My client Online Trading Academy is a heavy user of search engine marketing—classified ads on Google or Yahoo that take the reader to a landing page. Their standard landing page was a tabbed mini-site that delivers quick downloads of information and captures the visotor’s contact information for follow-up by the sales team—what you would call a best practice. Then, they experimented with a “long form” single page that had a narrative sort of like a traditional direct mail letter with frequent links to get to a registration page. This beat the tabbed version handily.
But now they’ve blown away their “long form” control with this new page that goes back to tabs but has a self-running video.
On its main website which is just completing a redesign, Online Trading Academy is including a video description for almost every course. We try not to recreate the written description but to complement it, for the benefit of avid fans who will both read and watch. But the real benefit is that the video provides an alternate entry point for a post-literate audience that is not entirely comfortable with the written word. And that’s why you should experiment with video marketing if you aren’t using it already.
Internet users love video—even videos without cats in them! Interestingly, one of the most popular posts on this blog remains this one which I wrote last winter at the Consumer Electronics Show. Old news—but it has a video! And not even a hosted one but just a link to the file on YouTube. But now my ISP (Dreamhost, see “green hosting” bug in the sidebar) gives me the ability to play Flash and streaming video direct from this blog, which you bet I will be doing in the future.
And what about video in emails? I have clients who are champing at the bit to do this and have urged them to hold off because of the bandwidth required plus the likelihood of triggering filters (both spam filters and filters at the corporate gateway). Besides, it’s not really necessary. All you need is a still with a “play” arrow superimposed, linked to the actual video on a web page.