How Online Video Can Reach the Business Audience

JANUARY 24, 2011

Even busy executives want to do more than just read on the web

Executives with no time for fun and games do have time for the sound and motion of video, according to findings from Forbes Insights. In some cases, they may actually prefer it to text for learning about products and services.

A majority of businesspeople surveyed by Forbes in October 2010 said they watched more online video than a year earlier. Nearly 60% of all respondents said they would watch video before reading text on the same webpage, and 22% said they generally liked watching video more than reading text for reviewing business information. Three-quarters of all executives said they watched work-related videos on business websites at least once a week, and more than half did the same on YouTube.

Video can be highly effective for merchants. The executives surveyed reported taking a wide variety of actions after watching online videos, with about two-thirds visiting vendor websites subsequent to viewing and more than half searching for more information. Especially among younger executives, likelihood of making a purchase was high.

Generational differences ran throughout the Forbes research, with a split in behavior at age 50. While the youngest executives were most interested in video across the board, baby boomers in their 40s had comparable participation levels. It was older executives who had not yet gotten on board with video, and business-to-business marketers must continue to reach them through other means.

But video has only become more important for the younger set, and marketers can depend on them to watch, pass along, recommend—and often, enter the purchase funnel.

---

©2011 eMarketer Inc. All rights reserved. www.emarketer.com

Video = Fastest Growing Website Feature

By Mark Robertson, RealSEO
Small businesses have been racing to get their websites video-capable over the past year - and those same small businesses are spending more on paid search advertising. According to a new report, small business advertisers spent more than twice as much on paid search and nearly 4 times as many of them reported having video on their website vs. a year ago.

Local online advertising firm WebVisible just released the second installment of their study, “State of Small Business Online Advertising,” which examines trends among their nearly 12000 small business advertisers and represents around $22M in Q4 2009 U.S. small business advertiser spending.

While there are a lot of nuggets of data about where SMBs are headed with online advertising, I thought I would take some time to highlight the aspects of the data that most apply to our readers: video, search, and conversion.


Video Continues to be Both the Present and the Future

In fact, “video capability” was the single fastest growing feature that small businesses added to their website. In the same quarter of the previous year, only 5% of small business websites had video. In Q4 of 2009, that number climbed to 19%–four times as many. That’s rapid growth for just one year.
I expect this number to jump significantly again in the coming year. It’s one of the best ways to engage your audience, and is rapidly becoming one of the best ways to position your company in front of those that are seeking out your product or service via search.


Speaking of Search Engines…

There are many findings in the report that might pique your interest. For example, small businesses seem to be leading the charge on embracing Google’s competitors (Bing, Ask, and Yahoo) for advertising purposes. The click through rates from 2008 to 2009 may point to one reason why these companies are moving some spend to Bing and Yahoo. In 2009, the click through rates for Google improved over 2008 by about 32%. However, for Yahoo, the jump was 123% and Bing went up 109%. Google still trounces them both on cost-per-click, which can matter greatly assuming similar conversions.

Overall, spending by small businesses on search advertising rose to an average of $2,149—that’s an increase of 111% over Q4 2008 and a jump of 30% over Q3 2009. No one should be surprised by these numbers, and you can certainly expect to see them climbing again in the next WebVisible report.

Here’s a quote from Kirsten Mangers, the CEO of WebVisible, that is both a statement of the obvious and the most important thing that you (as well as webvisible customers, partners, etc..) can glean from this article:

“These numbers show increased confidence by small businesses in using search to gain leads – and increased ability to turn those leads into sales.”

Conversion Rates are Rising?

Any form of advertising that captures the imagination of cost-conscious local merchants has to be effective. And by that measure, online video is hot. It would be tough for the small business to stay in online advertising if they couldn’t see conversions going up as a result. Small companies rarely have the luxury of throwing money at campaigns for brand awareness.

Which is why these increases in spending are exciting—it shows that online advertising is working for many small businesses. In my experience, these small business owners rarely make marketing decisions based on gut feelings. Even when they do, their focus quickly changes away from the novelty of the medium onto measured effectiveness. In the end, it’s usually something quantifiable on the bottom line that informs and guides their spending decisions.

The conversion stats are pretty impressive, with 35.5% of clicks resulting in conversion actions (versus 32% for the previous quarter and 26.6% for the same quarter of the previous year).

As a side note, keep in mind that it is also true that small business advertisers are becoming more and more sophisticated over time when it comes to tracking and measuring online advertising effectiveness. This may just be an indication of that welcome trend.

Glance back over the stats I shared above… are you seeing a pattern? More small businesses are spending their ad dollars online, implementing online video and targeting search… which is leading to better click through rates and higher conversion rates.

Summary & Takeaways for Small Businesses:

1) Get video on your website. There’s not a single business I’ve met that can’t find a way to use video to improve customer relations, branding, or profits. When small businesses are racing to get their websites video-capable, you know it has officially moved from gimmicky entertainment to a legitimate business tool.

2) Remove the blinders and consider going beyond Google for some of your search ad spend. The click-through-rates may be rising faster on these engines, and there is certainly evidence to suggest that conversions for certain types of small businesses are higher on the secondary engines than on Google. But at the very least: try advertising on search engines!

