Add media to spruce up your text content.
Video and other media can give your Sales Accelerator text content some visual pizzazz. It can also powerfully help accomplish specific marketing and sales aims such as increasing your brand’s credibility, conveying a sense of purpose, or establishing a personal relationship even before your first call or meeting your prospect.
Use this guide to help ensure a smooth user experience (UX) by choosing where you host the video and what link to embed in the text content.
What does a smooth UX mean for media in text?
For a smooth user experience, you’ll want to achieve these three simple goals:
Make the video preview as a thumbnail in the text stream. That will grab the viewer’s eye and engender trust—even if only a piece of the video is visible, as in the image to the right.
Ensure that the video platform doesn’t distract your viewer with content that didn’t come from you.
Avoid getting your texts trapped in spam filters.
The rest of this page is an easy guide to how to achieve these three goals.
#1 – Making your video preview as a thumbnail
Good news! If all you do is follow the guidelines in the next two sections, you’ll very likely meet this goal without any extra effort on your part. This is because iOS and Android texting clients are both designed to do this if the video platform allows, and most video platforms have already done the work to support them.
We suggest testing this outside of Sales Accelerator prior to submitting video links for inclusion in Sales Accelerator. Simply text your link to a colleague, in exactly the form that you plan to include in the text content. If you are sending from an iOS device, first turn off Wi-Fi and cellular data so as to ensure that the link travels via SMS (i.e., make sure it is displayed in iMessage as a green bubble, not a blue one).
Note that it’s important for the link to point to the video, not to a page that contains the video. If you use the latter, the phone on the receiving end will likely display a thumbnail of the surrounding page. Your test above will easily show that this is happening.
#2 – Avoiding distracting content
If you host your video on YouTube, it’ll likely end with a Brady Bunch grid of nine interesting videos. Those are designed to reel your prospect onto YouTube; they are certainly not designed to support your need for mindshare. Those videos may include kitten antics, content that’s loosely related but not helpful to your cause, and—of most concern—conquest videos inserted by your competitors.
A better option is Vimeo. It does require a nominal paid subscription; but after all, that’s their business model, not advertising.
Depending on the flexibility of your website framework, you may also be able to host directly on your website. If you decide to go this direction, do double check the preview-thumbnail behavior described in the previous section.
#3 – Skipping spam filters
The problem. As of early 2023, spam filters implemented by T-Mobile, Verizon, and other text carriers has grown increasingly intense. You may think yourself caught between a rock and a hard place:
Using a generic link shortener such as bit.ly or tinyURL leaves your content prone to spam filtering because, whether or not you have Trusted Texter registration, the carriers are suspicious of their links: there’s no inexpensive way for them to determine what your bit.ly link leads to.
Pages hosted directly on your existing branded domain may have long URLs, taking up valuable space in your SMS messages; and they may not preview in the way that you hope.
Choosing a strategy. The second approach above—using your existing branded domain—is fine as long as the resulting links are short enough for your liking, and do preview as video. But if your brand is like most, your existing domain name is a bit long: using it may take too much space away from valuable messaging that you’d like to include in your Sales Accelerator text content. Or it’s too much of a technical hassle to host videos on your own site such that they preview nicely in text.
If either of those is true, then we encourage you to make a custom shortener domain that is dedicated to your brand. Suppose your brand is called XYZ. Then this means that instead of making links that start with the name of a common shortener service such as bit.ly, tinyurl.com, or t.ly, you should make links that start with xyz.com or go.xyz.com. Your Lumin.ai support team can work with the carriers as necessary to mark your domain as trusted, causing its links to be more likely to bypass spam filtering.
Making it happen. Most of the popular link shorteners offer an easy way to make your own branded custom shortener domain. Search for “best link shortener custom domain” to see dozens of choices. We at Lumin.ai happen to use t.ly, so our instructions below use t.ly as the shortener and xyz.com as a stand-in for your brand’s custom domain. The instructions are roughly the same, regardless of which provider you use.
Follow these three quick steps. Steps 1 and 2 may not be so quick for you, but they should be easy for your IT administrator; and Step 3 is something that you or any member of your staff can easily do. The entire process took us less than half an hour.
Procure the xyz.com from any domain registrar, such as name.com. Or, using a domain that you already own, decide on a subdomain of that domain by tacking on one word at the start, as in go.xyz.com.
Create an account with t.ly. Follow the instructions there to use your selection from Step 1 as a shortener domain.
Use xyz.com or go.xyz.com to make as many shortened links as you like.
Don’t forget to test your links as described in the section above, “#1 - Making your video preview as a video thumbnail”.
Wield your new power for good.
You’re done! Armed with the ability to include video and image content in your text stream without tripping spam filters, you’ll find it easy to create brand credibility, convey a sense of purpose for contacting your prospects, and most importantly, establish a warm relationship before you even meet.