42 ways to use video to grow your business

This wonderful blog post was originally created by Jimm Fox on his blog - http://www.onemarketmedia.com/blog/

This is a perfect list of the type of video uses we have talked about within BrandVision for years now. Use this as a planning document.

New visual languages, graphic interfaces, rich media content, lower video production costs and shrinking attention spans are changing how businesses communicate. In-house or outsourced, video is becoming a standard delivery medium for marketing and communications activities. Here are some examples:

Customer Reference Videos

1. Video Customer Testimonials (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
Nothing is more compelling than seeing and hearing your customer (ideally in their own environment) extol the virtues of your products and services or explaining how you helped them achieve their business goals. These videos usually run from fifteen second snippets to a minute and are typically combined with or used to support other marketing material.

2. Video Success Stories (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
Similar to a customer testimonial these videos run between one and two minutes and follow an interview format where the person on screen answers questions posed by an interviewer just off-camera. These videos are usually delivered as stand-alone marketing support materials and are often grouped with other customer success stories.

3. Video Case Study (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
A video case study combines customer testimonials with more a more in-depth explanation of how your company’s products and services helped your customer be successful. These case studies usually incorporate two voices – a narrator and the voice of your customer and can run anywhere from two to five minutes. The video structure follows the same “Problem, Solution, Benefit” format found in a printed case study.

4. Man-in-the-street Interviews (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
These videos are typically done to promote events and to build buzz around coming events but can also be employed to capture ’spontaneous’ responses to targeted questions that help promote your product or service or to help differentiate the benefits of your brand compared to the real or imagined problems associated with your competitors. Soft drink companies, phone companies, fast food companies often use this format in advertising. Sometimes they are genuine. Sometimes they are completely staged. ‘Authenticity’ is becoming a style…

5. Customer Presentations. (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Low)
If one of your customers is presenting at a conference, trade show or event or even in your offices and is talking about your products or services either directly with you or indirectly as part of a larger discussion this may be a perfect opportunity to capture the presentation of video (with permission, of course) to re-purpose on your website and intranet.

Product and Service Promotion

6. Product Presentations (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
Product (or service) presentation videos are typically employed early in the buying cycle. Product or service presentations focus on benefits and talk from more from your customer’s perspective. They should speak clearly to how your product solves a specific business, personal or economic problem that your prospect is experiencing. They are used to help your customers and prospects differentiate between the benefits of your products and services to those of your competitors.

7. Product Demonstrations (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
Product demos show how your product works and highlight the features that differentiate it from that of your competitors. Software screen captures, a 3D cut-away, or a high impact demo by a presenter are all excellent ways of showing how your product or service works. These videos are typically used to influence a prospect who is relatively far along in the sales cycle. In technology marketing these videos would be targeted at the technical approvers who need to understand how something works. In consumer marketing these would be targeted at buyers of larger ticket items who are further along the sales cycle.

8. Product Reviews (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
The best product reviews are trusted third party reviews. Video reviews can be found anywhere from YouTube to various business portals. To the extent they help you, they should be referenced. You can also partner with trusted third parties to create product reviews for your own products.

9. Visual Stories (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
Quickly rising in popularity, visual stories employ illustrations, animations and motion graphics with a voice-over to explain complex products or services in a simple and compelling manner.

Corporate Video

10. Corporate Overview (Popularity: High | Growth Potential: moderate)
These videos are the video equivalent of the ‘company brochure’ for small companies – intended to give new visitors to a website a better idea of the company. Corporate overview videos typically company history, key products, executives/owners and other top level business info. As the cost of video production continues to decrease and the popularity of video increases you will start to see these videos being replaced by multiple, more targeted video.

11. Executive Presentations (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
Whether you are preparing for a quarterly update, responding to a major event in your industry or making a regularly scheduled presentation there is great value in presenting the “face” and “voice” of your leadership team to all of your constituents.

12. Staff Presentations (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
Social media and other Web 2.0 trends have caused companies to reconsider how they communicate with external audiences. Your senior leadership team should not be the first and only consideration to represent your company. It is becoming more imperative to consider showcasing the people that drive the day-to-day operations of your company. Customer service representatives, technical experts and legacy workers are all valuable considerations for this new category of corporate video. Surveys show that there is more trust associated with these employees than with senior management. When you are selling to influencers in organizations (versus economic buyers or decision makers) it is especially important you represent your company with people that your customers and prospects can relate to.

