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:
Gathering actionable data on user engagement to help optimize a purchase funnel- Incorporating video into e-mail marketing campaigns to understand which prospects are particularly interested
- Using 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?
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?
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.
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
Hi from Ireland, very good post, deserves a Digg.
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.
@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.