VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

Since October last year, when ComScore published that YouTube had surpassed Yahoo!’s search inquiries to become Internet’s second largest search engine, there’s no doubt that any brand, product, services or company will need video content sooner or later to compete online. No matter if they do real business, eCommerce, on the web or “just” branding, marketers will need to think about an effective video marketing strategy now because users search for and consume rich media content more than ever. A “No Video Found” is not an option as people turn away from text search.

Several studies have shown that adding videos to the site has a positive impact on sales, lead-generation, use of the site, and improved customer relation (see 2008 “Marketing with Video Report” by MarketingSherpa, or Internet Retailer Survey on “Website Design, Content and Rich Media”).

But what is video marketing in the first place? Is that putting high production-value TV spots on social media sites and wait for them to turn into 100,000 clicks’ virals overnight? Well, that’s an option but I would definitely not call it a real video marketing strategy.

Down to basics, video marketing is the systematic use of video content as part of the digital marketing- and communication-mix of a brand, product or organization. Having said that,  for me it does exclude the random recycling of expensive, low-impact TV spots on third-party video sharing sites, since the content was not actually created for the web 2.0 environment. Although there are of course,  some good examples of TV commercial that made it into the viral charts, with a positive lateral effect on branding. Just think of Heineken’s “Walking into the Fridge clip with some 3.5 million views and more than 2,600 comments on YouTube.

But there is more to video marketing and in order to get it right, marketers should forget everything they know about TV advertising and start thinking about online videos as a content that allows them to engage with their consumers rather than sending out unidirectional messages.

Online video marketing follows online rules and that’s why eRetailers are pioneering video marketing, rather than the FMCG industry.

So in the next 2 weeks at VideoRetailer, we’ll discuss and analyze the 3 key steps when it comes to creating an effective video marketing strategy, starting off with a chapter on content creation and new formats, followed by one on thumbnails and metadata and  finishing with a chapter on online video distribution and promotion.

NOTE: VideoRetailer.org welcomes Doris Obermair who will be contributing to the site and sharing his knowledge in the areas of video commerce, production and online marketing.

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