I've decided to break with the tradition of mystical subterfuge that we creative types like to use to keep our methods secret.  I’m going to come clean about the three easy steps to create successful online video marketing. I know this will likely get me scratched off the list at all the best industry events, but I can no longer hold my tongue in good conscience.

Step1: come up with an engaging concept.
Step2: produce a well-made, compelling video.
Step 3: post the engaging and compelling video.

Yea, I know… not much of a secret. The truth is people seem to view online videos as some sort of crazy alternative marketing.  It’s as if there is some secret ingredient that gets sprinkled over the computer while posting that makes it different than something you would see on television. The truth is that it is not the content that is different, but rather how it is consumed. Television is a fairly passive medium and people are more likely to watch something simply because it is in front of them. This is changing thanks to the DVR culture, but it is still largely true. Viewing a video online, however, is a much more deliberate act. People have to want to watch it. And, hopefully, they will pass it on to others so they can watch it. For this to happen it needs to really be engaging. Clearly the intent of all brand marketing is to engage the consumer, but online video needs to be or you won’t have an audience.

This fact makes it all the more absurd that many people believe that successful online videos can be created by anyone with a webcam. Certainly, there have been many such “successful” videos (witness the most viewed Youtube video ever), but this is the exception not the rule, and is rarely true when it comes to brand marketing.  I’m not saying that you need to have a million dollar budget, or hire the top Hollywood director, but you do have to approach it with clear creative intent, even if the end result is unscripted, or “low tech”. The principles that hold true for any successful film or video still apply: good narrative (whether plot or visual) and solid construction. Brands would never air some poorly produced piece with half-baked creative on television, yet they all too often treat their online video offerings as amateur hour.

Your video has to connect with your audience on some level, through humor, compassion, awe, outrage, etc. It has to offer the viewer some intrinsic value that will create an attachment and drive them to become a brand advocate. Once again, this is not a new marketing concept. What is new, is the tremendous advantage online video offers in this endeavor. At its core, a viral video is a social media tool. People love to share things with their friends and online video gives them the tools to go beyond the water cooler chat (did you see that spot on TV last night with the blue thing… hilarious!) to actually presenting your video to a person that trusts them. This is why an online viewing number that is a fraction of the viewers of a spot during a primetime show represents a much bigger win for the brand: the online viewers are active participants. Do it right and those participants become advocates.

There are specific factors that do distinguish online video from a televised spot: no length requirements, resolution and audio playback quality, trafficking to specific market, ease of deployment, etc. But do not let those differences cloud the fact that at it still needs to be approached with the same level of detail and planning as any on-air piece. Just because it is simple and inexpensive to get your video on the web, don’t treat like a second class marketing strategy. It has massive potential to influence your customers.

Intuition can guide you to the place of innovation, and analysis guides you to the method of innovation.

Driving down costs is the goal of every business in every industry. Identifying and nailing down Cost Drivers in a Interactive Media Agency is one of the most challenging aspects of Innovation due to the service model and diversity of projects. The more diverse the services and the more capabilities an organization has, the harder the cost drivers are to innovate. This is the challenge.

Create Measurability

In order to analyze data, you need to collect data. The first step is to establish a normalized set of information, and discover commonalities that you measure over time. It's difficult in service business models to identify measurable practices since commonality between projects may not exist. In contrast, it is much easier to find measurable actvities within consistent services. For example, in the realm of public service such as law enforcement, response times can be measured which can lead to innovation in terms of communication technologies, route mapping, and routine patrolling route generation to optimize the response times and measure improvements. In the same light, commonality and metrics need to be put in place so that you can innovate. Without this baseline set of metrics, most improvements are subjective and can be hit and miss.

Measurability and Interactive Marketing

Interactive marketing strategies and improved search engine optimization follow the same metaphorical principle. Because optimization is always a moving target, you have to establish a control on your marketing practices and only change a few independent variables at a time, such as keyword density, or keyword targeting in ads, in order to see their effect. In the case of organic search results, the effect of changes may take weeks or even months before they actually show results. To top it off, search algorithms and prioritization change "without notice." To discover these changes requires a scientific mindset for the search engine optimization consultants.

The cost drivers in Search Engine Marketing involve keyword market prices. Camping a commonly used keyword for PPC can cost you a fortune. Using longtail strategies and finding ways to effectively identify your product, service or company is the innovation point, and only good analysis and keyword research will get you there. Consistency is the rule of the game to establish and maintain hold of brand loyalty, market share, market segment, and also online in terms of keyword ownership, and search engine rankings.

Internet Application Development

With Internet Services, the identification of cost drivers needs to be built into the process by abstracting out parts of the process that show commonality and measurability. This should be the starting gate through which your innovation charges. Like online marketing, application development is a moving target. New technologies explode onto the marketplace on a regular basis, tempting you to change how you do business. Again by using a scientific approach, by controlling your process and making sure you change a few things at a time, you can drive changes from the right point of view rather than hype, and effectively make improvements on your cost drivers.

