Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

What does “Video Marketing” really mean?

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Paradigm shifting technologies are great, but they can have an unfortunate side effect… confusion about new terminology. One such phrase that’s currently mired in confusion is “video marketing.” Folks generally fall into one of two camps, both of which are valid but beg definitions, differentiation, and division. We’ll break these camps into two groups: “Marketing With Video” and “Marketing A Video”.

Marketing With Video

The people in the “Marketing With Video” camp are usually selling a product or service and using video to better explain that product or service. This typically takes the form of incorporating video into a direct marketing campaign like a newsletter or promotion. The simplest example of “Marketing WITH Video” is a company adding video to its website to summarize its product. Other examples of “Marketing With Video” include:

  • small-dotGathering actionable data on user engagement to help optimize a purchase funnel
  • small-dotIncorporating video into e-mail marketing campaigns to understand which prospects are particularly interested
  • small-dotUsing recorded webinars as a source of lead generation.

Here’s an example of “Marketing With Video”. This video is designed to better inform a web visitor about some elements of a product once they’re on our site. It wouldn’t be nearly as useful if viewed on YouTube.

The common thread of “Marketing With Video” is that the video is designed to better market things to someone who is already engaging with your company because they’re on your website, signed up for your newsletter, downloaded a whitepaper, or perhaps registered with you at a trade show.

Marketing A Video

Businesses who think of Video Marketing as “Marketing A Video” are generally trying to build brand awareness for their company/products. This is done by giving viewers a taste of the brand or concept in a concise package that can travel anywhere and that is designed to be shared. Taken to its extreme a video will be so compelling that it will market itself and you have created the elusive viral video. For this reason, these types of videos are generally more about entertainment and less about explanation.

Once the video has been created, it is often pushed out to as many of the consumer video sharing sites as possible (YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, etc.). These videos are often accompanied by a social media campaign, reaching out to bloggers and posting on Twitter, to try and generate buzz (and views) for the company’s video. For companies in this camp, they can either manually manage the whole process of marketing their video, or they can use third party tools like TubeMogul. TubeMogul allows companies to push videos to several different video sharing sites simultaneously and track the views across all of those channels in a single dashboard.

Here’s a great example of a “Marketing A Video” campaign that turned out to be a viral success. I’m unsure exactly what it’s for, but I like it!

So, why does this matter?

These differentiations are important because understanding them can be the difference between solving your problems quickly and being lost in the mire of marketing-speak website after marketing-speak website. Do you find this differentiation important? How would you improve upon these definitions?

Posted in rant | 6 Comments »

Stop Throwing Away Valuable Marketing Assets: Your Webinars

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

It might seem odd for a video marketing company to extol the power of webinars (an arguably competitive medium to video), but we think webinars and video go hand-in-hand like TV and TiVo.

Why are webinars valuable?

For the viewer, webinars provide a way to learn something new about a process, product, approach, or feature. In exchange the viewer is asked to give up their email and any other relevant contact information. For the host, webinars present a way to connect with a new audience. In return the host gets more leads, it’s a simple and overall valuable arrangement.

So why are webinars more valuable than previously thought?

They can be recorded. The first time the webinar is presented it creates value. But by simply recording your webinar it can continue to create value for months (and sometimes even years). Here are a couple of easy ways to get more from your recorded webinars.

  • Feature it as a resource on your website
  • Use it as the main event of an email campaign
  • Have your sales team send it as follow up to prospects
  • Provide access to those who couldn’t attend live

But how much value will my recorded webinar really add?

We’ll measure it. With webinars coming in at 30 and 90 minutes  in length, they are 15-50x longer than the average marketing video. NO ONE will watch 30 minutes (let alone 90) of something that isn’t interesting. This is a powerful point. By tracking those people that actually do watch your video you’ll learn which individuals are most interested in your topic (not a bad starting point for the sales team) and what interests people most in your webinar (so you can learn how to make your next webinar even better).

And here’s a teaser from a future post, a couple of the common ways we see people watching recorded webinars.

Webinar Viewing Types

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Posted in business, rant | 1 Comment »

5 Things Video Will Replace in Your Business

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

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It’s easy to forget just how many different ways video can enhance communications. Anywhere there is a repeatable (and often complex) message, video can lend a helping hand to tell that story more efficiently and in some cases tell it better. We’re highlighting 5 of the most popular ways we’ve seen people scaling their communication with video.

