Sazbean

Video can have powerful impact for your business. You are probably aware of video on major consumer websites such as the New York Times, MSN, CNN or video sharing sites such as YouTube. Video that provides information to your customers helps establish credibility in for your knowledge and expertise.

Content
Information that is valuable to your customers, such as how-to, training, or news updates will be best received. Videos are more likely to be watched if they are short: 2-3 minutes at the most. If you have more information, split it up into separate videos. Quality of the video does not have to be perfect. Thanks to sites like YouTube, Internet viewers accept lower-quality pictures. Investing in a good mic and making sure the lighting is adequate are worthwhile.

Technical
Videos can be in many formats, including Windows Streaming Media (WMV), Quicktime (QT), avi, mpg, mpeg, and Flash Streaming (FLV). I prefer Flash because most people have the plugin already installed and it has good compression (quicker to download). For Windows, there are several relatively inexpensive video software packages to try: Adobe Premiere Elements, ROXIO Easy Media Creator and Ulead Video Studio. All new Macs come with iMovie. Hosting a popular video can eat up your alloted bandwidth so you may want to consider having video hosted elsewhere, such as YouTube, which has disadvantages as a consumer-oriented site, or Cache-fly.

Promotional
If you’ve spent the time and effort to produce a video (even if its only one), you’ll get the more response if you promote it in ways other than just posting it on your website. Consider an email or an eblast to your customers letting them know about it (check with anti-spam regulations). Ads linking to the video on your search engine marketing programs and B2B publications can also help with visibility. If you post the video on YouTube, it will be included in their searches (which are mostly consumer based).

Measurement
How do you tell if your video has been successful? Your analytics program should be able to tell you how many people have viewed the video (at least to start it). Tracking whether they have watched it all the way through is more difficult and requires more advanced (and expensive) software. Keep in mind that if you pre-download the video to allow for faster viewing, that may count a view for every load – not necessarily when people are clicking on it.

Once you’ve created a few, using video to increase your credibility and image can be very rewarding (and hopefully fun).

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