Electronics marketing professionals around the world know well that "content is king." It's what drives the success of your website, email marketing, social media, and lead generation campaigns. Video content is increasingly common in the electronics industry because it provides self-service sales support and lower-funnel conversion. Informational videos add value to the design process by building audience trust and providing credibility to the product and company behind the videos. Whether you are producing your first videos or working to optimize the results from an ongoing video series, the following are some areas of consideration for your overall video strategy:
- Choose the Style of Video that Suits Your Marketing Goals Best
- Make Videos Interactive
- Get Your Video Seen by a Large Qualified Audience
- Optimize Videos for Improved Search Visibility
- Analyze Video Performance
Choose the Style of Video That Supports Your Marketing Goals
From datasheets to evaluation kits, educating the engineers about your products is key to your sales process. This is especially true of advanced technologies where words aren't enough to describe a product's capabilities or convey its benefits. Videos enable you to offer sales education, yet keep the content compelling and even entertaining. But beyond education, there are marketing goals you should define before choosing the type of video to produce. Is branding top of mind? Or maybe social interaction and outreach is the key goal. Here are a few types of video content that are being used by marketers to promote their products:
- Product Demo Videos
Online product demos are designed to showcase the features and benefits of a product. These may have more brand-building imagery and messaging than their counterpart—the instructional video (see below).
- Instructional Videos
Designed with education at their core, instructional videos demonstrate to design engineers how a product functions, the problem it solves and how it is applied. This type of video is a more common use of video in the industry and one of the most credible in terms of soft-sell marketing.
- Crowdsourcing Video Contests / Design Contests
Crowdsourcing is one of the top trends on the Web. Companies engage their audiences via customer/fan-generated videos that are collected through online contest submissions (generally for a prize). Design contests are one example of how crowdsourcing contests are being used in the electronics industry. One option for crowdsourcing contests is Facebook/Twitter integrated solution Offerpop. It's affordable and easy to use for holding contests, though you may attract a broader audience than your target market since these are not electronics-industry specific sites.
- Testimonials
Producing customer testimonial videos is another effective approach to video content marketing. Hearing success stories from a peer is a credibility booster. Plus, this type of brief video can be integrated into your product demos or used as stand-alone video.
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Make Videos Interactive
One of the most exciting trends in the video space is made possible through clickable video technologies. Anything in a video can now viably be clickable. Clickable elements can be added to a video through overlays that put a customer in the driver's seat as to what they want to do next. Customers can be given options such accessing related product info, sharing features, ecommerce carts or special offers. At the simple, low-cost end, products like the Flash widget LinkedTube allow companies to add links and sharing options to YouTube videos. For more robust capabilities, companies like Clikthrough or Overlay TV offer enterprise platforms that provide everything from video management to clickable overlay technology and analytics. Overlay TV even offers "Experience Pages" to support crowdsourcing. These pages serve as a hub that allow your online communities to record or upload and share their own videos. Check out their galleries to get some ideas for your own interactive videos.
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Get Your Video Seen By a Large Qualified Audience
While an increasing number of electronics suppliers are producing monthly videos to convert web audiences into sales, many companies skip a critical step in their video marketing plan – getting the video in front of engineers. Simply posting the video on your website or a video sharing service and hoping engineers will find it typically results in just a handful of views of your new content. A promotional plan is necessary to steer a large number of qualified electronics engineers towards your videos.
SupplyFrame offers video promotion campaigns that can expose your new video to millions of engineers every month. Suppliers using SupplyFrame to promote product videos are receiving industry-leading exposure across our global network of electronics designers and buyers. Promoting product videos through SupplyFrame can make a marked difference in ROI for your video campaigns by driving our audience directly to your videos and getting the benefits from your video investment right away.
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Optimize Videos to Improve Search Visibility
Video is a powerful tool to improve site rankings. A Forrester Research study found SEO-optimized videos are 50 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking. Here are some tips on optimizing your videos for better search engine visibility:
- Include keywords in your video filename, title, tags, URL.
- Create a video library on your website.
- Generate a Google Video Sitemap. Be sure to include thumbnail code in your video sitemap and create a thumbnail image for each separate URL (recommended size 160x120px).
- Place video higher up on your page and on relevant pages of text content.
- Link to videos using important keywords in anchor text.
- Offer embedding code to others.
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Analyze Video Performance
You likely spend some money on producing your videos and may ask yourself after a launch if the effort to storyboard your video, script it, record and edit it has paid off. As with other marketing mediums, understanding the performance of your video marketing effort is key in planning future programs and determining ROI. How long did a viewer watch a particular video? How did they find that video? Did they click anything on your overlays? These types of questions can be answered through video analytics. Tools can be leveraged such as Google Analytics, YouTube Insight (YouTube's self-service analytics and reporting tool), Site Catalyst, Flowplayer (video player that includes analytics) or TubeMogul's InPlay (free video analytics service that integrates with any video player). Whatever solution you choose to use, the key is to understand what types of video resonate with your market and whether the videos support your marketing goals.
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