Difficult to produce

The fact that video marketing has not taken off as quickly as the commercial use of social media a few years ago is not a purely Swiss phenomenon. 52% of marketers surveyed in an American study last year stated that video content was one of the most profitable content strategies. However, video was also the content category that most (49.8 %) rated as "difficult to produce" (followed by interactive media, infographics and animated graphics). This assessment is in line with Werbewoche's research on the video marketing series. It is true that examples could be found where online videos are used in one form or another for commercial communication or where initial experience has been gained with them. However, tried and tested methods, such as those offered in the USA in particular, are not yet widespread here.

Video marketing is seen as part of content marketing, as companies want to make a good impression on their audience with high-quality content and retain their loyalty. These are some of the best practices that apply:

Think journalistically. If you want to score points with content, you have to measure yourself against the established standards of publishers. Marketing thinking, which likes to emphasize brand messages, must therefore take a back seat and give way to journalistic thinking that focuses on information with a high utility value for the audience. Hiring journalists for this purpose can be a good addition to your own talent pool.

Get straight to the point. The attention span of the online audience is extremely short, and if you don't get to the point in the first ten seconds and offer an incentive to continue watching, you risk losing the audience. This is why an image film with an emotionally charged introduction, for example, which works well when shown in front of a closed audience, has little chance online.

Don't get bored. Who says that corporate videos can't be funny or entertaining? However, the path of professionalism must not be abandoned here - the fart idea that was so much fun to shoot could otherwise all too easily cause the audience to shake their heads in irritation.

Publish videos on a regular basis. Just like professional media products, company publications also come with an announced regularity. The public can orient themselves to this and stay tuned.

Remain consistent. Video marketing should be interwoven with all other communication outlets so that the same messages are proclaimed on all channels in a company-typical appearance. Details and actors can (and should) be adapted to the specific media.

Set a broad framework. Videos about your own products are simple marketing. Videos about broader concepts, insightful basics and novel ideas in your own subject area are interesting for a larger audience. Evergreen content can be combined with current topics to generate views over a longer period of time.

It is clear that video marketing means more than simply distributing TV commercials and image films via the website, especially as these were hardly ever produced solely for online distribution. It is therefore about the use of videos that are produced specifically for the web. The most obvious - and nowadays actually a matter of course - are product videos that allow potential buyers to get a better picture. Many variations are possible here: the product briefly presented in a good light, the product in use, the product compared with others - your own and others'. Testimonials from satisfied customers and enthusiastic expert opinions can be included here, as can training videos. Such product presentations are usually produced once at market launch. Just as images were previously produced for the product catalog, videos are now also being produced for the web - nothing new really.

Lack of video expertise

The use of videos in the job market is new, and a wide variety of approaches can be observed. From the departing job holder who openly and unadulteratedly informs his future successor about the job in the workplace, to the work of the expensively purchased star director, with which the company is to be presented as an attractive employer. This is one of the main reasons for the reluctance to use videos in professional communication: hardly anyone has learned how to do this, can express themselves naturally and authentically in front of the camera, can formulate requirements and write scripts, can judge the quality of the implementation and its price. As a result, there are various service providers in the field of recruiting videos who not only help companies with video production, but in some cases also operate their own distribution platforms. The lack of video expertise (together with some Swiss peculiarities) also explains why hardly any companies and organizations produce video content themselves. This content marketing approach was best illustrated by the example of Buuretv.ch (Werbewoche 18/25.10.2013, page 32) as part of the Werbewoche series of articles on video marketing. Although journalistic articles are produced here, they do not appear with reliable regularity and are not distributed via YouTube. Let's stay with agriculture and switch to the USA: The company Bright Agrotech in the state of Wyoming is active in vegetable growing with a system for vertical planting. Its own YouTube channel has 20,500 subscribers, putting it in the same league as Nespresso (21,300). There is a new post every few days, and it is usually company founder Nate Storey who shares his knowledge and experience. The production is unpretentious but correct, the images don't shake, the sound is free of ambient noise, and if something needs to be visualized, a simple flipchart will do. Reference is always made to the company's own blog, where more in-depth information is provided. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram presences are also maintained; there are e-books, webinars and video tutorials. New YouTube posts are announced to subscribers to the channel both on YouTube and via the company's own email newsletter. This approach can easily be copied by Swiss SMEs, as the example of Hans Bracher, who runs his farm in Ersigen, Bern - and a YouTube channel to boot - shows. "What is farmer Housi doing today?" - this is how most of his videos begin, providing a regular insight into the farmer's working life. Despite shaky images and sound that is not always easy to understand, Bracher soon has a thousand subscribers, putting him on a par with UBS (1001 subscribers), for example, which goes to far greater lengths to achieve this.

Always produce for mobile too

There are also numerous technical aspects to consider when it comes to practical implementation, although these are not new or different in the context of video marketing. It should be noted that videos are produced for all screen formats, including mobile. Once a video is finished, the next step is to show it to as large and appropriate an audience as possible. There are various offline and online options for this, which can be used according to the communication objectives.

Website: It has long been child's play to embed videos on your own website and give it a modern look. This can improve the conversion rate and keep the bounce rate low. Social media: Online videos are made to be shared. YouTube is at the forefront, where companies can set up their own channels. There are also numerous other video networks such as Vimeo or, in Switzerland, InternetTV. ch. Videos can also be played directly from the news feeds on Twitter and Facebook. This also applies to other social networks such as LinkedIn, Google+ (with additional SEO benefits) or the highly visually oriented Pinterest.

Search engines: Google likes videos; these are often listed at the top of the search results. For this to work, some technical requirements (such as video sitemaps and video rich snippets) must be met.

Email marketing: If videos are used in company newsletters or email marketing, their attention increases. In particular, products, company information or the announcement of a webinar can be communicated well in this way. Events and POS: Videos are a good medium for use at points of sale, on occasions and in the entrance area, for example. They attract attention and can also be used on tablets during sales talks.

Clean success analysis helps

Once a video has been produced and distributed, that's not the end of the story - now it's time to look at the viewing figures. These come in one form or another and are a cause for joy or disappointment. However, criteria for analyzing success are rarely defined at the start of the project. But with online videos, it is often difficult to indirectly determine whether the effort has paid off in terms of return on investment (ROI). Various statistics such as the number of views, estimated playback time, number of interactions, comments and subscribers can be queried on YouTube. This makes it difficult to score serious points with management and justify your own video production. In order to be able to make statements about your own business, you need to develop your own calculation models. As this is not an exact science, you can be quite creative in your approach. Here, too, there are American service providers in particular who have developed solutions for this, if only to combine call-offs on different platforms and link them to internal key figures. In the absence of such calculation models, it is difficult to prove the success of online videos, which often hinders their further use.
 
Christoph J. Walther