Product Demos

Replacing the initial in-person demo or online meeting presentation keeps your salesforce more available to focus on ripe opportunities. Giving your prospects the opportunity to watch product demos whenever they want, allows them to become better informed more quickly.  There’s no need to schedule a time to walk through the same canned demo; prospective customers can watch just what interests them.  The result is that prospects will already understand your product during initial sales calls, resulting in more meaningful questions being answered earlier in the process.

Customer Testimonials

Giving a prospect access to a happy customer is one of the most effective ways to gain trust and ultimately close deals, and yet one of the most difficult things to scale. Your customers may love your product but they’ve still go their own job to do and life to live. Interviewing your customers for testimonials on video can help you to harness one of the most effective (and underutilized) marketing and sales techniques.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is a polarizing issue. It draws “w00ts” from those seeing success and “@%!#’s” from almost everybody else. Many companies still use cold calling effectively but it’s at the expense of the 90% of people who never wanted to hear from them in the first place.

Fortunately we’re seeing a positive shift… turning cold calling scripts into video. Taking your message and putting it into a video format allows you to improve the quality of the message, annoy less people, and focus on communicating with those people that are actually interested. The goal of most cold calling is to gauge interest and qualify potential leads.  Letting people receive your message when it is convenient for them lowers barriers and makes it easier for the person to demonstrate interest.  By tracking what a potential lead watches you can spend more time following up with meaningful conversations and less time playing phone tag.

In Person Training

Keeping your customers, employees, and prospects well educated about your company and products is crucial to keep your business moving forward. When there weren’t technological options, it was common to ask people to fly in from around the country and spend an afternoon learning about all the new whizbang products and services your company has been cooking up. Today, we’re seeing people in the same company, sometimes even the same office opting to educate each other using video instead of meeting in person. Using online video to educate means that there’s no travel to schedule, venue to book, or documents to print out. It allows people to learn on their own time when it fits into their schedule. Just as you knew how many people came to your event, you can track how many (and which) people watched the video to get a sense for the impact.

Help & Support

Providing a solid line of defense for customer support is key to keeping customers happy and prospects engaged. Some customers will tweet questions @you, others while be satisfied with a FAQ or forum, but others want more in-depth explanations. As expectations have shifted we’ve found an increasing number of people expect that they can find the solution to their problem without having to pick up a phone or send an email. This is great, but it puts the onus on you to make sure that you can help answer even the most complex solution to problems on-demand. We’re seeing more and more businesses embracing video to get this job done right. Over time every business will include videos to explain many of their complex processes.

What’s next?

While even a few years ago it would have been a pipe dream to use online video to make all of the above business processes more efficient and scalable, today it’s a reality.  As technology advances and high quality video becomes easier and cheaper to produce, what will be the next generation of things in your business to be replaced with video?

Posted in business, rant | 4 Comments »

PSA: The Branding Risk of Consumer Video Sites

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Today I was uploading some of our screencasts to different consumer video sites. The intention was to place our videos in places where people might find them in a search and then link back to wistia.com for people who want to learn more. This a standard practice and something we often recommend as a part of a larger marketing strategy.

One of the places I started uploading videos to was Veoh. After uploading, my video page was riddled with related videos, no big deal, this is how these sites drive more views and ad impressions. But a second glance revealed something shocking. The “related videos” include the videos “Naked News”, “Sexy Beach 3 Plus Opening”, “How to hack a coke machine for change”, and “WOMEN DELIVERING BABY VIDEO” among many other videos I do NOT want my company video associated with.

Here is the screenshot I took right after the video was uploaded. Be warned that many would consider this NSFW.

veoh_poor_branding_small

What I don’t understand here is that my video is titled “Wistia Video Metrics + Activity Tracking.” I’ve tagged it things like ‘business’, ‘tracking’, and ‘analytics’. Yet according to the related subject matter, Veoh has decided that “Video Metrics + Activity Tracking” is actually a stage in the human lifecycle between seduction and birth. I do not want my message seen in this context. No business owner does.

Please remember the branding dangers of consumer video before relying on them as your primary source of video hosting. Your viewers will see these related videos. But I guess on the flip-side, sex sells.  So if you’d like to be seen as related to ’sexy girl in bedroom” and “woman delivering baby”  you should go ahead upload your video straight to Veoh and tag it as “video tracking”. This public service announcement has been brought you by Wistia.

Posted in rant, screencast | No Comments »