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Make yourself well-known both on the web and in the realm of business with branding. In order to build your brand be sure to read up on your industry to learn all there is, establish a clear and concise website for your business, and network with other companies to build relationships. Establishing a presence online will help enhance your brand and reach more customers.

When people talk about the importance of video marketing on the Internet, they aren’t kidding.

Video really is one of the best ways you can spread word about your business, and of course, there’s the always-present chance of the video “going viral” and making you a hit.

However, you can’t do this with just any video you have lying around. The best examples of marketing a video all involve a clip that was intended for the Internet. Just as when you’re dealing with films any other medium, you have to consider your audience and their desires for best effect.

We’ve got plenty of experience in helping people market their videos, so take a seat and read on for a few ideas on how to make the best marketing videos you can.

Six Strategies For Marketing a Video

• Reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. Ask any teacher the best way to teach a concept, and they will almost certainly say “reinforcement.” You should boil the idea of your video down to a single message, even if that message is simply “Eat at Joe’s,” and make sure it’s repeated several times in different forms. There’s an art to this, of course, since you can’t be too heavy-handed. But, consider 2–3 repetitions of the message to be the bare minimum.
• Comedy sells. If our hypothetical teacher above didn’t say “reinforcement,” they’d say “make them laugh.” It’s well-established that humor directly aids learning. For some reason, the cognitive dissonance that humor exploits also opens up a mind to be more receptive to new ideas. If you’re in doubt about the best way to push your message, you can rarely go wrong with being funny.(As long as it’s actually funny, anyway.  You’re on your own if you hire Rob Schneider.)
• Budgets: If you can’t go big, “make it work.” I’m not going to say that budget doesn’t matter, since many of the most famous ads in history had ridiculous budgets. However if you don’t have millions of dollars to blow, look to leverage a small budget in clever ways. Remember Chuck Testa? That’s a perfect example of how to make a small budget work foryou. (And reinforcement, and comedy…)
• Invite social involvement. Many marketeers don’t understand that a viral video is truly a collaborative effort. People at large need to have a reason to want to share your video with their friends. Speak to them and make them want to share it. This is yet another reason comedy works so well. Either way, your video should have plenty of options for sharing it on every social site you can think of. You can even embed apps for sharing directly in the video to make it easier!
• Music really matters. It’s easy to overlook the sound and music when marketing a video, but you shouldn’t. While there’s no “magic bullet” for creating a viral hit, having catchy music seems to be a significant factor. (It helps explain why Americans loved a snarky K-pop parody, anyway.) Don’t skimp here; take some time browsing around stock music libraries or Creative Commons works to find a good companion piece to your video.
• Remember the metadata. Before your marketing video goes live, make sure you’re leveraging the metadata in its file and its tagging. These should all be rich with keywords, while still being human-readable. This metadata helps search engine spiders catalog your work, as well as making it easier to find while using a variety of web searches. This is the “invisible” touch that can really enhance your video marketing, especially considering that popular YouTube videos instantly get a top spot in relevant Google searches.

Marketing a video online is remarkably easy, all told, and with the right video you can really spread word about your business while putting your message in front of viewers.

 By David Burrows

As search engines change and grow, instructive and entertaining videos are becoming a crucial way for brands to get an edge on competitors in search rankings and keep their audience engaged.

Video content might have become an integral part of the marketing mix, but many brands seem lost when it comes to search engine optimisation for video.

Search agencies offer clients ‘first page’ guarantees on their search engine rankings, but how many will use video to achieve that? A look at the statistics suggests they should. Video results have appeared in about 70 per cent of the top 100 search listings on Google this year, while YouTube broke through the 5 per cent barrier of all UK internet visits.

Travel site Holiday Extras sees video search engine optimisation (SEO) as critical. Anthony Clarke-Cowell, who heads the brand’s video team, calls it “a fundamental facet of our SEO strategy”. He adds: “It’s a cornerstone in our plans to improve engagement with customers and our team.”

