by Keith Smiley
Online video has fast become a standard medium for marketing and communication activities. Statistics have shown that having a video on your website moves your prospect through the sales cycle faster than any other marketing communications tool. That’s because an online video demonstrates the benefits of your product or service in ways that still photos and text simply cannot.
If you have not yet jumped on the video bandwagon, chances are your competitors already have. Here are 7 ways many companies are using video to generate leads and drive sales.
Product Demonstration
Product demos show how your product works and highlight the features that differentiate it from your competitors. Software screen captures, 3D cut-away, or a high impact demo by a presenter are all excellent ways of showing how your product or service works. These videos are typically used to influence a prospect who is relatively far along in the sales cycle. In technology marketing these videos would be targeted at the technical approvers who need to understand how something works.
Video Executive Summary Of A White Paper
A video version of a white paper executive summary is just a 30 second to one minute version of the benefits your prospect will learn from reading your white paper. At the end of the video there is a call to action where the prospect will be provided with an opt-in form to fill out if they wish to read the rest of the white paper.
Video White Paper
Obviously, video white papers are entire white papers on video. Video white papers have evolved over the last years from basically a person reading a white paper on camera to a professional delivery that is accompanied by charts, graphs and other visual references to make the presentation more valuable.
Video Case Study
A video case study combines customer testimonials with more a more in-depth explanation of how your company’s products and services helped your customer be successful. These case studies usually incorporate two voices – a narrator and the voice of your customer and can run anywhere from two to five minutes. The video structure follows the same “Problem, Solution, Benefit” format found in a printed case study.
Video Press Releases
The standard four paragraph press release is now being supplemented with video and rich media to tell a more engaging story. Video is now being purpose-built to directly support the important company announcements. The new challenge for press releases is to change the focus from the company to the customer.
Video Customer Testimonials
Nothing is more compelling than seeing and hearing your customer praise the virtues of your products and services or explaining how you helped them achieve their business goals. These videos usually run from fifteen second snippets to a minute and are typically combined with or used to support other marketing material.
Video Success Stories
Similar to a customer testimonial these videos run between one and two minutes and follow an interview format where the person on screen answers questions posed by an interviewer just off-camera. These videos are usually delivered as stand-alone marketing support materials and are often grouped with other customer success stories.