13. Corporate facilities or equipment tour (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Low)
Ten years ago corporate facility videos and equipment tours were popular. Down-sizing, off-shoring, outsourcing, a couple of recessions and a hollowing out of North America’s manufacturing base has change the priorities placed on these videos. Uniqueness is key to success here. That said, it’s really not about you any more.

Training and support video

14. Training (Popularity: High | Growth Potential: High)
Corporate video first gained prominence with training (service, support, sales, personal development etc.) and continues to be one of the best uses of video. Online Video is a cost effective substitute for in-class training. You can also easily integrate video into online training management tools.

15. Overnight expert videos (Sales Support) (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
If you serve a large geographic area or sell through channels then it is well worth the effort to put together short ‘overnight expert’ sales support videos that highlight the key selling points, features, benefits, objection handling and follow-up issues to consider by your direct or channel sales force.

16. Just-in-time learning (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: High)
Contextual training videos are becoming very popular on the web. ‘How-to’ videos, video manuals, on-site video reference, quick assembly demos, and other types of video are being used to supplement or replace traditional training. Mobile video will increase the popularity of this type of video.

17. Post sale support and maintenance videos (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
No one reads manuals. You can save thousands of dollars of post sale support by creating informative assembly, installation and maintenance videos for your products and services.

Internal Communications

18. Internal Communications (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
In larger companies few people have the time or interest to understand what other groups or functions within the company do or even why they exist. Internal videos that highlight business plans, new business activities and achievements can improve knowledge transfer and lead to more effective communications. They are also a great way to show off your local hero’s.

19. Event/Conference and Trade Show Communications. (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
Most companies spend a disproportionate amount of their marketing budget on attending and participating in a variety of industry events and yet only a very small percentage of employees ever benefit from these activities. Share the knowledge gained at these events by capturing the presentation, demos, interviews, commentaries etc. on video.

20. Employee orientation (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
Once your new recruits are on board employee orientation videos are a great way to get new staff up to speed. Company history, structure, procedures, policies and codes of behavior can all be communicated effectively with video.

21. Health, Legal & Safety (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: High)
The cost of dealing with health and safety related issues within organizations continues to grow. Video is one of the most effective means of minimizing these costs.

Advertising , marketing and promotion

22. Commercials (Popularity: High | Growth Potential: High)
While advertisers are becoming more selective in how they chose to spend their promotional dollars with broadcast television, other venues for commercials such as online video pre-roll, online sponsorships, in-game advertising, event sponsorships and in-theatre advertising are starting to take the place of broadcast / cable commercials. A proliferation of video screens cropping up on every building, device and structure will create an even more diverse set of advertising opportunities. The challenge will be to create specialized content targeted to an ever shrinking niche audience.

23. Viral Video (Popularity: High | Growth Potential: High)
A video is viral if it is so compelling that people want to share it. (Calling a video ‘Viral’ doesn’t make it so). Viral videos have to be extremely engaging, entertaining, shocking or meaningful to be successful. Unfortunately some of the most successful viral videos have little connection (and therefore value) to any brand. (Everyone references ‘Will it Blend’ but very few viral videos are remotely this successful in actually driving sales.)

24. Email Video (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
Testing has shown that open rates can double if you include video in your email marketing activities. To be effective the video should be purpose-built to elicit a specific conversion activity such as requesting a demo, more info etc.

25. Infomercials (Popularity: High | Growth Potential: Moderate)
Infomercials have been around forever. While they continue to be the primary focus of web-based parody videos they have remained remarkably resilient over time. The shopping channel is, in effect, a 24 hour infomercial. If done well, Infomercials can be very effective at selling certain consumer products.

26. Content Marketing (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Huge)
This is a broad category that will become very important over the next months and years. Much of the content (video or otherwise) being creating today by companies is focused on selling. Focusing on solving your customers problems first and then associating your brand with those solutions will be increasingly more important and effective. (i.e. Home Depot could create a branded ‘how-to’ series that sits on their website and shows their customers how-to fix anything. They would, or course, reference tools and supplies available in their store but more importantly, they would generate tremendous value for their customers and prospects – value that would accrue to them over time.)

