Optimal Sales Strategies by Jason Cronkhite

Video Marketing Is Powerful but How Important Is It?

// May 18th, 2009 // Comments // Video Marketing

Video Marketing Expo

Last week I attended the 1st Video Marketing Expo in Austin, TX which was put on by a couple of good friends and savvy entrepreneurs, Chris Justice & Kelly Shores.  If you are a business that wants to learn and stay on the cutting edge of how to use video marketing I highly recommend that you attend next year.

So, how powerful is video marketing?  Well, you know how powerful TV advertising has been over the years and you know that online video is exploding but why?

With 57% of internet users consuming online video and growing, there is actually a scientific reason why TV and online video commands our attention as consumers.  Backed up by Forrester, Ominture and other scientific sources; video stimulates over 40% of the brains cortex thus commanding in depth attention.  Since video stimulates the human brain so much it is why we love our action-thriller movies, sports on TV and other genres of video based entertainment.  We just can’t get enough video and it’s why video based marketing is one of the most important ways to market.

Wanna see how powerful it is? Watch this commercial for Grasshopper, a telecommunication system for small business owners. Then find out how they could have spread this message further using a unique video syndication system!

Spread Video Far & Wide Online

Grasshopper has done a fabulous job with this video commercial and has done a great job using social media to enable the opportunity for people to spread their message on their website.  How could this message have been spread even further?

If Grasshopper wanted, it could have used TubeMogul to spread their video to several of the most popular video websites.  TubeMogul provides you a single point of distribution by allowing you to upload and distribute your content to some of the most popular video sites.  Here is Brett Wilson, Co-founder and CEO explaining how TubeMogul works.

With that, how important do you think video marketing is now for your business?  I’d love to hear from you.

Why Is Social Media So Cool For Businesses?

// May 1st, 2009 // Comments // Social Media Marketing

In the context of marketing your business, social media has many amazing advantages to accelerate the growth of  your company and quality of your product or service through real, transparent customer feedback.

When used appropriately, social media provides you the opportunity to connect with many people in a very short period of time.

Not to mention that you can reach many more people at a significantly lower cost, be more efficient in your targeting, be more effective with your message and measure activity through web analytics.  Further, social media mindshare or engagement is earned through time and work but is often more effective to attracting customers that are more likely to buy.

Rather than spending thousands of dollars to promote something that may only net you a small amount of business with negative ROI, why not invest some time into building some strong relationships that can come at a much lower cost and yield greater ROI?

Social Media Marketing & Efficiency

As a small business marketer consider this, instead of just going to business chamber and networking events which are localized, compliment your prospecting efforts with social media opportunities where you can target and grow your business awareness globally.  Of course, this depends on if you are running a business that is not just based on a localized economy.

Still, if you are trying to market a location based product/service you can achieve localized awareness much easier, quicker, and often for less money than you could by taking out ads in local papers, buying billboards, direct mail, local TV, etc.   However, if you have the budget to do these types of things I would think about how you can use these mediums to drive traffic to a web property for your ability to track customer conversions or tasks such as; subscribing to an email list, blog or following you on Twitter to further strengthen or deepen a potential customers trust in the value of your product or service.

Social Media Video & Monitoring

Consider developing a promotional video about your product or service that can be distributed on your website and through other web properties.  Once you have this done, you can promote your video through various social media properties.  Asking for help from your friends and community is a good idea rather than trying to push your wares on people.

I guess the last thing to touch on is the capability to monitor buzz and conversation about your company through social media monitoring tools.  Some of these tools out there have amazing capabilities that I plan on getting into a bit later but, setting a tag in these software applications will notify you every time your company, product or service is mentioned.  This of course allows you the opportunity to be proactive in thanking someone for positive praise and to further engage the person and conversely this provides you an opportunity to manage events proactively that could be detrimental to your business reputation.

What Are Your Thoughts?

I’ve just touched on a few things that I think makes social media cool for business and now it’s time for me to practice the coolness of social media.  Tell me what you think or what ideas you have about how to use social media to market your company.  Lastly, please feel free to Share This post on Digg, Twitter, Facebook, email, etc.  Thanks in advance as I greatly appreciate you visiting and participating in the discussion.