In the past 12 months, Holiday Extras has invested £20,000 in creating video “to enhance customer experience and drive SEO rankings by serving up relevant, informative and unique video to search engines.” The reasons are simple: “People who view our videos are about 60 per cent more likely to book and they’re also less likely to complain,” Clarke-Cowell explains.

“Videos help to increase the average time spent on the site and reduce the bounce rate from our pages. Our content helps us to retain good positions in the natural search lists,” he adds.

Video search and video hub sites have been mainstream since 2004, but content on these sites has evolved dramatically over the past few years. In 2007, Google announced ‘blended’ or ‘universal’ search, adding video and images to its search algorithms.

As Danny Denhard, lead of SEO at VoucherCodes.co.uk, explains:”Technology improved and copyright infringements decreased but, more importantly, Google dramatically accelerated the monetisation of dynamic content — perhaps the most significant recent development in video search. This investment from Google and other large companies has forced the video search market to evolve and grow.”

Five years on, SEO professionals are of the view that video results are gaining growing prominence in Google’s results pages. YouTube has started to adjust the rankings of videos on its site to “reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching” — in other words, less clicking and more watching.

Andrew Smith, a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations social media panel and lead trainer on digital marketing, says this drive towards quality, rather than quantity, on Google and YouTube will see video play a crucial role in SEO strategy.

“Google is starting to look at search and the quality of content available to its users. For example, instead of ranking YouTube on views, it is assessing the content consumption in terms of minutes viewed,” Smith explains.

“It is also looking at how information is consumed on its search page, analysing what happens when people click on a link. For example, do they immediately click back to the search, suggesting the top links are irrelevant?”

However, marketers are still not fully exploiting video search, says Smith.

“Consensus is emerging in the SEO industry that video results have ever-increasing prominence in Google’s results pages. Despite this, there seems a surprising lack of knowledge and investment in basic video SEO techniques, such as video site maps.”

VoucherCodes’ Denhard explains that a brand’s approach to video search can be similar to keyword search. “Brands that create ultra-relevant, compelling content and target core keyword searches will succeed,” he says.

Holiday Extras includes full details of its videos on its site to improve its search rankings, as well as links to its YouTube channels, homepage and social media pages. “The fact that YouTube now ranks videos according to watch time, rather than clicks, is a big incentive to produce engaging content,” says Clarke-Cowell.

Yet optimising video for search rankings isn’t the exclusive domain of big brands. “Video is a bit of an equaliser in the SEO world, acting as a tool for smaller brands looking to make an impact,” says PR and marketing manager Nick Gibbens of premium UK shaving brand The Bluebeard’s Revenge. The brand ranks on the first page of Google in the hotly contested ‘how to shave’ category of videos. How?

“We researched the top related keywords for search traffic and ensured they were included in the file name and video title and that the video description was built around the key terms we were targeting, like ‘shaving tips’ and ‘how to shave’,” he explains.

“It’s easier to rank video content for competitive keywords than ‘normal’ content when video results are incorporated into the search engine results page. Google normally only shows two or three videos in a set of results, which makes them immediately prominent over traditional results. This gives you the opportunity to claim a higher percentage of traffic.”

‘How to’ videos are a popular avenue, especially as consumers are far more likely to engage if the clip directly addresses their needs. According to Google, there are three times as many searches for the term ‘how to’ than there are for ‘music video’ on YouTube.

As ‘how to’ searches gain popularity, many brands, such as eSpares, are now using YouTube ‘how to’ searches to advertise their products and show customers how to use them.

The brand sees advertising associated with ‘how to’ searches as a way to put its service in front of customers at an appropriate time.

But while YouTube is all but synonymous with online video, it isn’t always the best place to host your branded content because it holds so many distractions.

Nigel Allan, social media manager at WWF International, prefers to embed video on the WWF site and then refer people to the webpage.

“If they’re watching on YouTube, the next thing they’re likely to do is watch another video, but if they are on our site then they may read more or download a report,” he says.

