Online video is going through the roof. Media entities such as HBO, Hulu and Netflix are sweeping the awards shows and pulling in more and more viewers.
Facebook is finding more innovative ways to include video on their platform through their own version of Stories. YouTube recently reported that viewership in a single month reached 120 million.
Video is more relevant than other. What businesses may not realize is that it’s just as relevant for them as it is for a media conglomerate that produces movies and television shows.
Any business or company with an online presence needs to integrate video into their site or offering in some way. The question is how to do that, and to what end?
Monetization
For one, online video players offer a way to engage but also monetize that engagement. Top-tier online video player platforms offer monetization features that can give your business a way to integrate ads and generate a new revenue stream.
Powerful Data
Online video can also be used as a marketing tool to assess key demographics, their engagement and more. An online video platform can offer important metrics that can drive informed and effective business decisions in many other ways, too. Data on device usage, for example, can give you insights into your users, while location specs can tell you where your customers are. All of this can be funneled into some serious and effective decision making at your company.
Accessibility
For a long time, the best technology was limited to large-scale enterprises with deep coffers and deep benches of IT staff. Today, many solutions are more ideally positioned for adoption by SMBs, including online video. Online video players that leverage HTML5 are easy to embed in a site and won’t take 20 IT experts to use. Businesses can get a lot of ROI out of little upfront cost and effort.
Lead Generation
Online Video, too, can become a pretty sizeable tool for lead generation. It works as simply as this: an upfront form requests that your users fill in some basic details before watching a video. You end up with quite a list of engaged and primed prospects. After all, if someone is taking time to watch a video, they have already displayed interest.
Product Exposure
Finally, online video can give some key exposure to your products and offerings. Additionally, video can highlight products in ways that can generate purchasing decisions. In fact, according to one industry expert, watching a product video makes consumers 85 percent more likely to purchase it. That is a serious incentive for any company to integrate online video into their online retail plan.
You don’t have to be a movie studio to benefit from online video. Businesses as diverse as retail clothing stores to smoothie shops can increase engagement with video, while pulling in a wealth of other benefits.
