Integrating video to your online content strategy offers a number of benefits ranging from increased conversions to reputation management. The question for businesses, however, is whether to divert resources from standard marketing activities with a proven ROI to potentially costly multimedia content production.
Well, just as your main product offer may not necessarily be tied into video (or other rich media) production, your business can leverage online video without investing significant time or resources. In fact, there are five different kinds of easy, cost-effective videos that are within the budget of almost any business, and they can help contribute to everything from acquisition strategy to public relations and branding.
Video Product Demo
Shooting short product demonstrations is not only relatively simple and cost-effective, but it’s also an effective way to help consumers interact with your product. By showing your products in action, consumers can develop a better sense of their functionality and practicality, and added understanding can help encourage them to become buyers. After all,by showing exactly how your products can solve some problem or fill some need, you can stimulate demand for them.
This is true for products ranging form tech to fashion. While demonstrating a gadget raises and helps educate the public of its existence and various uses, video demos of apparel items can help extend the line’s lifestyle branding. They also help consumers picture themselves or someone they know in those pieces. Even many intangible services can be demo’d by showing someone going through the motions of using the service.
This is a clip, American Apparel demonstrates how versatile one of their dresses is.
UGC Video
Brands can benefit in several ways through leveraging pre-existing video created and uploaded by independent third parties. First, by using “a real person’s” video, your brand come across as more human and approachable. Second, content from independent third parties is generally regarded as more trustworthy by consumers, so any positive User Generated Content (UGC) messages of your products can be translated into more sales. Finally, giving added exposure to existing UGC about your products can lead to added UGC about your products. Essentially, either the initial content creator will be encouraged to create additional content, or consumers who were prompted by the UGC to buy might then go on to share their own experiences, possibly in video.
UGC video, however, is not without it’s challenges. First, you have to find the content, which means sorting through a lot of unuseable video. Second, you have to select content with a sufficiently positive message. For instance, if the majority of UGC videos about your products are negative, plugging the positive ones will also require that you openly address the negative ones. After all, UGC video exists largely within the realm of social networks, and your brand’s engagement of UGC video will not go unnoticed; so once you engage UGC video on your products and services, you have to be to willing to address all manifestations of such content – positive or negative.
In this clip, a reviewer from the blog All About Symbian gives his impressions on a trial Nokia N96 device, and showcases its various features.
Commercials
Even though putting up commercials on YouTube isn’t video blogging, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t benefits from taking commercials you’ve already paid to produce and making them available online. When properly optimized, video content can help you capture more real estate on blended search results.
Remember, consumers often search for TV commercials online, so while you once paid to place an ad in front of a TV audience, there’s potentially an online audience that is actively seeking it out so that they can share it with their network. Finally, adding this content to your website is a great way to make your overall site experience more rich and interactive; it will help increase your average time on site, as well as encourage users to interact with your brand for a prolonged period of time.
The AXE line of men’s body spray has all their TV spots uploaded to their official YouTube channel, and users searching for that content will also find a slew of other lifestlye content to keep them engaged and help them better identify with the brand.
Expert Interview
Chances are your products/services solve some problem or fill some demand (if they don’t, no kind of online marketing is going to be able to help you). In that case, there’s some independent expert party out there (such as a doctor, engineer, or journalist) who can help put that problem and its possible solutions (including your product) into context.
By conducting video interviews with experts, you can help stimulate further demand for you products, as well as elicit the trust of consumers. After all, if you’re openly addressing a problem via the views of a third party expert, you not only put it into context through third party expertise, but in doing so, imply that your products/services are perfectly adequate for solving that problem.
When going with third party interviews, however, it’s important to not seek out an outright endorsement. In addition to risking offending the expert, you may also turn off the audience. The average user tends to regard an outright endorsement as paid advertisement, and paid endorsements fall-short of the trust-building potential of interactive media. Rather, try to have these experts discuss your industry, and by virtue of sharing some practical knowledge, you’ll earn the user’s trust and be more likely to convert them into a customer down the line.
In this clip, I interviewed Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, for NVI about webspam and how to ensure that your site doesn’t get hacked. Matt probably isn’t even aware the NVI does SEO, but by featuring the content on our site, we’re able to send the message that (1) SEO is important, and (2) we’re in the loop on the latest tactics.
Business Vlog
With business vlogging, you’re pursuing a strategy that’s similar to expert interviews: building trust. How business vlogs differ from expert interviews, however, is that they feature one or several of your employees, partners, or execs. The idea, here, is also to discuss your industry’s trends in an transparent and matter-of-fact way, and in doing so, build trust with your target market demographic.
And the great thing about video blogging is that it doesn’t have to be super high production. Rather, you can get by on an affordable camera, such as a Flip HD Mino or normal digital picture camera that records, and get by with minimal editing.
The thing to remember with video blogging is to keep it short and to the point. Online video viewers tend to tune out after 90 seconds, so it’s ideal if you can deliver your message in 60-120 seconds. There are exceptions to this rule, but they tend to feature either (1) someone with a lot of showmanship and personality, or (2) a lot of high production.
An example of the video blogging showman is Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s built a vertiable wine empire through his video blogging efforts, and it’s even led to a book deal. And even though Gary violates blogging etiquette by explicitly selling the wine labels he carries, his unapologetic honesty and flamboyant personality is so entertaining and charming that he both entertains and nonetheless elicits your trust.
And an example of something high production is the weekly video blog Relevantly Speaking. It’s a show that’s produced by the marketing platform producer MediaTrust, and features online marketing and geek news. This show also violates blogging etiquette by slipping in the network’s weekly promotions at the end of each episode, but that’s only after it’s delivered some quality news and commentary that viewers can relate to and use toward their own marketing efforts.
These exceptions aside, there remains considerable opportunity for businesses who want to video blog to reach an audience. Short installments of key employees sharing their thoughts is a great way to (1) optimize for blended search, (2) better engage users, and (3) build trust with them.
Video Killed the Radio Star
The internet differs from other mainstream media in two important respects. First of all, the internet is a multicast medium, meaning that it can feature text, images, audio, and video all on the same page. From this it follows that if your web presence is lacking one of these elements, your web presence is probably incomplete.
Second, the internet is a multi-directional medium, meaning that it allows for communication that runs top-down, bottom-up, and peer-to-peer. The result is that you can talk to consumers, consumers can talk to you, consumers can talk to consumers, and all of that dialogue is archived and indexed for other consumers and brands to access. So if your business is not already engaged in all three of these spheres, it is missing out on a full third of its communication potential.
Online video can help your business fill out its online strategy in both these regards. While it stands as the fourth and final element of the internet’s multicast nature, its various manifestations allow your business to engage consumers on a variety of levels. This in turn allows you to reinforce your brand message both on- and off-site and often in a way that contributes to your acquisition strategies and helps garner consumer trust and loyalty.
Moreover, what builds trust, isn’t something that’s highly polished and overly produced. It’s something that is honest, straigh-forward, and transparent, and it doesn’t take a lot of resources to have your video embody those ideals.
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