“If you send them to YouTube, before you know it they are looking at a video of a cat jumping when you’ve been trying to engage on them on the conservation of tigers.”

Brands also need to bear in mind that Google and YouTube are not the be-all and end-all of online search. New search engines are emerging that can trawl social networks as well as video sites and provide user personalisation.

One such site is Blinkx. According to company president Suranga Chandratillake, it was built from the ground up using search technologies that “listen to” and even “see” the web.

“On Google, you search for words on a webpage, [but] with video there are no such words and what is in the video might not be in the [tagged] text [or titles], so it can be misleading. The difference with our search is that it also uses speech and visual analysis.”

Unlike YouTube and iPlayer, which only search through their databases, Blinkx searches across the web and boasts “35 million hours” of audio, video, viral and TV content from sites including YouTube.

Chandratillake clearly spies an opportunity in spite of the dominance of the big players. “Google is a major player but still primarily for text web search. Given the lack of a real web video search function on Google, there’s a huge opportunity to become another option.”

There is potentially a huge opportunity for brands too. SEO for video has received little attention as yet, but as video content on the internet grows, the scramble to be at the top of Blinkx, Google, YouTube and other search rankings will only intensify.

By Marit Fratelli

It’s Thanksgiving week, and that means it’s time to sit back, reflect, and express some serious gratitude. But if you were to create a list of things to be thankful for this year, would anything about your job make the cut? (Besides the fact that you have one, of course!)

For marketers, there’s a lot to be thankful for this year, particularly the continued rise of online video as a valuable and cost-effective content marketing tool. OK, so obviously I work at Brainshark, but there are so many ways it makes my job and our clients’ jobs easier too. Here are just five reasons why marketers should consider putting Brainshark video on their gratitude list.

#1. It practically makes itself.

I know that when some people hear the word video, they still think of long lead times and lots of production money. But that’s just not the case anymore. With tools like Brainshark, marketers can leverage the content they already have and create professional, voice-enriched presentations in a flash. All you have to do is upload that vibrant PowerPoint with a click of a button, add your audio, and presto-chango, you’ve got video!

#2. You can be a voice-over star.

Morgan Freeman, John Krasinski, and Willem Dafoe, just to name a few, have all done voice-over work for commercials recently. You can easily be a part of that trend as Brainshark’s online video presentations provide an easy way to add your voice narration to those awesome slides you just uploaded. All you need is a phone or computer microphone and you too could be the next James Earl Jones.

#3. Video extends the reach of your most powerful presentations.

In-person PowerPoint presentations can be great, but no matter how many meetings you schedule, there will always be more potential prospects out there waiting to hear your message. By taking that PowerPoint slide deck and turning it into on-demand video or even a series of videos, you can reach more people and give your audience the ability to soak in your information when and where it’s convenient for them. Not to mention you can track things like viewer retention, or even who is watching and how many times.

#4. No lost sleep to last second edits.

Here’s a scenario that might sound familiar. You are asked to make a change to a piece of collateral that was deemed final and has already been printed about a thousand times. Another great thing about creating your own Brainshark online video is that when you make a change to your presentation, it’s automatically updated everywhere. How is this possible? It’s in the (all powerful)cloud. So while the original video link will stay the same, the next time anyone clicks on it they’ll see the updated version. Pretty cool and you didn’t have to sacrifice a forest.

#5. You can be a work hero.

Let’s face it; nothing speaks louder than actual results. Sure, creating online video is easy, fun, and even environmentally sound – but does it work? You bet your bottom dollar. Clients have long realized the power of online video when it comes to their marketing communications. For instance, by using Brainshark in their marketing campaigns, the team at Concur was able to quadruple their sales and cut their sales cycle time by a third. Imagine if you could return those same results at your own company? Let the hero worship begin.

Having a job is definitely something to be thankful for. Having job security, now that’s priceless.

by Brafton Editorial

For certain industries, online marketing is a foreign language. It can be difficult to alter traditional outreach programs to include emerging practices like video marketing, but if lead generation is the driving force behindimproving ROI, professionals can look to the auto industry for some guidance.

