Broadcast 2 | Be Seen . Be Heard

When the going gets tough, the tough get smarter. In these testing times, everyone who has a product or service to offer takes a long hard look at their marketing budget, along with other cost-based activities, to see where they can trim the budget and make savings or return that money to the bottom line.

If you need to take a look at your marketing spend, maybe you need to examine exactly how you’re investing your money. Marketing and advertising has always been associated with creativity and smart, eye catching themes. Within the current environment, suddenly words like “efficiencies”, “productivity” and “return on investment” are being applied to the creative process.

This is where online marketing, and video deployment in particular, can show huge cost savings and still get your message out to your target audience. Let’s look at one example of how this can work.

Say you’re launching a new model in the marketplace, and retailers have the stock, and you intend to launch with, among other activities, a press ad in a major newspaper. The benefits of that ad are obvious – the circulation guarantees that a lot of eyeballs will see the ad, may be interested in it, and may eventually buy your product on the basis of that ad and other complimentary marketing activities.

However, there are some factors that you also need to consider: the ad only has a shelf life of one day, you can’t measure how many people actually took notice of the ad, and you are not able to really target the ad because of the newspaper’s wide distribution demographic.

Have you considered that for the same cost, you could invest in an online marketing campaign that would have a much longer lifespan, will be targeted to your consumer segment and that you can measure to the micro degree?We’re not suggesting that you dismiss your traditional avenues of communicating to your customers – but in the current conditions, it’s certainly worth examining as a real alternative or supplement to your plan.

Online video marketing is not rocket science – it’s all about utilising your distribution channel, and engaging with your retail partners and offering them a service that they wouldn’t necessarily create themselves. I’m sure part of your marketing plan, if you’re in the retail products game, is to ensure that your product is exposed in every retail catalogue possible. Online video is very similar – to ensure your product is on as many of your retailer’s websites as possible. The way to do that? Don’t just provide an image, provide a feature video.

A picture may say a thousand words, but a video can spark real interest in the viewer as they see the product in action and demonstrated right before their eyes. In this way, you are building interest in the product, as well as the retailer that is delivering the video on your behalf.

Labels: online marketing, video streaming