27. Landing pages and micro sites (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: High)
Video is beginning to replace or supplement text and graphics as a content element on many corporate websites. Landing pages can offer a more compelling call to action with video. Some micro sites on larger web properties are self contained, purpose-built conversion machines that have the singular purpose of generating a conversion activity (sign-up for more info, attend event, order something etc.). Video is becoming an important part of the conversion process.

PR Support and Community Relations

28. Video Press Releases (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: High)
The standard four paragraph press release is now being supplemented with video and rich media to tell a more engaging story. Video is now being purpose-built to directly support the important company announcements. The new challenge for press releases is to change the focus from the company to the customer.

29. PR Support Materials (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)

Make it easy for networks, bloggers, news gathers and others to promote your business and also to talk about your industry. Smart companies are developing video support catalogues of company and industry related materials (b-roll, industry footage, sound bites etc) and offering them to news and business portals. The demand for video is everywhere. If a news agency (online or broadcast) is looking for stock footage to use in a story it might as well be yours. (assuming the story is positive, of course)

30. Community Relations Video (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: High)
If your company is out working in the community, being good corporate citizens, helping the environment or contributing to important causes you should be capturing those efforts on video. Show the world what you are doing, don’t just talk about it.

Event Video

31. Event Presentation video (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: High)
Events represent a unique confluence of expertise and opportunity – often under-leveraged. Trade Shows, meeting and conferences are usually attended by your top sales people, your corporate executives, industry experts and other influential business people. If you are speaking at an event or someone is referencing your company you should be capturing this valuable content on video.

32. Round table Sessions (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: High)
Take the opportunity at an event to corral four to six of your best customers and other industry experts, put them in room and video tape them talking about industry trends, business issues and the future of your industry. This content will be the most valuable content you could ever capture.

33. Q&A Expert sessions. (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
There are many opportunities to take specific event participants to the side and take them through informal Q&A sessions on various topics that matter to your customers. This content is valuable lead generation content.

Other Uses of Video

34. Recruitment Videos (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
Finding the best employees is the single most important function of any company and yet comparatively small amounts of time and money are allocated to this critical task. Recruitment videos that feature company employees, highlight corporate culture and promote the direction of the company can be very influential.

35. VLOG (Popularity: Moderate | Growth Potential: Low)
Video blogging has been gaining popularity on personal and expert blog sites and is now carrying over to corporate blogging as well. The key challenge with a video blog is that it is linear – you can’t scan it.

36. In Store Video (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: High)
Wal-Mart has its own profitable in-store TV network that makes shoppers aware of new promotions. LCD screens are ubiquitous. In store LCD’s will be networked and customizable offering you the ability to promote your own goods and services or make money by promoting other complimentary services.

37. Company Lobby / Waiting Room Video (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
HD video screens are popping up everywhere – why not in your lobby or reception where you can get a jump start on first impressions and also take advantage of a captive audience.

38. Mobile Video (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Huge)
Yep, ‘there’s and Ap for that’. Mobile video will soon be the largest video category outside of broadcast. In the short-run, mobile video will consist of hastily re-purposed video made to fit on a mobile device. It will quickly evolve into a much more specific format – five to fifteen second hyper targeted messages that are part of geo-located and micro-niched promotions.

39. Market research, focus groups and polling (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
Market research firms are now capturing the anecdotal feedback along with the raw statistics of their research. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video of your customer describing her likes and dislikes of your new product is priceless. Go to YouTube to see how people are describing your products and services.

40. Website FAQ Video (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Moderate)
In certain formats video can be a suitable replacement for text where an authoritative voice, support materials or other visual references are required. A list of FAQ’s answered by a company expert is an example.

41. Video White paper (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Low)
Video white papers have evolved over the last years from basically a person reading a white paper on camera (what’s the point) to a professional delivery that is accompanied by charts, graphs and other visual references to make the presentation more valuable.

42. Video Magazine (Popularity: Low | Growth Potential: Low)
Some video production companies specialize in helping companies deliver serialized video content to their customers. Like the name implies video content is created on a regular basis (usually monthly) that customers and prospects can view through a subscription service.

Have I left any out? Let me know.

