Tuesday, October 11, 2011

What's So Great About Video?

Video by Digital Dazzle is great for communicationGenerating new leads to bring in business or gain investor support is a top priority for every organization. More companies are turning to video as a powerful lead generator that packs a high return on investment (ROI).

Video has many advantages over more traditional media — but only when it’s used properly. How can you ensure that your video efforts will have the results you want?

What’s so great about video?
One of video’s biggest advantages is its wide reach:

  • Visible Measures, an online media research firm, reports that audiences watch online video advertisements up to 600 million times per quarter.
  • A recent Web Video Marketing Council (WVMC) Intelligence Report shows that more than 75 percent of business executives regularly watch online video — 17 percent of them watch daily. This figure has quadrupled in only four years.

Beyond getting your message in front of viewers, video has a growing ability to get it in front of potential customers:

  • A recent study by research firm Ipsos Mendelsohn shows that affluent Americans (i.e., those who earn more than $100,000/year) are the heaviest users of digital media.

  • Of all digital advertising, video advertisements had the highest chance of prompting action in this group — twice as many video ad watchers purchased an item, compared to web banner or static online ad viewers.
Keep in mind that Google can scan captions. To pump up your search-engine rankings, add captions or a transcript to videos that you post online. (Incidentally, Google owns YouTube, which accounts for about 25 percent of Google search results.)

Video can boost a company’s exposure even further by increasing its search-engine ranking. Forrester Research blogger Nate Elliott says that in recent years, “optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.”

Big-league players such as Zappos and Amazon, which regularly use videos to draw in customers, would probably agree.

Reel in leads with video marketing
Just what turns a video into a lead-generating powerhouse? Several factors help business videos succeed.

  • Interaction: Get viewers to act. Provide a registration form, a call-to-action button or one-click sharing, or combine video and text to increase branding.
    To take full advantage of video’s wealth of distribution options, be sure to give each video a unique URL. Also make certain that your videos support multiple formats and bit rates, as well as automatic detection of the receiving device type, Web browser and connection speed.

  • Distribution: One of the great things about video is its flexibility. One clip can be pushed to consumers via many methods: on your website or social media pages, in marketing emails, onscreen at a conference booth, on video sharing sites such as YouTube, and more. A video is also an effective tool in all types of presentations, whether to clients, investors, prospects or partners. Follow the tips in our blog for more ways to maximize your video’s reach.
  • Empowerment: Videos can be integrated into a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution such as Salesforce. As a result, companies can accelerate the sales cycle by giving their sales teams the ability to speed delivery, measurement and follow-up — increasing the likelihood of successful communication with potential customers.

A single video can provide all these benefits in one package that can easily be forwarded, linked and replayed, without additional costs or concerns about size or storage. And videos can provide a powerful personal element that static text and links cannot, offering potential customers a view of your company’s “corporate personality” and the people behind it. 

Any company can produce a video — but not many companies have the expertise to execute a truly valuable, successful one. Your best bet for on-time delivery and success is to work with an expert organization. Contact us to learn how our experts can transform your message into a high-value video that gets leads! Call us at 415.937.1791.