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What does “Video Marketing” really mean?

Jan 11 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?

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Video Rocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.flimp.net Matt Shaw

    I don’t know that I find the differentiation important. What marketers should be worried about is creating compelling video content that can be repurposed for a variety of objectives. Yes, that content should be inherently sharable (vis-a-vis “Marketing A Video”), but if you can distribute that video via email, social media, PR, your blog, etc. (“Marketing WITH Video”) to incite that primary exposure, all the better.

    I think it unwise to simply post a video to YouTube, for example, and hope that it goes viral. That’s too untargeted. A much more effective method of “Marketing A Video” is to use it in your existing marketing efforts. This generates targeted exposure which, if the video is shared, targets relevant social networks, as well. Maybe the video won’t be as widely watched as similar YouTube videos might be, but it will certainly be more efficient.

    For my own education, which camp does Wistia consider itself to be in?

  • Chris

    Matt,

    My point is that people should be “marketing with video” and “marketing their videos” and that providing a differentiation helps to make it more clear which solutions to use for each problem.

    I agree that simply posting a video to YouTube to market it would be unwise. But uploading that video to TubeMogul, distributing it to 30 different free video sharing sites with proper tags and descriptions is definitely an efficient way to drive new traffic back to a website. In my definition, this would be “Marketing A Video.”

    I’m entering a world of subtly by discussing these differences here, but I do think it’s helpful when trying to figure out which features are important for different uses.

    As for Wistia, we find ourselves squarely in the “Marketing With Video” camp.

  • http://videomarketingintensive.com Mukul Verma – Video Marketing Intensive

    Thank You, this is quite often mixed up and a huge difference.

    Quite often people will use the first one and put it on You Tube or other video sites and end up with a commercial. For it to work, when marketing a video, you need to build concrete value for the person watching the video, you need to structure it so it can easily be found. This is a important time to build that trust and relationship with the customer and proving you are the solution.

    Cheers,
    Mukul

  • http://www.everythingcaravan.ie Andrew A. Sailer

    Hi from Ireland, very good post, deserves a Digg.

  • http://www.onemarketmedia.com/blog Jimm Fox

    I’ll volunteer these definitions to add confusion to the discussion…

    ‘Marketing with video’ – Any marketing activity that includes the use of video.

    ‘Marketing a video’ – The act of promoting a specific video. ‘Video seeding’ is a good example of this. Promoting entertainment videos (music or film) would be another.

    ‘Marketing video’ – a video created with the specific intent to promote a product or service. (I.e. not entertainment)

    ‘Video Marketing’- …pretty much all of the above and anything else you can think of.

  • http://wistia.com Chris Savage

    @jimm fox

    I think you’re right on with the four definitions you present. There clearly is a ton of confusion about all of the terminology here. I hope that by continuing the discussions we can help others make sense of it all.

  • http://netmarketingniche.com Art

    Good article. I think video marketing is the way to go. The old marketing ideas still work, but they do not hold a candle to what video marketing can do for your business.

  • http://jules.tv jules

    It’s such a broad field, from people creating nonsense spun videos and spamming the world to amazingly creative video promos that go viral – it’s mind blowing!

  • Pingback: video marketing

  • http://paulhollandmedia.com Paul Holland Media

    Marketing is such a broad field and video is one of the best tools we have available right now. This does not mean we should use it to the exclusion of all other forms of marketing.

  • http://www.accelerateyourmarketing.com Ryan Steinolfson

    Video marketing online is here to stay. Traffic geyser is another great tool for syndicating out videos on a large scale.

    I get amazing results with my video. However, they have to add value to the end user, be keyword optimized and have good off page optimization in order to be found.

  • http://www.explania.com Timo Mouton

    Great blog post! Opened my eyes, never really tought of the difference between Marketing with a Video or Marketing for a Video…

    By the way, great example of Viral Video from Belgium :-)
    It was to raise awareness for a National Television show like American Idol, but they were looking for a “new” Maria to star in the musical “The Sound of Music”…

  • http://videomarketingacademy.com.au/ Video Marketing Academy

    Excellent information. Thanks.

  • http://www.deanethridge.com Dean Ethridge

    Great article and I think early adapters that use video will be well served long term. Video is beginning to dominate the search engines, and I try to include one with my articles as often as possible. As one of your earlier guests mentioned, I use Traffic Geyser to distribute, and also Talk Fusion for my marketing and webinars. Thanks so much for explaining this area well on with a video or for a video

  • http://twitter.com/ReelMarketer Reel Marketer

    Fantastic article – you’ve spelled out ‘video marketing’ well – especially considering this article was written in the beginning of 2010, and now, in 2012, it seems video marketing is really on the uptick now. i.e. this article is ahead of it’s time ;)

    Writing through our eMagazine ReelMarketer, we’ve found that many marketers and business people are confused between the differences between Video PRODUCTION and MARKETING with Video (Video Marketing). The two are closely tied together of course, but what Video Marketing is about the STRATEGY behind the video – why the video is being done, the distribution strategy, what the goals are, and how success will be measured!

    A video marketing strategy is so important! Will you be writing a follow up article soon? If so, looking forward to it!

  • http://www.facebook.com/tanishaphill Tanisha Adjo

    great this saves so much time