Learn more about BrandVision and our tools to help you use video better, please contact us at 303-529-7007. Our Sales Director Mike Murray will be happy to help you. You can also email Mike at mikemurray@actionmediagroup.com

Thanks,

VideoMichael

Golf Mesquite Video Sites are Setup

Golf Mesquite Video Sites are Setup

Here is a list of a few video sites for Golf Mesquite, Nevada

YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/golfmesquite

Vimeo - http://www.vimeo.com/golfmesquite

Dailymotion - http://www.dailymotion.com/golfmesquite

Yahoo Video - http://video.yahoo.com/mypage/video?s=6907579

Blip.tv - http://golfmesquite.blip.tv

Veoh - http://www.veoh.com/users/golfmesquite

Zoppy - http://www.zoopy.com/golfmesquite

Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/golfmesquite

Facebook Fan Page

I-Tunes - http://golfmesquite.blip.tv/rss/itunes

Blinkx - http://www.blinkx.com/videos/Golf+Mesquite

Consider Video?

In a time when business is a bit more challenging then in past years, it becomes important to put you best message to potential customers. There's few better ways to make an impression and have high retention than through the use of video.

It is now very effective to use video in your online marketing efforts. Here are a few reasons why:

Video does very well in Google search
You Tube has become the second leading search engine
People are starting to expect video when looking for information
Video provides the highest retention rate of any form of communication

So how does video help you make more money?

You get better informed customers, leading to higher conversion rates.

The key of course is to have good video and lots of it. Start with several short videos that aim to describe your top five features. Each video should answer a question or solve a problem using your product or service.

Great quality is key. Then you videos should be distributed correctly. This process gives your video the highest chance of being seen and popping up in related keyword searches.

We are available to provide a free presentation on how you might start using video better and gain higher visibility for you brand.

New Website dedicated to BrandVision

If you have read any of my posts on this blog dedicated to the concept of a Web Delivery Network or a Online Video Distribution Strategy then you may be familiar with the concept of BrandVision. This term that we created is how we describe our product / service designed to assist brands with the ability to "broadcast" their story, message, strategy, information, etc.

BrandVision is a combination of two basic concepts that we have successfully applied for our own brands and those of several companies we have helped. First, BrandVision is the process of creating Branded Entertainment intended to help get your brand message across the your intended audience. BrandVision is not promotional video or how-to video, not training video or sales video, but it can be those things. Essentially it is the creation of a video strategy, a series of videos or a video campaign. Whether the video is intended to be funny while including your brand in some manner or it is intended to inform or tell a documentary story with historical relevance that supports your brand. The idea is to utilize the same ideas we have applied for 20 years in the creation of television programming to generate online video "shows" or a series of videos for your brand.

Why a series of videos or shows? Because BrandVision is also the concept of delivering your brand videos across a video network or the web video network if you will. To do this successfully you must have more than one or two good videos, you must have playlist of videos, a sequence or a library of videos. We like to use the analogy of a TV Channel or Television Network. If you think of a network like ABC or FSN (where our shows run), these are just companies that generate or organize a library or schedule of shows. They create a "lineup" of shows that they deliver to affiliate stations or regional networks (in the case of FSN). Essentially, through BRANDVISION we can help you do the same to your own network of "affiliate" channels that we help you create.

So that is BrandVision - the creation of your own video network or affiliate channels across the existing web video network and the creation of video content to "fill your bucket" or distribute to the web video network.

Now we have a new website dedicated to the product and we hope you will visit us and learn more about how we can get BrandVision started.

Approaching a million

I talk about web delivery in three important aspects - hosted, posted and social distribution channels. If you have read previous posts you know Hosted means placing video on your site or your own video channel. Depending on the relevance and popularity of your website this can be very effective. For example - Vail Resorts (one of my clients) has a very large endemic audience that visits the websites of their mountains. So to post a "snow conditions" video on the homepage and lead people into a video channel works well.

In the case of some of my video channels we know that we have a limited audience who are going to find sites like www.golflifetv.com or hitgolf.com or skitv.com. Just a reality. So instead of putting too much involvement in trying to fight an uphill battle we use Posted video delivery strategies. This is how we have been able to start approaching a million unique views for the past year. Our golf content is distributed across the web and using techniques we have developed we are able to manage many different brand channels and drive branded entertainment to lots of locations where people view video content.

Our overall goal and one we are working on for our own content is to locate and nurture social video audiences so that our content can be delivered in the most effective fashion - Social distribution. With Social we utilize our techniques in publishing and delivery for the other techniques, yet with the same level of effort reach a much more engaged, dependable audience member.

