This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Content Marketing: Is 2014 Really Shaping Up to Be The Year of Video? This webinar was sponsored by Act-On who recently was named by Forrester as a leader in the Marketing Automation space (see act-on.com/wave for more info). The webinar included a superb mix of panelists, including: Zach Cole the Social Media Manager at Lyft, Richard Boehmcke Creative Director for Vibrant Motion, and Kristen Craft who is the Director of Partnerships at Wistia.
Richard got us rolling with a few slides on video creation strategy which he declared that the Wild Wild West is alive and well in the video creation space. You should "know where you want to go before your start" a video project. This was well re-tweeted by the audience on Twitter.
Kristen then took over and showed some slides on the impact of video along with some best practices. She mentioned that length is inversely correlated to the number of completed videos, which brought about a bunch of questions on the optimal length (approx. 2 min) and whether you need to break up longer videos into "chapters" was discussed in the Q&A.
Zach gave the final presentation with an overview of his video content marketing strategy at Lyft. He suggested 3 Tiers of video: Tier 1 - High production videos that can showcase your product or services, Tier 2 - Low production, quick turn type of video, more playful and short form, Tier 3 - Long tail content that can either be motion graphic video or talking heads but something that has long life, in his case "What is Lyft?" is a key piece of his video strategy.
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: How much production should you put into a video (2 camera angles etc)? Measuring the value of video content marketing strategies? What tools give you the best measurements? What is a realistic expectation for a B2B video to be viewed?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar, please check out this link. Otherwise, we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is on Customer Service is the New Marketing: Turning Satisfaction Into Sales. Sign up for it or view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.