There are many reasons why you should consider using online video for your business. Most obvious, branding, reach, and story. You have to tell the story of your business, especially if you operate with a store front on the web. Video can be used to create a competitive advantage if your competitors are yet to integrate video content into their web strategy.
If you are like me, you subscribe to a number of industry reports that deliver trends and benchmarks around marketing and sales. There is definitely one thing that these reports all have in common, Video. Marketers are projected to start incorporating video into their core efforts this year. But what does this all mean? Does it mean filming more videos? Or, does it mean optimizing existing content? In my opinion, I think we will see "video series" bypass the "blog" by the end of 2013.
There is a high probability that you now watch movies and TV shows via the web, using services like Hulu and Netflix. When was the last time you purchased or rented a DVD? 2012 will be there year that online video will surpass alternative legacy channels. This infographic from onlinedregees.com goes into further detail.
This week I attended the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. Having not been to Ad:Tech before, I was not exactly sure what to expect. I figured it was a bunch of online marketers discussing banner ads and digital advertising. Well... it was much much more. There were 2 floors filled with exhibits from companies you'd expect to be there, but also some cloud folks mashed in like Cloudwords and Rackspace. It's apparent that the cloud has become mainstream, the lines between what once were separate industry gatherings have become blurred.
In 2011 online video progressed further towards mainstream viewership. Here's a brief overview of some stats provided by comSore. Of course Google leads the charge as far as video sites go, behind YouTube was VEVO, which captured about a third of the YouTube audience. The report does not say whether YouTube videos viewed where viewed on their main site or from embedded sources across the web -- that may be good to know.