A recent Unruly white paper entitled “Stuck in First Gear?: The State of Automobile Marketing in Social Video” uncovers key data for auto marketers as they allocate resources toward their future content marketing campaigns. While businesses understand Page Rank and SEO-friendly branded content can help their brands get in front of leads through search, video marketing encourages social shares and can spread media across the web even further.

The white paper found that the auto industry isn’t leading the proliferation of social video, but innovators in the sector are gaining early adopter advantages. For example, video sharing of auto content on social networks is growing at only one-fifth the rate of the overall ad market. In addition, four automobile brands account for 73.1 percent of video sharing in the industry, which indicates there is significant room for growth, and that more companies may soon develop custom content of their own for professional gain.

Perhaps the statistic that stands out the most is that nearly one-quarter of all video shares in the auto industry occur during the Super Bowl. With the bulk of companies focusing their marketing strategies on a single day out of the year, an untapped opportunity awaits those marketers who look toward the remaining 364 days.

Econsultancy contributor David Moth analyzed the Unruly Viral Video Chart and noticed that German carmaker Volkswagen claimed one-quarter of all auto video shares from June 2011 to June 2012. The companies Kia (21.6 percent) and Chevrolet (15.3) earned the second and third amount of online video shares, respectively, over the same time period.

Moth went on to note that for every branded automotive video share, an average of 25 people see the content, so marketers who develop engaging material can generate a significant number of new leads with one post. Video marketing may seem like a far off strategy for some auto brands, but Unruly’s data and Moth’s analysis put demand for the practice in greater perspective.

There certainly is room for growth, as indicated by the volume of branded video shares that occur during the Super Bowl, but it’s up to today’s thought leaders in the automotive field to take the leap into content creation and get ahead of the social sharing wave.

Are you considering adding online video into your marketing efforts? Do you need some statistics to convince your boss that using online video in your marketing efforts is worth the investment?

Or do you need some pickup lines because your crush is a filmmaker? Hey babe, did you know that two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016? Why don’tyou buy me a drink?

25 online video marketing statistics that you should know

1. YouTube attracts 136MM unique viewers per month. (source: NIELSEN) Tweet this stat!
2. YouTube users watch more than 3B hours of video per month. (source: YouTube) Tweet this stat!
3. 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. (source: YouTube) Tweet this stat!
4. 75% of online video viewers have interacted with an online video ad in the past month. (source: Tremor Video) Tweet this stat!
5. 80% of online video ads are abandoned within the first half of the ad. (source: VINDICO)Tweet this stat!
6. 86% of colleges and universities have presences on YouTube. (source: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth) Tweet this stat!
7. 147.4MM Americans watch video on the internet. (source: Nielsen Wire) Tweet this stat!
8. Roughly 74% of the online video market now supports HTML5. (source: LongTail Video) Tweet this stat!
9. Animated explainer videos increase conversion rates by 20%. (source: Unbounce) Tweet this stat!
10. 36% of online consumers trust video ads. (source: Nielsen Wire) Tweet this stat!
11. 87% of online marketers use video content. (source: Outbrain) Tweet this stat!
12. 76% of marketers plan to increase their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012. (source: Social Media Examiner) Tweet this stat!
13. 49% of the top 20% of B2B marketers in generating leads through social media integrate online video with social media, compared to the industry average of 32%. (source: Aberdeen)Tweet this stat!
14. Video ads make up 35% of total online ad spending, up from 27% in 2011. (source: Break Media) Tweet this stat!
15. Digital video advertising spend will reach $5.4B by 2016. (source: Break Media) Tweet this stat!
16. 49% of U.S. marketers plan to boost video ad spending in 2012, and 65% have larger mobile ad budgets. (source: eMarketer) Tweet this stat!
17. Comedy is the most popular form of online video content among all viewers (39%), followed by news (33%) and music (31%). (source: Burst Media) Tweet this stat!
18. Rich media ads with video generate 6 times as many post-ad site visits as standard banner ads. (source: MediaMind) Tweet this stat!
19. Online video advertisers prefer pre-roll ads by a 3:1 margin over the next most favored format. (source: Break Media) Tweet this stat!
20. 30 second in-stream mobile video ads have an 88.3% completion rate. (source: Rhythm Insights) Tweet this stat!
21. Combining video with full page ads boosts engagement by 22%. (source: Rhythm Insights)Tweet this stat!
22. 4 out of 5 online users will click away if a video stalls while loading. (source: Google) Tweet this stat!
23. 22% of U.S. small businesses plan to post a video to YouTube in the next 12 months to promote their businesses. (source: BIA/Kelsey) Tweet this stat!
24. Enjoyment of video ads increases purchase intent by 97%, and brand association by 139%. (source: Unruly) Tweet this stat!
25. Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016. (source: Cisco) Tweet this stat!

