There are two things you need to succeed in business. You must have a product or service to sell and you must have customers to who are willing to purchase your product. Designing and building quality products may be the easy part. Finding potential customers and convincing them to purchase your product is a monumental challenge. This is the purpose of marketing. Marketing is all about generating leads. It makes no difference what product or service you sell, you need leads that you can convert into customers.
Outbound Versus Inbound Marketing
You have two routes to take. You can send your message to your potential customers and hope that some of them will respond; this is known as outbound marketing. The other option is to put your message out and hope that your potential customers will find it; this is called inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is commonly used online. Inbound marketing works well online because customers are often searching on the Internet for the products and services they need. Ideally, their searching will lead them to your site.
To increase your chances of success, you must have high-quality content. High quality content not only improves your ranking on search engines, it encourages your leads to spend more time on your website. When they spend longer on your site, you have more chances to convert them to customers.
Types of Content
You can present almost any type of content on your website. You are free to include text, graphics, sound, and video. Each type of content has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you have a complex message to convey, text is probably your best bet; written language has a near infinite ability to convey thoughts and ideas.
Unfortunately, many of your potential leads do not have the time or inclination to read your content in depth, no matter how compelling it is. Graphics are useful for some types of information; as the old saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words. Audio is a good way to deliver content to people who are driving or working and unable to give their full attention to your message. Each of these types of content has its place, but when you want to deliver effective content in a short time, it is hard to do better than video.
Advantages of Video Content
Video content has several advantages over most other types of content. Video is convenient for audience; it takes very little time to watch a video, and your leads can view video content during their downtime if they choose to. Video is also easy to distribute online through YouTube and other video sharing sites. If you produce a video that “goes viral” it could be seen by millions of viewers. Video is an efficient, effective and exciting medium; it is a medium that you should not ignore.
If you want to get started with video, we want to help you. Keep reading, and we will guide you through the process of writing, producing and distributing Web video.