Public Relations & Social Media Insight

In my previous post, “Using Video Content to Drive Brand Awareness, Leads, and Sales,” I took you through the first four steps of the definitive B2B video marketing strategy. In this second post, we focus on executing your video content strategy, maximizing impact, measuring results, and ensuring that you create sustainable campaigns that add long-term value to your organization....

Video apps: Discover 5 video apps to boost your online engagement and market your business....

Do you want to use videos to market your business? Are you wondering if there are simple mobile apps to make this possible? In this article I’ll review five mobile video apps and share how they can boost your online engagement.

Why Mobile Video? Vine, Twitter’s mobile video app, has business and marketing professionals considering the numerous ways video apps can be used to increase engagement.

Ekaterina Walter, social innovator at Intel and author of Think Like Zuck, recently predicted that “2013 will be the year of visual marketing”. Walter based this prediction, in part, on the fact that “…visuals and video done right are highly effective in cutting through the noise.”

As an example of this opportunity, Paul Roger’s recent post on using products to increase conversion rate showed the power of video to persuade consumers about a product.

For example, Matt Lawson, Head of Conversion at Appliances Online explains: “Video gives us the opportunity to wow our customers and this in turn delivers results. We have tested and proven that when someone watches our video reviews they’re 120.5% more likely to buy, spend 157.2% longer on the site and spend 9.1% more per order. So my focus this quarter is increase customers watching video. Simple.”...

This graph tells us that shorter videos are better for getting people to watch the whole thing. After all, most business video is created to serve up a pre-packaged message, so the longer the video, the less people will watch. It's also noticeable that after a certain point the engagement average flattens out -- so there's not a major difference in engagement for a 4-minute versus a 10-minute video....

[When it comes to video, shorter is better. ~ Jeff]

Video is something I’ve wanted to integrate into my social media marketing strategy for a while now. Sound familiar?

When I saw a blog post on using 15-second videos (thank you, Social Media Examiner!), I got pretty excited. One, because the blog post focuses on Viddy, a company I first covered at Tech Cocktail a year and a half ago. And second, because it was a good reminder to me that Viddy only allows you to make 15-second-long videos, and that is both short and doable.

The best part is that a Viddy video can be quickly and easily shared on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which means there’s no excuse not to use it!

Here are my favorite (read: easy-to-do) marketing ideas for using a Viddy video...

New York's Con Edison includes videos featuring employees in its press releases, customer emails and employee communications. The power of the medium is immediate.

Con Edison, the utility that provides electric power to most of New York City and New York's Westchester County, is a company with a lot to say about energy conservation, efficiency, and its employees.

Over the past few years, the company has discovered that video makes saying those things a lot easier.

"We've really embraced video in our communications," Ann Cameron, director of creative services for Con Edison, told an audience at Ragan Communications' PR and Media Relations Best Practices Summit at her company's headquarters. "We use video to have conversations with our customers, we use video as a PR tool for our media relations work, and we use video to tell our corporate story."

Instead of messages coming from a faceless company's press release, they now come from personable, friendly Con Ed employees speaking directly to the viewer. The public, its own employees, and the media have all taken notice....

For marketers who have not used video in direct sales or direct communications, the process may be daunting. The Content Marketing Institute identified eight key steps for creating and deploying B2B video content to assist.

These steps make the process manageable, straightforward and cover the following:

1. Execution – producing video content

2. Distribution – selecting what channels to use for distributing videos

3. Encouragement – using SEO and other tools to tell an audience to watch your video

4. Viral – creating content that people not only want to share, but make it easy for viewers to pass the video along

5. Optimization – incorporating simple calls to action to convert viewers into customers

6. Maximization – making video content a key component of the marketing mix

7. Analyzing – using data to determine a video’s ROI, especially in relation to sales lead generation

8. Do it again – web video marketing should not be a “one and done” exercise...

Videos have the ability to connect with prospects in a way you can’t through text, e-mail, or even a phone call. This is especially significant because in sales, you’re selling yourself: the product comes after you’ve established a connection. Imagine being able to talk to a prospect who already has a connection with your company; that changes the dynamics of the conversation.

Anyone in sales knows that people buy from people they know and trust. Videos have the ability to connect with prospects in a way you can’t do through text, e-mail, or even a phone call. This is especially significant because in sales, you’re selling yourself - the product comes after you’ve established a connection.

Different Types of Video Marketing

Let’s take a deeper dive into the different types of video marketing:

- Promotional: Showcases your products and services

- Testimonial: Highlights your talents by showing clients raving about work you’ve done

- Thought Leadership: Presents new or useful information relevant to your industry

- How-To: Informs prospects on how they can use your product or service

- Product Information: Explains new features, benefits, solutions, troubleshooting

- Entertainment: Shows your brand’s human side; leverage viral videos, contests

There are many more examples of how to use videos in your marketing campaigns. Larger corporations may elect to use videos as internal information pieces to help sales or customer service representatives....

First came infographics, and now more brands are moving into video, a way to take advantage of the power of visual story-telling...

Sports commentators are the ultimate content marketers. And never is that more prevalent than during the Olympic Games.

Think about it. Sports commentators take mounds and mounds of stats on every athlete and compile them into short, simple sound bytes that deliver high-quality commentary for viewers. It’s no different than brands citing data points to validate their market positions or credibly tell their corporate or product stories through various-content marketing campaigns.

But not all brands get it right. Telling a data-driven story in a simple way is tough. With so much data, where do you start? And how do you bring a creative flare to the mix, to ensure it is simple and compelling enough for your customers to not only read it, but want to share it?...

[Mia Pearson explores what's new in content marketing - video - JD]