Stats and facts
Let’s look at some statistics and predictions on the commercial advantages of online video:
- Forrester forecasts that online video advertising will overtake email marketing spend by 2012.
- Universal McCann research into professional IT buyers found that 57% said online video had an impact on purchase decisions, with 90% viewing online videos daily or weekly and 82% sharing videos with a colleague.
According to Lisa Ditlefsen, head of search & analytics at Base One Interactive, a B2B marketing agency, 93% of customers within the B2B world use the Internet to research a purchase - in fact, it's the 'first resource' for 63.9%.
For B2B marketing this means that optimising your website involves making it come to life.
Integrated
Web TV is already being embraced by many major business brands and organisations - including BT Business, Land Securities, Sony, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and Canon Europe. But those who don’t take it up run the risk of being left behind.
For it to be a success, though, it needs to do more than exist on a company website. It needs to be a fully integrated part of the marketing communications, conceived, developed and produced for use alongside other digital assets. Increasingly the use of web TV is becoming routine and so should not be treated as some ‘other’. It is a way for your audience to better understand your perspectives, products, services and organisation, and offers a time-effective and engaging alternative to text, PDFs and photos.
Live and on demand
On demand content enables your sales pitch to be accessed 24/7. Live content allows you to create an appointment to view for people who don’t have to leave their desks. A web programme can be interactive and targeted. A live webcast of a sales or internal event can also let those not at the event post questions, whether submitted in advance or during the presentation.
Live streaming gives access to those who couldn’t be there but the on-demand capability extends availability of the video for later viewing at a more convenient moment. And it also gives longer life to the event itself.
Consider Sony at IFA, one of the main consumer electronics shows in the world. We worked with Sony to widen accessibility to the products it was launching at the show. We webcast the press launch, produced 19 blogger videos, delivered a B roll to European broadcasters, and put together a highlights video for Sony employees.
Suddnely an event is leveraged to reach a much larger audience than those in the room.
Optimising the web and engaging bloggers
Leveraging the content is now the name of the game. How to use video as an outbound marketing tool? The world is changing. If used correctly from a search engine optimisation point of view, employing meta-tags and keywords, online video can boost your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website.
From a business angle this is particularly relevant as Google seeks to reward those who use video on their website via the Universal Google Search capability. Ultimately, those featuring video on websites will see a higher traffic to their site with stickier content and will hopefully encourage the browser to turn into a buyer.
Another emerging audience that’s vital to engage with is the blogger. This is particularly true in the technology sphere where bloggers set the news agenda and subsequent product reviews. Highly influential, residing in the blogosphere, most now feature videos on their site. As long as the provenance of the content is clear, your own videos can become collateral for them to feature and demonstrate their access.
Environmental benefits – save a football pitch
The internet can be a tool for green marketing and web TV plays a role here too. Based on research we commissioned from co2balance we established that webcasting an event reduces the carbon footprint of each delegate by 17,222 times. At one event we webcast this was equivalent to 333 trees being used to sequester CO2, or half a football pitch.
Following the consumer’s example
Web video brings organisations to life, helps share best practice and showcases people, products and services. Web TV is a way of doing this in an ongoing, programmatic way that becomes a sustained cakmpaign of rich media content for the target market. Combined with online interactivity, this is a new dynamic way of engaging audiences.
Consumers tend to lead trends and B2B marketeers need to look to what’s happening in the world of entertainment and follow these leads to stay ahead of the game.
An interactive company website featuring online videos will be far more appealing to surfers and potential business prospects and partners than one with text-heavy features. Keeping viewers engaged is key to all areas of any business, just as in the consumer world.
www.broad-view.com