Friday, August 11, 2006

How should Your Business Catch the Video Wave?

Videos are the hottest trend today on the Internet. From YouTube.com who reports that over 100 million videos are watched every month to Internet giants like Google and Yahoo who have been heavily investing in their video search applications, everyone wants to get on the video bandwagon. So how should your business catch this latest popular wave?

The first thing to realize is that most of the videos online today are created to capture attention from an entertainment perspective and the popularity of these videos can’t be seen as a trend that is relevant to every business. Creating an entertainment video is akin to creating an award winning advertisement for your business – very difficult to do, possibly very expensive and probably not that relevant to the bottom line.

So how can businesses use videos to their advantage? I suggest three ways that allow a business to participate in the video trend while remaining focused on the bottom line.

1. Customer testimonials - Showing a video of a customer talking about how your product or service helped them is far better than reading a quote or a sales professional talking about the customer’s experience. These videos can be used in presentations or on a corporate web site.

2. Training videos - As a lower cost option to in-classroom sessions, training videos can be used to get new employees up to speed or retrain employees on a new process or piece of equipment. These videos can be archived on an intranet site for refresher training. Some companies have even created secure parts of their web sites to store training videos that customers can view at any time, reducing customer support costs.

3. Process or equipment demonstrations - Instead of explaining a process by using a diagram or showing a picture of a piece of equipment, some companies are starting to use videos to "tour" the process or equipment. This gives a customer a better feel for what is being explained. This can reduce the length of the sales cycle, as has been seen in the real estate industry with building tour videos posted on web sites.

As long as you see videos as a new way to enhance the customer or employee experience, you will be able to capture the benefits that video offers.

I explain exactly how to integrate videos into your PowerPoint presentations in my video tutorial at http://www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com/vtvideo.htm .

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