By Chris Lee

Online video marketing is one of the hottest topics in Internet Marketing right now. Not only does video enable organisations to add rich, engaging and shareable content to their website, but they can also benefit from search engines’ increasing respect for sites which contain video content.

Nearly two-thirds (60 per cent) of Web traffic involves online video, according to research group Forrester, a figure which network technology company Cisco believes will rise to 90 per cent by 2013.

The business case for video marketing

“The Internet would have been just video if it could have been,” according to Fergus Dyer-Smith of video production network Wooshii. “Now we’re playing catch up – [video] is more engaging than text, more interactive. Video goes into the brain and sticks around.”

Dyer-Smith was addressing delegates at the Internet World exhibition in London this week and cited a number of businesses that had seen a significant increase in business performance on the back of video. For example, online clothes store Zappos, which credits its use of video to improving sales by 30 per cent, or online jeweller Diamond Jewelry United, which used video of products to show case them to potential customers before they purchased, leading to a 60 per cent reduction in returns. When online file repository Dropbox added an instructional video next to its “Download Now” button the site saw a 30 per cent increase in downloads, Dyer-Smith added.

“There is so much you can do [with video], so much more now than with TV,” he said, adding that using the HTML5 Internet code would be more useful going forward than Flash technology going forward due to its ease of use.

Online retail sites such as Boux Avenue and Marks & Spencer use video to help viewers envisage clothing on individuals before deciding whether to proceed, while US blender firm Blendtec has used its YouTube channel as its main marketing tool and seen a 700 per cent increase in sales.

Video in e-commerce

For Tom Cape, managing director of Capablue, the design agency behind the Boux Avenue website, high-quality video not only brings the product to life, it links the visual aspect of watching TV with the efficiency of online commerce.
“Video commerce applications involve mashing up video with e-commerce and can take many shapes,” he told NMK. “Potentially most significantly, videos can contain a number of clickable objects. The viewer can click on any of those objects for further information or to purchase them.”
Cape said that vide was great for search, especially as the Web matures and people want more video results than purely text.

“As with most keywords your webpage might compete with 100,000 other webpages, but with video it might only compete with 200 other videos.  There simply aren't nearly as many videos on the web as there are pages," he said.

Opportunity knocks

Wooshii’s Dyer-Smith explained how global hotel chain Intercontinental decided to invest $1 million in online video rather than TV advertising, producing thousands of local video guides instead which were tagged for keywords and seeded throughout the Web.

“Anywhere you’re working online you can fit video into it. Video is just going to get more and more and more, and the earlier you get in the better. We’re still in the early days,” Dyer-Smith concluded.