Remember - the key to all of these online marketing strategies is content. This does not mean to have someone go out and start creating video just for video content sake. It means content planning and strategies. My best "free" advise is to look for programming experts as I outline in my previous post. To be successful take one long video and break it into a lot of little videos in a series. Target your audience, think of their needs and what they might watch. Most importantly analyze or have someone who can analyze how to produce and publish content optimized for you SEO and sales goals...make proper call to action and target keywords.

Ok - enough advice - get to work considering a budget to start communicating with video using the internet - it will result in positive lift for your business.

Program Pros

So what do I mean with the title "Progam Pros" - well unless your marketing team is under a rock you might have noticed that video is the hottest thing on the web since people learned more about SEO. Incidentally, video can do very well at driving SEO. So the title of this post is intended to put forth the concept of using Programming Professionals to help you with our online video marketing strategies.

Here is my chance to pitch our company - we are programming professionals and for 17 years we have placed products into video distribution on TV, DVD, CD Rom and Internet. However - don't become confused with the fine work done by people you know who mostly do corporate videos. They also have used many of the media I mention. The difference is the idea of programming and specifically the idea of episodic programming on television and internet.

My point here is that in order to be successful with online video you really need to look at it as a long ever evolving journey and you need to plan for more video and less length. The reason for this strategy is that you will find more viewers and more interest in your messages or information if you can provide a "playlist". Think of it like a television series or a broadcast television network. You want to put you message out in a continual fashion and whenever possible you want to spread you message across as many related videos as you can.

There are several reasons for having a group of videos instead of spending your buck on a few high end videos. First let me say all of your videos must be high quality. Second - forget the idea that you are going to come up with the next great "viral" video. Even the most creative of the creatives in video will no promise you that the video concept they are presenting will be successful as a viral video that takes on a life of its own. If they do - they are not being honest with themselves.

I prefer to encourage people to think of their online video efforts more like a "broadcast network". I use the term Brand Vision - broadcasting your videos to audiences across the web. If you consider that to properly distribute video you need to create opportunities to reach viewers where they are - then you can see that it is important to "program your channels". Our advice is to think of your video messages in more of a stream or series - a video campaign or series of campaigns if you will.

If you have more video to work with you can be more successful setting up video accounts, creating video players, presenting playlists and getting people engaged more thoroughly than with a few single messages. Plus you will ultimately reach a much larger audience with more attainable video goals than the Viral hit discussed above.

So back to the original point of this post - "Program Pros". Our advice is to look for companies with experience creating programming. If you are lucky enough to find someone who has successfully developed and syndicated programs that include a lot of product information and demonstration in an entertaining way, then you are much farther along. Finally - if you can find a group that not only understands how to create episodic product based programming but also has been navigating distribution of content on the internet for a while you have a good chance of success.

These days everyone can do video...but few have generated millions of viewers around a series of videos in an informative and entertaining fashion. If you look you will find those few or if you like you can talk with our company - Action Media Group.

Good Luck.

Need to keep moving on this blog

Sorry to anyone who has visited lately...more content on the way. Here is my latest take with regard to online video distribution. We can help -

We define three levels of video distribution currently on the internet: Hosted, Posted and Social. Many company sites currently have hosted video. We feel this could be done in a more “channel” viewer enhanced way and if your site has weak SEO presence the new audience generation is minimal. We often end up advising improvement of Hosted video presence and developing some micro-site applications to create video landing sites.

Posted video is the process of syndicating your video to multiple video portals, search engines, RSS/MRSS feeds, blogs, oher sites, etc. Our process is much more involved than just posting some video on You Tube. The strategy involves developing a programming plan and a network of channels to delivery and promote that programming or video content. We also endeavor to work with marketing and public relations teams to create now promotions and activation opportunities on other sites to leverage video assets.

Social video distribution is the third prong and a much more evolutionary “BHAG” approach. The basic strategy here is the locate an audience and retain them through content, incentives and news. This is a longer process and requires dedication. It entails much more than creating a “social network” and hoping people come there. It involves seeding and relationships with existing social groups and luring your audience with your content as an enticement.

The Anthropology of You Tube

This is a very interesting video that provides some enlightenment on the new video communication that is becoming such a part of our social fabric. While a bit deep at times, the point for businesses as it relates to our web delivery network is that your efforts to begin telling your own story while creating an audience around your brand is a necessity more than a trivial pursuit.javascript:void(0)