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How to Become "Video-Active" and Profit from It — 11/25/2009 15:30 PM

How can we utilize video in this new buyer-led world?
To engage today’s customers, we must forget nearly everything we’ve learned about the video of the “past” and reinvent it as an interactive marketing medium. Here’s how:

1. Become “Video-Active”
Thanks to technology, we no longer need an army of well-trained people to shoot, edit, and produce video content. Sure, it’s not entirely easy just yet, but Cisco’s Flip cameras and a host of others are a great way to quickly capture that customer testimonial you’ve been waiting for.

2. Make your video personal
In digital marketing, we’ve seen the benefits of identifying and targeting messages to buyer personas — and video is no exception. With interactive technologies, we can now assemble a personal video story on the fly that maps directly to each persona’s needs. How cool is that?

3. Roll with your own rock stars
You and your own employees can create effective and authentic video content. Look for individuals in your company who connect with people and can tell your story the best way. Use LinkedIn and Twitter to enable direct connections between your rock stars and prospects.

4. Keep it short and sweet ( Not that KISS … )
In this consumer-led world, time is precious — so don’t assume that someone will sit through a 30 minute company presentation on video. Find juicy, bite-sized bits of video snippets and create fun, memorable content out of them.

5. Build calls-to-action into your video
Strike while the iron’s hot. If you have prospects engaged in your video, provide the next step directly within the experience, rather than sending them off to another Web site.

6. Focus on the ROI
Absolutely! Do NOT think of video as optional Web site eye-candy, but a way to add rocket fuel to your current lead generation, lead nurturing and sales enablement programs. Recent studies show that adding video to e-mail campaigns can increase conversion rates by 2 to 3 times. This is an ROI that’s hard to beat.

Last but not least…

Video is Google Juice
According to Forrester Research, optimizing video content is one of the easiest ways to get a first-page organic ranking on Google. Submitting video content to YouTube and other video portals will help you raise awareness, but driving prospects to your door is the ultimate goal.

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