8 Ways Online Videos Can Scale Your Business

August 21, 2007

Between 80 and 100 million Americans are watching online videos. Many of them are sharing the videos with coworkers, family and friends. They’re making purchasing decisions and developing opinions about brands based on these videos.

If your company doesn’t have good great online videos, then you are missing out on profits. Don’t hesitate any longer.

Here are 8 great ways to leverage online videos for profit.

Seasonal Promotions A recent Washington post article highlights how retailers are leveraging online video during the back-to-school shopping season. American Eagle created an internet series about teens who work in a mall, while JC Penney launched a reality series on the internet starring jean designers and twin brothers, Chip and Pepper. The videos are working because teens are buying.

New Product Launch I cannot emphasize enough how great online videos are for new products. Viewers can get a much better sense of function and the size of a product, more so than they would with a static photo. Good videos will demonstrate genuine enthusiasm on the part of the users/wearers/players/watchers/listeners of your new product. That kind of enthusiasm needs to transcend the screen and capture the excitement of your viewers. If you want sales, that is.

Instructional Videos - The other day I couldn’t find my pilates DVD. I looked up pilates on YouTube. Lo and behold, there were several pilates workouts available on demand. If you sell leather furniture, then have a video teaching customers how to clean their sofas. If you sell clothes, teach consumers how to dress for their body shape. Manufacturers of digital gadgets could turn their instructional pamphlet into a video tutorial. There’s really no reason your company should not to be doing this.

Universal Search - Like it or not, it seems the search engines are headed in the direction of including video clips, photos, and other interactive media into the main search results. Marty Weintraub of aimClear confirmed this in one of his blog posts from Search Engine Strategies (a big conference for the search engine optimization industry) yesterday. He noted that David Bailey from Google explained that people’s lives are too busy to visit a bunch of niche search sites or do a ton of bookmarking. Universal search streamlines that to provide quick, simple results.

Conversational Marketing Throw a video on your blog every once in a while. It breaks things up, keeps it fresh, and is a great tool for demonstrating things when words just won’t do the job. If you post your video blog on YouTube, then users can respond to you via video as well. You could get one heck of a conversation going on the biggest video site out there, talking about YOUR company.

Viral and Buzz Marketing When a video is JUST THAT GOOD, people make sure their friends see it. They’ll email it, stumble it, digg it, and blog about it. This kind of video requires thinking outside of the box. But when it works, it’s a thing of beauty, and your sales will reflect that. Need inspiration? Check out WillItBlend.com. This video blog was created by BlendTec, a maker of - you guessed it - blenders. Recently, they blended an iPhone. That video got a huge amount of links for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Contests Who says you have do make all the videos? Hold a contest where customers submit videos demonstrating their love for your product. Doritos, Heinz, and Red Stripe beer have all utilized this method. These contests kill two birds with one stone: you get inexpensive content and testimonials. If thousands of people are willing to put their precious time and creative energy into promoting your product, then awesome things will result. Heck, I bought 5 bottles of Heinz ketchup in preparation for the Heinz contest and then my husband was too busy with other film projects to enter. I usually buy generic.

Customer Service No one likes to call customer service unless the sky is falling, so save your customers some time and yourself some money by putting customer service videos online. Take your most common issues and questions and illustrate solutions through video. It’s like an FAQ on digital film.

Share your ideas for online video by leaving a comment.

Technorati Tags: online video, social media, conversation marketing, youtube

Posted in Social Media by Nathania Johnson