Everyone loves something for free. The marketing message varies but the core tactic involves the word “free”.

Buy two and get one free, free holiday for purchases over $1,000 and the online shopping favorite of “free shipping”.

When you are starting your blog, website or start-up you usually don’t have have a bucket of money to throw at marketing. Traditionally you did something like a letter box drop, a direct mail after buying an expensive list from a database marketing company or you hired a telemarketing company to call people and annoy them.

In the digital world it could be buying Google Adwords and commencing a digital marketing campaign that uses key words and phrases that people would use to find your product or service when searching online, it could also be Facebook ads targeting your city and target demographic. At the end of the day it costs money and unless your family is backed by Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates or a drug baron, the money pit is not a bottomless pile of gold coins and and you have to get smart and savvy and find cheap or zero cost alternatives.

So you have to be clever and work out ways to get free traffic that you can convert to leads and sales.

The 3 digital marketing strategies that can pay off and drive free traffic include social, search and the all important “unique” content that is the foundation element that facilitates and accelerates the sharing and lifts your search results.

1. Search is Changing

There are two ways people find your blog or website when searching online. They either click on the paid Google Adwords that are placed on the side or the top of the search results page (that someone has paid Google to put there) or they clicked on the other links that are called “Organic Search Results”. These are earned through optimizing your website and blog for search engines. The best way to do that was to hire an SEO consultant.

Five years ago SEO consultants were all the rage. You hired them and put them in a dark room, fed them pizza and pasta and soon your site was ranking on the first page of Google. It was like magic. If you dug a little deeper they were doing things like buying links, setting up domains with the keywords in the URL that were important for your business and other tactics that gamed the search system.

But Google has started changing the rules. Strange sounding updates for Google that include the words “Panda” and “Penguin” are really code words for “watch out your site is about to drop from page one to page ten”

Plumbers, painters and podiatrists that were ranking on the first page of Google and had built a booming business based on old school search engine optimization (SEO) tactics had dropped off page one and the inquiries and leads had dried up. This type of SEO didn’t require creating great unique content that the web needs and loves but just involved playing the SEO game.

The search game is changing with Google now putting major emphasis on content and social signals such as Retweets, likes, shares and the Google Plus one platforms +1′s.

It is no longer about gaming the sytem but adding real value to the web through regular publishing of content that people love to share, link to and embed.

2. Content is the New SEO

Google’s updates have made content marketing the hottest trend since “planking”.

Create, publish and promote great content and Google (read search engines) will start to love you. That content can be a YouTube video, a blog post or a Slideshare presentation or any type of multi-media content. eCommerce stores are hiring magazine editors to lead the creation of content that is visual, viral and valued by readers and viewers. Creating content

A word of warning here. Google does not like duplicate content (it has new ways of detecting that) so just copying and pasting someone else’s content into your website or blog is frowned upon. It needs to be unique.

The challenge is to make the content so enticing that people will share it with their friends, family and colleagues. This does take some thought, skill and creativity.

Content with a good headline or a captivating image will be shared much more on Twitter or Facebook than a bland bit of poorly written text. You need to think about what sort of content captures your attention and then create that for your customers that is relevant and tempting.

