Video viewership on the net is growing rapidly in March 2014 Comcast reported that 187.8 million Americans watched 46.6 billion online content videos in March, while the number of video ad views totaled 28.7 billion. This is huge growth year over year. What is even more impressive and important about these stats is that over 75% of executives rather watch video than read online. These are the decision makers which all B2B marketers wish to reach. The best way to reach business executives online with content marketing and even social media marketing is using video as they prefer it over other kinds of content!
Below are eight tips on how to capitalize on the power of video marketing and especially use it effectively in email marketing campaigns.
Producing a B2B Marketing Video
Tip 1: Keep Video Short, 60 seconds or Less
The attention span, even of those actively searching for video is very short. Keeping your video short will increase its chances of being played all the way through. Viewership starts dropping even 10 seconds into the video but it drops off quite dramatically after 60 seconds so if you must go over 60 seconds put your best content in the first 60 seconds including a call to action so that the user gets converted in those 60 seconds.
Tip 2: Save Time and Money by Producing the Videos Yourself
B2B marketing videos can be quite costly, but if your marketing department has a low budget yet wants to take advantage of the incredible benefits of this video craze, you can use http://rawshorts.com to produce your videos on your own with professional quality. You will create videos much faster and quite affordably.
Tip 3: Go Beyond Branding Present a Core Message Right Away
As per tip number 1 viewers have a short attention span, including the core message right away is super important. Just as importantly is to focus on a value to the user rather than branding as branding videos do not do as well online. Give the user a reason to keep watching and keep them hooked on what you are doing for them and why should they use you or buy from you.
Tip 4: Recycle Your Marketing Material
You likely already have a great deal of any content you need to include in the videos in the form of logos, graphics, photos, etc. that you use on other marketing campaigns. It is relatively easy to recycle those contents to create a new video out of them. You do not need an expensive video service to create your videos all the time. A great advantage of services like http://rawshorts.com is that they not only allow you to rehash all of your existing materials, but once you produce a video since you have full control over each frame of the video, you can recycle the existing videos and within minutes make different version of it or use portions of it to create a new video.
The Marketing Metrics Continuum provides a framework for how to categorize metrics from the tactical to strategic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Delivering Videos in Email Marketing Campaigns
Tip 5: Use an Image Rather than Embedding the Video
Embedding videos in a B2B email campaign while technically possible is very difficult and presents too many delivery problems. The best solution is to put an image with a video play arrow on it to simulate a video and link it directly to the video. This method will convert people almost as well as if the video was embedded.
Tip 6: Digital Marketing 101–Use a Branded Landing Page to Host the Video
Sending B2B customers to YouTube lacks elegance and it lacks the ability to improve the branding of the company. Take the time to build a custom landing page for the email marketing campaign and maybe even create a few version to do A/B testing of the content. With a landing page a form on the page can also start adding potential customers to your sales funnel.
Tip 7: Consider the Huge Number of Mobile Viewers
When creating the email consider the mobile users, particularly the Apple mobile users who cannot view Flash based video so you must include HTML 5 video format for them. More and more video consumption and email reading are moving to the mobile arena so you must adapt to accommodate that channel.
Measuring Result with Analytics
Tip 8: Measure and Test Videos and Landing Pages with Analytics
It is super important that you know what is happening with your email campaign and online analytics like Google Analytics can provide great insight into the effectiveness of your campaign. Make sure to add the proper codes to the email and all landing pages to measure every aspect of the campaign to determine how successful it is. If you use A/B testing don’t forget to track each version separately. Measuring results is of supreme importance to B2B Email marketers.
