So someone on the marketing team pitches a great idea of creating a wonderful video documentary for television to market your organisation. After all who reads anymore?? Video is the way to go!
ARE YOU SURE?? The stats may surprise you.
The good thing about online marketing is that you can easily measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Marketing professionals can now access tonnes of real-time data almost as soon as an ad campaign begins. Prior to having these kinds of stats companies would just allocate a budget for TV, radio and newspaper ads etc hope for the best. They would then conduct some surveys a few months later to gauge the success of the campaign. By which time the budget has already been set for the following year anyway.
While it is true that no one reads anymore (thanks to Twitter, Instagram etc), documentary-styled videos and ads may not be as effective as you think. Here is an example of why I say so. A recent video promotion campaign revealed that only 50% of those who clicked on a promotional video only viewed the first 7 seconds and only 20% watched all the way through to the end. Mind you, the video was only 30 seconds long and was professionaly produced (at quite a cost I am sure). The stats for other documentary styled videos were similar. Therefore, organisations would want to weigh a decision such as this carefully.
People are as tired of looking at lengthy videos as they are of reading long articles. You probably read this first and are already tired.
Having said this, videos that are highly creative can go viral and do wonders. The point is don’t just put together the typical voice over documentary with videos, images and testimonials and expect it to do well. Do your market research. A good suggestion would be to try social media as your avenue of distribution first. You can get a good idea of conversion rates and other useful statistics at a fraction of the cost of airing it on prime-time television.
If you have any questions on what I have written above or even if you disagree with me totally please feel free to contact me at info@onverlewis.com!