3) Finally, don’t let your advertising efforts and your new found passion for video blind you from the most important conversion piece in the entire chain: your own website. Make it video capable, make it pretty, and make it useful. While video and search can be huge wranglers of traffic to your site, they are only part of the conversion process. You haven’t really helped your business until the conversion action takes place.

Search and video will definitely work to help market your business online. But they are only pieces of the puzzle. As most small business owners know all too well, at the end of the day you still have to have an attractive, useful product or service. If you skip that step… all the fancy web marketing in the world won’t

FuseMedia reccomends reading the following article:

The 'Cadillac' Of Online Video Advertising
by Alex Rowland, Media Post Publications

Most online video advertising today sucks. It essentially comes in two main flavors: annoying (pre-rolls) and distracting (auto-play banners and overlays). And if you look at where money is being spent in online video advertising today, it is weighted heavily toward the annoying end of the spectrum.

The good news is that brands are evolving their approach to online video and experimenting more aggressively with longer-form videos that can stand on their own. In response, a new standard is taking shape that prescribes best practices to both the creation and distribution of these videos. You could call this standard the "Cadillac" of online video advertising.

How did we get here?

Most online video ads can trace their roots to television ads, which come in the same basic flavors described above. They are designed to interrupt the stuff you want to watch with stuff you might want to watch (but probably didn't). These ads don't warrant their own attention; they leech attention away from what you elected to watch because they cannot stand on their own.

The problem with this model is that a growing majority of online video consumers are more likely to click away or simply ignore these types of ads. According to YouTube, 70% of its users responded that they would rather not watch a video at all if it carried pre-roll. Online viewers' attention span is shorter -- and, even more important, their patience for unwanted interruptions is growing thin.

Interruptive messaging is anathema online, where every piece of content is effectively on-demand. The path away from these forms of interruptive advertising will be a long one, given the scale of television advertising and the endemic attitudes of advertisers toward these types of traditional advertising approaches. Still, this shift is slowly beginning to take place.

We are seeing this shift materialize in the form of integrated branding in content. Over the past 24 months, more and more advertisers have begun to work to integrate their brands and messages more directly into serialized Web shows, viral videos, educational videos, and other forms of entertainment. These campaigns have moved from untested experiments to real projects with production and distribution budgets that often top seven figures.

This is a great start, demonstrating an evolving relationship between brand and consumer that will continue to play out over the coming decade. What has not changed significantly, however, is the distribution mechanism associated with these new efforts. While brands are beginning to pour critical investments into production, they are still distributing the resulting content as if it were nothing more than a banner ad.

This has been understandable. In-banner placement of branded video does give the advertiser access to the reach, targeting, and measurability which they have grown accustomed to in display. And the length of these shows typically precludes pre-roll or other in-stream placements.

Unfortunately, in-banner placement defeats much of the purpose of branded entertainment as a consumer engagement tool. A video placed this way may momentarily grab the viewer's attention, but rarely will it result in a full viewing of the video or a positive impression of the brand's messaging. In-banner, the viewer expects to see a commercial, not a piece of content. Instead, the goal should be to draw the viewer into the narrative of a show to take full advantage of the content investment. A better solution to distribution is emerging.

This leads us to one of the first practices of a 'Cadillac' video advertising effort: editorial placement of the videos. Editorial placement involves working with publishers to position the videos as compelling content and setting the expectation of the consumer in the right place. Now, building a large engaged audience through in-page or editorial placement is difficult, but the resulting engagement with the consumer is far more meaningful. Rather than enduring your message to reach the content, the message is the content. Consumers who elect to watch these videos are far more likely to watch a significant portion of the video and come away with a positive attitude towards the brand sponsor.

The leads us to the second practice: guaranteed user engagement. User engagement can be viewed as an extension of placement, but great placement does not always guarantee engagement across every publisher. The only way to ensure engagement is to set financial incentives around authentic engagement rather than impressions. Viewers can be directed to watch these videos via thumbnails, RSS feeds and placement within relevant articles, but distribution partners should be compensated based upon the number of user-initiated (or Click2Play) views they deliver as defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The third practice, without which the first two are rendered irrelevant: seamless brand integration. Falling under the qualifier "you know it when you see it," brand integrations into long-form video should add to the value of the content (or at least not detract from it). When brands, agencies or their production companies don't execute effectively on the integration, publishers will be less inclined to carry the content, and consumers less inclined to watch it. Overbearing messaging, poor product placement and poor creative execution can all result in negative brand impressions and an implosion of value for the message and the audience.

What many brands might find most surprising is that online video campaigns that have been organized around these "Cadillac" principles are not only more impactful, but also less expensive than the same campaigns delivered in-banner and optimized around CTRs and eCPMs. Much like the emergence of social media and branded app campaigns, branded entertainment represents another movement from "paid media" to what Fred Wilson has termed "earned media," and its implementation should reflect this migration.

Here's where the "Cadillac" analogy can move beyond the cliché of simply being the "best" to being the "most valuable." So, rather than making the traditional media buy through a network, it might be time to begin evaluating new syndication models that appropriately value the content, deliver interested audiences, and charge based upon performance rather than impressions.

It's time to test-drive the Cadillac.

Winterskol

Tourism Video

Fiberforge

Corporate Video

Internet Users Embrace TV - eMarketer

Internet Users Embrace TV - eMarketer

Using Social Media Strategically - eMarketer

Using Social Media Strategically - eMarketer