I read an article on MediaPost that showed how 2 major retailers, The Home Depot and Best Buy, targeted the U.S. Hispanic community.  One company failed while the other is gaining more sales.  What is interesting to me is that it appears that they both took the same approach, got back the same unexpected results, and then went in two different directions.

Both companies created a "U.S. Spanish" website.  Their target was U.S. Spanish speaking consumers.  What they discovered was that they were getting a lot of non-U.S. Spanish speaking visitors to their websites.  These visitors wanted to buy online just like U.S. consumers.  In many cases, the non-U.S. consumers were either visiting relatives or friends in the U.S. or were Mexicans crossing the border to shop.  The prices in the U.S. were cheaper than in their country and so they wanted to get their items in the U.S. and then bring them back home.  So what is the problem with that?

For Home Depot, the problem is that they did not take the foreign credit cards on the U.S. Spanish site.  Best Buy on the other hand embraced the additional and unexpected consumers and did allow the foreign credit cards.  Best Buy is finding that, even though they don't ship overseas, people will order online and ship to friends or family where they will pick up the items later.  They also have found that U.S. Hispanics are using the website to print out information before they go to the stores to purchase the items.  In many cases it is easier for them to understand the information in Spanish.

One of the more interesting sides to this story is that The Home Depot has stores in Mexico, they have a Mexican website (in Spanish, of course), they have an English Canadian website and they have a French Canadian website.  So they are marketing to everone across North America except the the growing number of Spanish speaking Hispanics in the U.S. and those Spanish speaking visitors who wish to purchase in the U.S.

Not knowing the full details of the costs involved, it would be interesting to see the cost for Home Depot to maintain the U.S. Spanish site and the revenue the site could bring in (if they allowed foreign credit cards) and the revenue brought in by those in the U.S. who used the site to gain more information about products they wanted.  It seems to me that 4 months of running the U.S. Spanish site is not enough time to determine its impact and that if Best Buy can make it work for them, The Home Depot should be able to make it work, too.  Besides, if a French Canadian site can work for Canada, why can't a Spanish U.S. site work here?  I wonder if Home Depot is looking for a way to recreate the U.S. Spanish site in a way that will embrace those consumers that liked having the site available.

Are you looking to build a website to market your products or services to the fast growing U.S. Hispanic community?  Definition 6 is an Atlanta interactive marketing agency that can help you.  Besides doing website development and web application development, we can manage your Search Engine Optimization, your Search Engine Marketing and your email marketing campaigns while providing web analytics that ties everything together.  As we gather more and more valuable information about your consumers, we can tweak all methods of marketing to maximize your dollars.  Contact us and let's get a plan in place for you.

As social media channels become more and more powerful they also seem to become more and more varied, it feels like every day we learn about a new cool tool, as an interactive marketer, it can be challenging to figure out which one is the best fit for which marketing strategy. I read an article in Marketing Sherpa on how to use social media in a more effective way. The article gives specific examples from IBM on how they have combined social media strategy with traditional tactics for application development, event promotion and demand generation. I have highlighted here one of them, where social media was used to promote SOA’s events and tools. 

Social Media Marketing for Event Promotion and Lead Generation

IBM wanted to bring together the SOA community and generate leads for its SOA tools and solutions. So the Marketing team organized a road show that included 100 cities. To complement the traditional marketing methods of promotion for the event which included direct mail and one-to-one invitations, IBM used an animated 3D person on the SOA website, a Twitter campaign, blogs and a widget.

- 3D Animated Character

The animated 3D character was added to the SOA website, it walked with an invitation in its’ hand, when users clicked on the character or on the invitation they were taken to a registration page. Visits to the registration page increased by 600%.

- Twitter

Messages were sent on Twitter with a promo code, users that signed up with that promo code were allowed to talk directly with one of IBM’s CTO for 30minutes. Within 3 days, over 40 people registered in Amsterdam alone.

- Blogs

The marketing team blogged about the conference on multiple development oriented blogs. The buzz created around the event caused many developers to mention the conference in their own blogs, feeds, profiles… Customers even created Facebook and LinkedIn groups supporting the event. The buzz caused by the social media ‘add-ons’ increased their event registration by 10% at no cost to the company.

- Online Community

For connecting customers after the event the team used a third-party company to build an online community website called SOAsocial. They let the third-party host the community as the goal was to make it less company/IBM focused and let it grow on its own.

- Consumer generated content

They encouraged customers to take pictures at the events and post them on Flickr afterwards. This not only increased engagement through user-generated content, but it also helped the company save thousands of dollars on hiring a photographer.

- Widget

Since the attendees of the events were potential customers for the SOA tools. The marketing team built a widget that supplied the events’ presentations. The widget could be added to a blog, website or downloaded to a computer. The widget was driven by RSS feeds, so the company could push news and products demos to potential and existing customers. 67% of the conferences’ attendees downloaded the widget.

One of the “key lesson learned” for Interactive Ad Agencies is that social media is a channel and not a strategy in itself, it is most effective when used to complement other marketing initiatives, including offline and traditional marketing.