3. Social is the Turbo Charger for Content

Social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and social media (YouTube, Slideshare and Pinterest) provides the platforms to turbo charge your content. It is how people share content.

Social accelerates the discovery of your content. Before the rise of social web, content was locked up in filing cabinets, hard disks and printed offline articles. Sharing online was limited to sending an attachment via email. This limited its spread as it was private.

Content needs to be re-purposed (Make a blog post into a Powerpoint presentation and put it on Slideshare or take a printed press release and turn it into a blog post), published online and it then needs to be set free.

Google has created Google+ to measure these social signals of sharing and is embedding and weaving social into search results.

Content that is shared on social channels is your new SEO.

What About You?

The days of single channel marketing are over. Combining and integrating social, search and content into your digital marketing strategy are now vital to move from visible to visible on a crowded and competitive web.

This blog was created on a foundation of consistent unique content that was shared on social networks. When I started Google didn’t really know I existed. Today nearly 50% of my traffic (and it is free) is via Google organic search. That is over 160,000 page views a month. It doesn’t cost me a cent.

How are you playing in the digital marketing landscape? Is it social, search or content or have you moved to an integrated approach?

Which strategies and tactics are working best for you?

Look forward to hearing your stories in comments below.

There is a temptation to forget about the potential of email marketing campaigns. We get carried away looking too far forward and we forget about the power of one of the earlier life-changing aspects of the Internet. Email is still widely used. Having people sign up to your mailing list gives you instant access to their personal inbox. All you have to do is construct your emails in such a way that your audience actually wants to open them in the first place, and click through them to your website in the second place rather than getting stuck in their inbox.

There have been some interesting statistics of late which have clearly shown that combining online video with email marketing can have powerful effects.

Recruiting people to your mailing list

How many steps does it take for someone to sign up to your mailing list? This is an important question. Do a little test. As someone who is a stranger to your site to take a look at the homepage of your website and tell you how they can sign up to your mailing list. If they can’t work it out quickly, you have uno problemo.

Make it obvious how people can sign up to your mailing list. You can do this by paying attention purely to design and placement. You can also think about incentives that will draw people to the mailing list sign up button. If getting people on your mailing list is a priority, consider using an engaging web presenter who can show your visitors exactly where to click (see below image of web presenter pointing towards a field on the web page). More importantly, tell them what they will gain by doing so. Give them good reasons to sign up to your mailing list.

It is good practice to send a welcome email immediately when someone has signed up. They have just shown enough interest to sign up and while they are hooked in you should be aiming to use a creative welcome email to build on this initial amount of positive engagement.

When people sign up to your mailing list, it is also an opportunity for you to gather more information about them so that you can target your emails more effectively. This could include asking questions around content preference e.g. video. You could do this by having them complete some extra details on an initial form, when you first gather their email address. Or, in the welcome email you could ask them to complete registration by completing a short form. Be aware that there is always the risk that this will put people off and they will fail to complete registration.

Frequency and timing of emails to different devices

A little common sense won’t go amiss when considering how frequently to email your list and what time of day to do it. Firstly, there is no point sending out emails on a weekly basis if you have nothing new to say. If you are using your mailing list to showcase your video content, it would make sense to utilise the list every time you have a new video to share. Marie Forleo has a very basic format for introducing her readers to new video content. She doesn’t embed the video into the email but uses a static image and a text introduction to the content. It could be that embedded video in the email would be more convenient for the user, but it is likely she has made this choice to encourage click throughs to her website and also to aid deliverability.

Over the past year there has been an 80% rise in people checking their emails on smartphones and tablets. The first thing to take away from this stat is that it is worth investing in mobile templates for your email campaigns. The next lesson is in relation to user behaviour. Research has shown that phone usage peaks throughout the day. iPad usage peaks in the evening, as does home computer usage. People also spend longer on their devices in the evening.

