History Says it All.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”
George Santayana 1863-1952

Ask any recognized marketing guru. It’s true; the strongest marketing tool is an organization’s record of sales and marketing efforts and the response they actually drew from the target demographic. All that means is that you will learn how to get a strongly favorable response from the public at large by observing how they responded to your marketing efforts in the past.

Marketing communications are a one-way street right up until one gets a response from the target audience. Then, the marketing becomes a function of sales. We want all marketing to turn into sales. Without the sales aspect, marketing is a useless function and a total waste of resources.
The issue is knowing for sure that one’s marketing efforts are generating a positive sales response. Any positive response from a member of the demographic is a sign of a good marketing asset, and a buying signal.

What is a buying signal? The buying signal goes way beyond an actual sale and shows up way ahead of the actual shipment of product. Questions from the audience about the product are good buying signals. And beyond that, any audience time spent taking in product information is also strong buying signal stuff.

If one is displaying a marketing or promotion video 120 seconds in length that is only getting 20 seconds of play time from ¾ of the audience, it would be much better to find that out earlier rather than later.

If a poorly performing video only needs minor tweaking instead of total replacement, this can be discovered by looking at when the audience is bailing out of the offending materiel. Are they leaving the video early on? If this is true, then maybe just making the intro more dynamic would fix the problem. Knowing what part of the video that is causing yawns and the killer “NEXT” button to be stroked can be worth thousands of dollars in resource time.

What would happen if you could break your video into three parts; INTRO, BODY, CALL TO ACTION? Can you imagine how much more simple it would be to precisely tweak a marketing video that is already rolled out and online? This isn’t just a new or refreshingly good idea. This is standard marketing procedure that corporate professionals use to release the marketing genius of their high dollar advertising agencies. Team A works on the concept of the attention-getting introduction of the video, Team B works on the informational body of the video, and Team C works on the powerful call to action of the video that gets the target market to take action immediately upon watching the video.

Your video in three parts

Anything less than a three part video design is virtually an unfinished video.

One thing I have found that helps streamline this established business video process is choosing a video player that gives one the opportunity to add an introductory video clip at the beginning and a closing video clip at the end of each video. EZWebPlayer is actually the only web player I could find that offers this as a standard feature. It seems that the guys over there at EZWebPlayer understand a lot about marketing video on the web, not just the technical web part, but the actual marketing science behind all of the techy stuff.