Implement Engagement Marketing with Web Videos

by Patrick Zuluaga, PMZ Marketing [Download Article]

People love and are incredibly engaged with interesting web videos.  It is estimated that more than 75% of Internet users view videos. This is expected to increase to 90% or more within two years.  Web video that captivates your audience is very likely to be shared with their own network of business colleagues and friends using social media.

This is the key business justification to implement web video with social networking – it dramatically expands your ability to reach out to your potential customers at an extremely cost effective price point that cannot be matched by traditional marketing and communications mediums.

The exceptional persuasive power of videos is most effective when these are benefit-oriented and delivered with entertainment value. Keep in mind that engagement marketing allows your audience and potential customers to interact with you and shape how they would like to communicate with you.  Focus your video on these components and your initiative will bear fruit with much Better Marketing Results for your business.

I recommend you implement your web videos for your online web presence using either flash-based or embedded YouTube video code or both.  Today, flash-based videos are the number one format on the web.  Flash players are installed in close to a 100% of all computer platforms and web browsers.  Your business can be assured that flash-based videos can be viewed in a consistent and high quality experience for the vast majority of web users.  YouTube is a must consider alternative as their embed code is easily integrated with your web presence and offers the additional benefit of potential web traffic sourced from YouTube related searches.

Web video adoption has not yet taken hold with small business because of a perception of high cost. This is simply not the case! Small business can easily cost justify the investment by keeping the production simple and short.  Web video productions of 2-minutes are sufficient to deliver the marketing message that will engage with your target audience.

Web videos are most effective when used for:

• Information on product-related features and benefits
• Provide information on product placement and use
• Demonstration for more complex products and services
• Testimonials in a real environment about customers experiences
• A video series or program to associate your business on specific topics that are relevant and interesting to your target market

Experience has shown that the use of web videos with eCommerce web stores achieves higher sales for the featured products, reduces product return rates and has significantly fewer abandoned web carts.  Essentially videos allow Internet users to close the experience gap between “touch and feel” at a retail shop and the web.

It should now be fairly obvious to most small business readers that web videos must become part of your digital marketing strategy.  On the other hand to make web videos work hard for your business you must implement the ability to measure and track how effective it engages. This will allow you to manage and fine tune your efforts for Better Marketing Results.

You will need to measure the effectiveness of the web video in delivering real business value resulting from the “call to actions” taken by the viewers. Ensure you include a powerful and compelling “call to action” for your potential customers to avoid wasting your video marketing.  This is the key performance metric that must be measured for your business.  Yes, the popularity for viewing and sharing the web video are important metrics to measure however it is the conversion rate that is a measure of the success in contributing to the growth of your business.

Look at implementing your engagement marketing strategy using web videos while at the same time facilitating the sharing of your promotional material on social media.