72% of IT Prospects Use Online Video to Make Purchase Decisions
December 10th, 2008
Couple of points from this TechTarget Presentation:
1 — Prospects WANT video — shows that marketers produce less video then prospects want. 72% of users use online video to research tech solutions.
2 — Syndication is critical (one video leveraged to many places). Prospects view video content on multiple sites (youtube, corporate sites, content providers, etc.).
3 — Users like diverse amounts of video content (demos, case studies, testimonials, conferences).
4 — IT Buyers like COMPARABLE content.
Thanks to Tanya at Xinify for sharing the presentation!
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Interesting stats. With broadband speeds and online video technologies so fully evolved, it seems like the “technical challenge” of putting these together is not the issue it was justa few years ago. Now it seems like pretty much any sort of creative video approach a company can dream up is doable.
The main challenge that I see today with online videos has more to do with the promotion than the production. It’s one thing to put a video up on the corporate site, YouTube (or the many other channels now available) – but it’s another to actually get people to check it out. I’m not a Twitter user, but whenever I do a Twitter search on an enterprise technology, I always see all kinds of marketers putting up tinyURL links to online videos and so forth. It’s clear to me that a lot of marketers out there are hustling to drive eyeballs to an online video, and I’d be curious to have a little more insight into the conversion rates of their efforts.
It would be interesting to see a follow up report that demonstrated some of the most successful breadcrumbs that actually lead customers to online video. I’m a big believer that if you have a great product and a great product demo that your prospects check out – your chances at conversion are greatly improved. i.e., it’s pretty clear to me how it’s extremely effective at boosting sales with existing prospects. But how to get the prospects that are NOT yet aware of your company to go to where you have the video hosted and check it out?
Guess you gotta just make sure that the team you pick to help you produce your video is also an expert in SEO, social networking technologies, publicity and other vehicles for online marketing, right?
Thanks for the great insights here….
In terms of getting fresh prospects to even watch the video, that is, of course, the million dollar question, especially when you have to compete against First To Market companies (unless your category is totally new, and then you have an awareness challenge).
Obviously whatever you want to communicate takes time and money — and the more money the better. A “horizontal” strategy of inside sales, direct mail, email, social media, banners, content, etc. to start is ideal — with a follow up on which breadcrumbs work for you.
I like using Search Marketing to test the actual messages — gives you some sense of how people respond to certain concepts.