Marketing With Video and Social Media

Excerpt from Chapter Stu Sweetow’s book, Corporate Video Production, Chapter 16

Copyright 2017 by Taylor & Francis

MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Introduction

Video has been an essential tool for corporate marketing from the start. From TV commercials to sales support clips, video helps to show products and demonstrate the importance of services. With the advent of streaming video and the explosion of social media, corporate video use has increased dramatically. A 2014 study from cloud provider-Brightcove found that 76% of consumers cite video as their preferred content source for consuming brand information. 44% said video is the most “appealing” form of media, with such terms as “engaging, sharing, authentic and shareable” listed as reasons for trusting video content versus other forms of brand communication.

Peruse the websites of major corporations, and you’ll probably find a video link either on the home page or at most a click or two away. General Electric has a 1:56-minute video on smart grid technology that includes customer testimonials from both consumers and industrial clients. German electronics giant Siemens has five videos that document new gas turbine technology that the company says provides higher efficiency for a greener future. Home Depot has a 22-second Quick Project Tips video on how to use a potato to remove a broken light bulb from a socket. Users may click to share this video via e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook, and Twitter—mediums of communication that didn’t even exist a few years ago.

A 2014 University of Massachusetts study measured the engagement of corporations with customers via social media. The study showed that 67% of corporations had YouTube accounts. Twitter accounts were held by 83% and Facebook got 80% of corporations using their accounts.

According to eMarketer senior analyst Jeffrey Grau, “Retailers are making the case that videos boost their sales conversion rate, a measure of the increase in the percentage of shoppers who make a purchase after viewing a product video. Retailers also claim videos reduce shopping cart abandonment rates and diminish product return rates.”

Some corporations utilize innovative engagement tools for their website videos such as user-clickable overlays that lead to shopping cart purchases. User-generated content (UGC) web-sites let enthusiastic buyers tout products’ benefits with their homemade video testimonials. And nearly every corporation that produces TV commercials uses YouTube to widen their distribution of them and encourage sharing among their followers.

YouTube for the Enterprise

Have you visited YouTube lately? It’s more than just human skateboards and iPhones in blenders. Corporations have embraced this home-brewed social network and are gaining customers without paying for airtime. Some use the platform to publicize their social responsibility programs. Go through the list of the largest worldwide corporations, and nearly every one uses YouTube to engage with the public.

AT&T shows their TV commercials, but they also post videos of their employment diversity programs. Wal-Mart also shows commercials, and they have clips about organic produce and wind harvesting. BP ran a series of videos explaining their progress in containing the Gulf oil spill. Many of these companies have links to their YouTube clips right from their home pages.

On the Ford Motor Company YouTube page, you can watch their commercials and some cute videos, such as the one comparing a Fiesta to a Lamborghini, and a silly series about a zombie. However, you can also see their own Scott Monty, who claims to be the “Head of Social Media” at Ford. He says on-camera, “The social media strategy at Ford is about humanizing the company by connecting our employees to our constituents and with each other when possible and providing value along the way.”

Ford’s Monty knows about YouTube’s captions tool because you have the option of turning on captions when you watch his video. YouTube employs voice recognition, technology from Google Voice, to create captions for the hearing impaired and to display text translations. As of this writing, the voice recognition display included some humorous inaccuracies, but their heart is in the right place. Captions are text that Google searches for when users enter keywords. Video producers can enter the script of the text as part of the metadata with a YouTube video, and potential customers who perform a keyword search could find the video.

According to YouTube, “YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.”  Major corporations that once relished the exposure that broadcast television brought them are now moving their sights to YouTube’s vast audience. YouTube and other social media sites facilitate “narrow-casting,” where companies can target specific markets. Users with particular interests gravitate to those YouTube’s categories that pique their curiosity.

Look at the growing number of do-it-yourselfers. Users log 35 million searches a month on YouTube just for “how-to” videos. Most companies can find some area of interest to the do-it-yourselfer, whether it is how to remove a broken light bulb or how to invest your money wisely. How-to videos are the content that consumers crave, and they are a portal to the enterprise website with new brands to promote, the locations of the nearest stores, or community programs the company has adopted.

Some companies develop a community of customers and supporters by asking visitors to subscribe to their YouTube channels. This offers even more exposure to the company’s brand because each of the subscribers gets e-mails every time you post a new video.

Read more at https://avconsultants.com/corporate-video-production-book-second-edition/