I joined the digital video revolution during its earlier days. When I started editing as a pastime during college I was fascinated with all things digital video and the breakthroughs that were being made. What your average teen can produce on his Macbook these days was industry-shattering at the time. It allowed your average Joe to pick up an affordable camera and connect that camera to a computer to capture, edit and produce video. It was a revolution in the way videos were produced and delivered. Everyone became a potential filmmaker.
Then in February of 2005 a new platform called Youtube came along that provided a way for the guy with the handycam and computer to distribute his content for free to anyone with an internet connection.
Today there are more options for producing video than would fit in a series of blog posts so I won’t delve into the production side of things, at least not yet. However I would like to briefly tell you why online video is a good thing for manufacturers and how manufacturing video can help drive the bottom line.
According to a new report released by the Content Marketing Institute, manufacturers have some of the highest adoption rates for content marketing tactics as compared to other industries. Videos (48%) are the preferred content format over other digital tactics (podcasts, virtual conferences and e-books) by a wide margin. Even though social media (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) adoption is lower among industrial marketers, YouTube usage by manufacturers (50%) is higher than other B2B marketers (38%).
As primarily inbound marketers here at UniTherm we see online video as a pivotal component of our strategy. With online video you can deliver content to a very broad or very specific group of people free of charge. In the rest of this post I would like to share a few thoughts about online video and why we are using it more and more.
1. Create Engaging Product Demonstrations
Video provides a great way to demonstrate the unique capabilities of our products that print ads and sales presentations can’t accomplish. Take for instance SolarShell. It is a product with an unlimited number of applications, many of which have yet to be discovered. To get people acquainted with just one of it’s practical uses we produced this video.
Whether we primarily market business to business or we are trying to reach a broader customer base we can demonstrate the unique features and advantages via of our products via video.
2. Generate Brand Awareness
Some manufacturers that are already using online video do so for the brand awareness that it generates. At UniTherm we tag our videos with specific key words so that they will come up in specific searches. If someone wants to know how to effectively patch a steel tank that has rust or corrosion we want them to find the video about how to patch a steel tank with SolarShell.
If you have the next greatest product that needs to get out to a broad audience then online video may be the way to go for you. There are many styles of online video that can generate brand awareness and interest including corporate profiles and videos that showcase new or conceptual products. Video also let’s you build a rapport with your audience and really let them connect with your company.
3. Effective Inbound Marketing
Manufacturers are using videos as part of their content marketing strategy to get discovered by their target audience and drive qualified traffic back to their site. These differ from product demos and brand awareness videos because these are created from the ground up to drive people to specific web content. These are advertising web content and driving people to view the associated website.
I understand this post is not even scratching the surface of the many benefits that online video can provide to manufacturers. Instead of us telling you how it benefits us, we want to hear how it benefits you. Next Friday we’ll discuss what tools we use to produce videos here at UniTherm.