Marketing with Online Video is Easy and Effective

Three separate articles published today demonstrate both the benefits and the challenges of communicating with online video.

Generally, marketers tend to focus on tried and true methods.  Most organizations cannot afford to make a misstep.  If a tactic worked before, chances are it will be used again.  Over the past few years, thanks in part to technological advancements, a slew of new ways to communicate have been made available to marketers.  Although video has been around for decades, web video marketing is relatively new.  Many marketers are curious about online video.  Yet many professionals are not currently using online video as part of their marketing mix for a variety of reasons:  unknown outcome, budget constraints, and staffing bandwidth just to name a few.

Online video should be part of the marketing toolkit.  Why?  According to Target Marketing, the CMO for eCorpTV.com shared these statistics at a recent Direct Marketing Association meeting in Philadelphia.

1. 33 percent of C-level executives view work-related videos on a daily basis.
2. 65 percent of all video viewing occurs Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
3. Brands using web video marketing have seen between 20 to 40 percent lifts in incremental buying.
4. Online video generates conversions that are twice the rate of other media.
5. From a search perspective, video content is 53 times more likely than text content to appear on the first page of search results.

From my vantage, I think a lot of marketers don’t utilize web video marketing because they don’t have video content.  I do see the lack of video content as being a barrier to entry.  Yet, this commentary from Fierce Online Video found that while many organizations do have content, they’re overwhelmed by the “how to.”  Author Jim O’Neil noted “The general feedback from you all was that yes, online video is a challenging, and at times, daunting industry. It does, in fact, require a fair amount of handholding.” 

One person quoted in Jim’s article, Chad Goehring, said something that immediately resonated with me  “What your emailing CEO needs is a company that can provide an easy to use video platform but also assist in video concepts & campaign strategies (basically, low cost consulting – the hold my hand stuff). I got what I wanted by creating my own video platform and because no one was available to ‘hold my hand’ on how to actually market with video… I learned that too.”

Chad – I would like to believe that Flimp is the company that can provide both an easy to use video platform and assist with video concepts & campaign strategies.  “Easy” should not be “hard.”  Marketing can be tough enough – so I certainly see why professionals would shy away from a tactic that can be difficult.  Flimp takes this tactic and simplifies it.

Beyond powerful statistics that validate web video marketing and moving away from some marketers are still learning about how to work with online video, the most shocking thing I read today was research published by BtoB Magazine.  According to research from Omniture, 70 percent of web video marketers cannot measure post-video conversion.  Sure, it is great that 42.9 percent of marketers polled by Omniture are using online video, but why are they not analyzing their web video marketing campaigns?  From the beginning, analytical data has been a component of the FLIMP Platform.  We understand that marketers can’t gage the effectiveness of their work if they are not able to measure results.  Although I have said this a thousand times, it is as true today as the day I first said it – once a flimp has been created and distributed, it generates a report.  The report is near real-time and it presents, in simple terms, the flimp’s performance with data including:

• Total amount of video viewed (in minutes)
• Percentage of video watched to completion by audience
• Total number of flimp views
• Total number of links clicked on the video landing page (and which individual link was clicked)
• Total number of times the flimp was shared virally

These are firm metrics that help evaluate the effectiveness of the online video content and the supporting branding and messaging.

I think the lack of understandable analytical data is why so many marketers have fixated on viral video campaigns.  With viral video, at least marketers are able to determine a rough number of individuals who have viewed a video.  As compelling as this number can be, especially from a bragging standpoint, I think it is more compelling to know what percentage of an audience engaged with your organization as a result of your video marketing effort.