This post originally appeared on Endeca's eBusiness Facets blog on Thursday, February 24.
Marketers are always looking for the latest ways to grab audience attention, build lasting impressions, stimulate conversations, and drive conversion. And that’s true regardless of whether you market to B2B or B2C customers.
Q: How are marketers using online video today?
A: Video is a versatile medium, so we’re seeing our brand marketers using video to engage at every stage of the customer lifecycle: from building awareness, to evaluating products, to purchase and even into the loyalty phase.
- Awareness: Video helps attract new audiences and reach viewers wherever they spend their time. Videos about company innovations or culture might grab prospect’s attention early on. LinkedIn’s vintage style video campaign recently garnered interest, drawing attention to the site and encouraging new users to get involved.
- Interest: Video brings your products to life better than any other medium. Potential customers engage with video to understand your products or services.
- Trial: Present calls to action to motivate your audience without ever leaving the browser. A leading enterprise software brand is driving trials utilizing Brightcove’s flexible player framework. Forbes insights found that business people are demonstrating a preference for learning about products through video.
- Purchase: Product videos have proven to increase shopping cart size and online conversion rates by as much as 200%. Kmart, Thomas Pink, and Warehouse UK are introducing products with shoppable video.
- Loyalty: Video helps you connect with customers and keeps them coming back for more. Ocean Spray uses video to educate customers about the Ocean Spray brand and history, building loyalty. NET-A-PORTER.COM recently launched and online video initiative to drive engagement with its high-end fashion content.
And brands are seeing returns on their video investments as they begin to produce more compelling video content. Last quarter we reported that brands saw a 98% increase in engagement with their video content over the previous quarter.
Q: How can video help drive traffic and contribute to my site’s SEO?
A: Here, it’s all about the metadata. Online video platforms allow you to manage rich contextual information about your video, including short descriptions and tags along with tiles that will help your videos get found and contribute to your site’s content. That valuable metadata can travel with your video wherever it gets shared, on social networks and in blog posts where videos get embedded.
And while metadata can help you in your search rankings, the fact remains that YouTube is the second largest source of search. So it’s important for marketers to support a blended distribution strategy to get found. Thankfully, Brightcove publishers can now streamline their video management to reach even larger audiences with YouTube Sync features that automatically and continuously sync the metadata and videos in their Brightcove accounts to their YouTube channels.
It’s also been proven that pages with video perform better in search returns because the graphical elements draw searchers’ attention in an otherwise text-heavy search return.
Q: Why would I need an online video platform? Couldn’t we just use YouTube to embed videos on our site?
A: YouTube is great for driving traffic and getting views, especially if you’re looking to do a viral campaign. But for professional websites, we’ve found that our marketers are looking for lot more control over the viewing experience. That’s why online video platforms offer incredible flexibility in customizing the player experience to match with a site’s branded look-and-feel. We also introduce unique interactive elements like in-video calls to action that allow browsers to click-to-purchase while on your site.
We also think it’s incredibly important to be able to support a seamless experience, no matter what device customers are using browse your site. That’s why our Smart Players work in both Flash and HTML5 environments (for iPad and iPhone playback) so that mobile websites appear as slick and engaging as their desktop counterparts.
And for marketers, being able to measure the success of a campaign is key, so online video platforms like Brightcove offer detailed analytics to give insights on how video is performing, both on your website and off.
For more inspiration check out Brightcove Solutions for Brand Marketers or download the free whitepaper: B2B Marketing with Video: Driving ROI form Awareness to Advocacy.