Beyond Viral: How to Attract Customers, Promote Your Brand, and Make Money with Online Video

Chapter 4. Video's Role in the Marketing Funnel

In this chapter, you will learn:

• How video can serve as the stage of a customer-engagement process, from awareness through trial and loyalty.

• The best practices for engaging with prospects after they've seen your video.

• Three primary types of online video: viral (awareness), conversion (initiation), and education (loyalty).

• How video can help humanize a corporation, and mitigate media's tendency to vilify or characterize its public image.

For every marketer there seems to exist a different definition of the marketing funnel, which is meant to describe the path from a target customer's awareness to loyalty. Most consider online video's role at the top of this funnel (awareness or engagement), but miss opportunities to use online video to complement relationships with prospects and customers.

Although it is increasingly easy for a business to create a destination web site with social-media tools and embedded videos, it's important to populate content where people already travel. Again, these "billboards in their backyard" won't drive sales.

Still, having videos on your site can help visitors turn to prospects and even customers, and that's something harder to control on a third-party web site like YouTube. This book emphasizes video at the top of the funnel because that is where businesses need the most help. However, a web site that doesn't convert attention to purchase is like fishing with a net full of holes.

From Curiosity to Close: A Customer ...