Creating Value With Streaming Video Content
by:
John Howarth
Having a corporate or promotional video for your institution is often viewed as thing
of an big-ticket luxury – useful, but seldom
considered to be an essential marketing tool. Whilst galore businesses can understand the benefits of having a corporate video, all too often they are put off by the perceived cost and later find it hard to justify commercially. Furthermore, the process of devising a video can at times, appear complex and intimidating, with an array of technical terms and processes.
Streaming video provides a number of useful opportunities for maximizing the potential of an existing corporate video. And compared to another distribution media such as DVD or CD-ROMs it besides offers a cost-effective resolution for broadcasting a new corporate presentation to a wider audience.
Although streaming video is surely not a new conception and has been about for several time, it’s now easier than ever to add streaming video content to your website. The technology required to change video streaming is wide
available, it’s comparatively
cheap and with the dramatic growth in high speed, broadband computer network connections, a growing number of computer network users can now view high quality, streaming video on their computers.
In this article, leading corporate video & business television producer, John Howarth, explains several of the route in which streaming video content can be ready-made to activity effectively for your business and produce tangible results.
Provide Compelling Content
Try to provide content that creates a real interest for the viewer. Instead of just informing them of your key corporate values – the typical narrative being ‘how booming we are, the great products & services we offer, our featured clients’ - why not turn the message into thing
that is actually useful and piquant to watch.
Take for example a institution that manufactures room
products. Whilst you could produce a video to establish institution values by highlight such areas as quality of craft and innovational design of the product, this information is about surely accessible much easily on the web pages. It could be far much absorbing for the viewer to provide them with a series of recipes, which feature the products being used in context.
Another technique is to provide content that is not centrally focused to your company’s core products & services. For example, your institution sponsors a sports event or art exhibition. How just about showing several clips from the event, with institution stigmatization about it? By exploitation much recognizable and popular content, you are creating a wider ‘reach’ for the video, with the accessorial possibility of gaining accrued website traffic.
Re-Package Content
Lets say you already have a corporate video, it’s about ten minutes long and you presently
distribute it on a video tape format or DVD. The most obvious resolution would-be be to have it transferred to a streaming format in it’s entireness and loaded up onto your website. Whilst a ten minute corporate video sequence may be useful as a background display in a trade exhibition or screened to a captive audience in a conference, it’s often far too long to use as a streaming video clip on your website. Who actually has the time to sit and watch a corporate video clip for this length of time? It’s often far much useful to break the sequence down into a series of individual clips or re-edit into a shorter, condensed version that has greater impact.
Following on from this, you mightiness besides want to distribute streaming video clips about several areas on your website. This way, the clips featured can be targeted to match – and complement - the page content. For example, on a page particularization institution clients and case studies, the video clip could feature client testimonials; located on a contact details page, the video sequence could feature several generic shots of institution locations and building exterior shots.
Brand The Video
Whatever streaming video clips you use, try to ensure they are proprietary
with your corporate identity. This could be a small logotype in the top corner of the screen or a ‘picture frame’ wrapped about the moving images. Taking it a step further, you may want to add an introduction sequence with animated corporate logos at the beginning and end of every sequence. Another option is to create an Hypertext mark-up language or Flash ‘player’ custom-made with your corporate identity. The video clip would-be then play inside
this frame and could be complemented by several animated product or service information about it.
When reviewing website statistics, it is often pages featuring streaming video content that are the most ‘sticky’ and have the longest viewing times by site visitors. Use this factor to your advantage - it’s an ideal chance to get your core brand values, products and services across to the site visitor.
John Howarth is creative director of Blue Tuna Limited, a leading UK-based corporate communications & multi-media creation agency. Past projects include live streaming for leading online bookmaker, Blue Square and the launch of the UK’s of the 1st club association football channel, Boro TV for NTL.
www.bluetuna.tv
