going to be and who did what and why and who's collecting the data and how are they going to shape this future world we're living in. I thought I had some good ideas, with like a chatbot and a video with a collector.
Jeff Julian: You have to look at one, like just the Bezos divorce. Who gives 75% back to the spouse that left them and Washington Post and the Whole Foods thing. There's a bigger story to what Amazon's doing and she understood that and Bezos really wanted that, he needed that control.
Jeff Julian: There's a reason Facebook is pushing VR as hard as they can because they don't have a Cloud platform. When the world lives in the Cloud, all of a sudden, you have to be the one that has the device. So, Facebook is saying, "Well, people are losing interest in pictures and comments and political stuff. We need to have the device." And Microsoft is saying, "We need to own the Cloud. We need to own the platform and the API's that everyone uses." So, you've got this weird fight going on for the future right now and it's so awesome to watch it run out.
Andy Crestodina: Well, this was great. So, except for the true futurism that we just got from Jeff here at the end, that more tactical piece, enterprisemarketer.com is where you will find the diagram that shows both the how the chatbot can shortcut the contact form and get on the calendar, as well as the video player, the future of video players is having a calendar widget for them, too, which are just simply ways to add calendar widgets and conversion opportunities to any sales page but that view there at the end, I get it. I'm starting to get it.
Jeff Julian: Right. Think about your phone now. If you walk up to an office that's closed and you have an app on your phone, you can get on the calendar for the guy the next day. For a banker, imagine from a banker's perspective, that is like the only way that they can actually get people to come back is when they're there and it's not available, let them get access immediately, right? You can learn intent so much by these little beacons that we carry around with us everywhere that say, "Hey, we're doing something."
Andy Crestodina: Awesome. This is great. Another good one. Jeff, I'm going to play this one back and listen to it myself. Because like, we need to get a better handle on that last piece there and you're absolutely right.
Jeff Julian: And that kind of brings up my topic I forgot to mention was my favorite technology this month is the Oculus Quest which we all believe will come out at Facebook's conference on the 30th or May 1st. It is near Rift quality, so, high performance processor, RAM, monitors built into the headset, no cables, no machine attached. So, you'll have the ability to take this thing anywhere, put it on your face and enjoy very nice VR experiences. Which will then allow us to start seeing what the consumer use of this technology will be. Will it be 3D TV's or will it be Lawnmower Man, right? Are we going to start seeing this thing more frequently and in the use and we get to Ready, Player One. [crosstalk 00: 30: 44]-
Andy Crestodina: And the price point?
Jeff Julian: It's $399 for the introductory version and like $499 for the 120 gig version. That's a steal.
Andy Crestodina: Cheaper than a phone.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, cheaper than a phone, right? And so, if you're in a marketing team and you're not considering buying a VR headset just to let your team experience the future, I think you're making a mistake. Especially at these price points. And you've got to ... Once you put it on, I want you to take whatever piece of content that you just finished up and consume it in that environment. So, if you just spent hours on a blog post, read that blog post in VR and you'll realize that it's very hard to read text in a virtual environment. Maybe you should consider getting into audio. Maybe you should consider getting into video because those are consumable because they have a place in that world, right? They have an atmosphere where text doesn't.
Andy Crestodina: Text does not. But no one's figured that out yet. Does that even, is that compatible, text and VR?
Jeff Julian: I mean, you can pull up a document, you can pull up a browser page and read it, but it just becomes this weird window that lives up there that you've got to use technology that wasn't designed for it. There's no scrolling mouse, well, right, you've got to drag something around. And, you know, the text that does work are the bullet points. So, if you have a how-to article, how to step me through something with bullets and holograms and let me interact with it in the environment with something like AR, a HoloLens or my phone, those are great ways to do virtual experiences with text. But the Pure Play large document that's all we do, man, that was quite a while ago whenever that started to ending it's fad.
Andy Crestodina: I love it. So great. Thank you, Jeff.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, so, we'll do this again in May and I have a little secret. I'm going to be at a conference you're at at the end of the month. So, maybe I'll bring some stuff and we can do it in person.
Andy Crestodina: Let's do it. Let's never miss a chance. I will never miss a chance to record with you. Any time.
Jeff Julian: Yeah, so, we'll both be at the Social Media Strategy Summit in Chicago.
Andy Crestodina: Right.
Jeff Julian: And we'll meet up and we'll do something fun.
Andy Crestodina: Good news, I will see you there, friend.
Jeff Julian: Awesome, all right. Well, that was it for this show. I hope you guys enjoy the other shows we have coming out from Katie Martell and Joe Cox and the rest of the gang. And until then, I hope you have a great day.
tagged with: Content Marketing, Strategy