This means that you should be thinking about the time of day that you send particular content out to your list. Sending a video which is a few minutes long during the day will be counter-productive. You should save this content for evening mail outs when people are at home and more likely to be able to watch video and have sound etc (i.e. when they are not in the office). Save shorter text/image based emails for during the day when you have a quick message to get across.

Barriers to using video in email marketing campaigns

Video in email marketing is only just catching on. There have been issues in the past which have created barriers.

- In the past an email with video was likely to get filtered and not make it to the target inboxes.
– As video in email isn’t quite standardised yet, not all people will have email accounts that will be able to play the video you have included.
– Because videos are generally bigger files they can take time to download. Users can become impatient and delete your email without knowing what you were trying to say to them.
– If a video plays within an email, you won’t be able to gather the valuable click through information you would get by pointing them in the direction of your website to view a video.

Using video on email landing pages

If you aren’t ready to use video in your email marketing, or if you feel it isn’t right for you, you should consider using video on your landing pages. Using the right video in the right place at the right time will reduce your bounce rate and improve your conversion rate. If a user clicks through your email, they are demonstrating an interest. Once they hit your landing page you need to hold their interest and direct it efficiently so that they don’t become bored or confused and leave your website.

Web presenters are an innovative way to grab the attention of your audience. They also enable you to present your visitor with an efficient call to action, rather than them looking around your website for what they need. Depending on your conversion goals, corporate videos might also be a useful way to engage visitors who come to your landing page via an email marketing campaign. Corporate videos can be used to entertain, inform, advertise, or help – so think about what you are trying to achieve on your landing page and create/place videos accordingly.

You may also find our article on using video to reduce your website bounce rate useful.

The future of using video in email marketing

The 2012 Digital Marketer Benchmark and Trend Report stated that the inclusion of the word ‘video’ in the subject line of an email will boost click-through rates from 7–11%. Supposedly, emails that contained an embedded video achieved a 21% higher conversion rate than emails that contained static images alone. The future of email marketing and the integration of video can only be considered alongside the rise in mobile technology and smart phones. The same 2012 report found that 28% of smartphone users watch video on their phones in a typical month. This is combined with a culture in which most professionals check email on their smartphones.

Some of the age old concerns about using video in email marketing apply less and less because of the expansion of high-speed Internet. It is possible to have a static image as a back up in place of your videos so there is less need to worry about users who might be unable to view a video. So we know that people love video and that people also depend on email; putting the two together can only yield exciting results.

The data are clear: Video content is the fastest-growing segment of online advertising. According to eMarketer, more than 50% of the U.S. population views videos online. MediaPost reports the number of marketers that plan to use video in email campaigns skyrocketed fivefold between 2009 and 2011. And according to a 2009 Forrester report, incorporating video into emails improves click-through rates by two to three times.

These market trends are compelling enough to make almost any email marketer consider adding video to the content mix. So how can you leverage email to drive video views?

Most commonly, b2b companies are investing in customer and product videos to help drive sales and marketing efforts. These videos often highlight product features and function, success stories, testimonials from clients or upcoming events. Videos are a great way to add creative dimensionality to an otherwise flat piece of content or ad.

While most users won’t be able to view videos within their email client, a simple screen shot (image) of an intriguing piece of video content coupled with a “play” button will add visual flavor to the email and entice users to click, taking them to the video that is often more engaging and effective than a static ad. Be sure to add a headline or piece of text that explains the video’s content so users know what will happen when they click through.

Now that you have people watching video on your site, you will need to measure its effectiveness. Common key performance indicators include: tracking which email the user came from; how long the user was on your Web page before they watched the video; how long the user interacted with the video; whether the user reopened the video; whether they took the next logical action that you were driving; whether the sales lead originating from the video converted to the ultimate goal.

Considering the value that sight, sound and motion can bring to your product or service, video advertising is definitely something to keep on your radar. You may have some amazing customer success stories that might be best told in compelling videos. Or consider video to promote upcoming webinars or conferences. Don’t be afraid to get your story out in fun ways. You may find video resonates well—and profitably—with your customers.