Sort of a good news, bad news post from Gini Dietrich this week. She blogged about an Alertian survey of marketing professionals that revealed some surprising results.

The good news is that marketing pros are anticipating increases for both overall budgets and social media budgets. The bad news is there’s still a substantial number of businesses that haven’t developed a digital marketing strategy.

It’s amazing to think with all the information out there about how to leverage the internet and social media as marketing tools, that many companies still haven’t gotten onboard.

I’m a half-full type of guy though, so I prefer to look at it as an opportunity. Companies that have a blank slate, ready to be educated on the benefits of social media and the power of video.

Hope you’re ready for the challenge marketing pros. I know I am.

–Tony Gnau

Okay, you’ve bought in… social media is an important marketing platform. You’ve done research and learned about the millions of people sharing videos. Time to create a marketing video for your company and get it out there.

What’s next? Ask yourself a few questions. What’s my message? Who’s my audience? Why should they care?

Don’t go any further until you can answer them.

–Tony Gnau

eMarketer reports many businesses are turning to a more personalized approach to marketing. By segmenting its customer base, especially through email lists, they hope to target people only with the information that’s relevant or appealing to them.

This is where video can really shine. The better you know your audience, the better you can produce something that’s going to capture their attention.

For example, business travelers… actually, let’s narrow our focus even further to female business travelers. Imagine an airline email blast to all its female business travelers.  It includes relevant customer service information, plus a video like this one…

VIDEO: United Airlines Executive

It features an airline executive that our targeted market can relate to, and puts the airline in a great light.

A well-defined audience is almost always going to make for a more effective video.

–Tony Gnau

I met with some potential clients yesterday who get it. They understand the power of video and want to make it a part of their marketing strategy.

Even better… they know their audience and where to find them. They’re targeting young people who use social media, so they want a whole series of short videos.

The key word here… short. Many businesses make the mistake of trying to cram too much information into their marketing videos and stretch them out so that they’re unnecessarily long.

Longer than a commercial, short enough for the web. 60-seconds can work wonders.

–Tony Gnau

60-SECOND VIDEO EXAMPLE: Sovereign Healthcare

Love the new video recently posted by American Airlines. They do a great job of telling a simple story without using any voice track or interviews.

Sometimes good video and nice music is all you need.

Video: American Airlines

–Tony Gnau

Corporate America… we get it. You want carefully scripted corporate videos, most likely approved by your executives and possibly your legal team. Guess what? We’re not listening.

You can spend lots of time and money controlling your message, but if nobody’s paying attention what’s the point? People surfing the web can spot these canned corporate messages a mile away and won’t be influenced.

An authentic message on the other hand can win them over. Produce a video that features your employees, and let them talk about the company unscripted. Ask a loyal customer if you can feature them in a video, and  let them tell people what it’s like working with you.

Authentic messages like these will connect with an audience and help win new customers.

–Tony Gnau

This one’s specifically for those people posting boring videos. More to the point, businesses posting canned, carefully scripted corporate messages on social media. Stop it!

Video is a brilliant medium and social media is a great way to share it. Here’s the deal thought, if you’re a business leader who wants to post a video just to be able to say you posted a video. Don’t do it. You might be doing more harm than good.

Your video needs to be purposeful, and it better be authentic. If you’re sharing videos with canned messages, nobody’s going to pay attention. Worse, they’ll probably be irritated with you for wasting their time.

Instead, find a good storyteller, a video artist, and turn them loose on your company. You won’t be disappointed.

Okay, we’re not there yet, but more evidence today courtesy eMarketer that not only do people want to see online video… they want to see it in corporate blogs.

Yes, “readers” want to watch video in the place where people typically put their heart and soul into written word. I guess we’re ahead of the curve here at T60 since we’re constantly sharing videos using our blog, but hey… we’re a production company… of course we’re going to share videos.

Anyway, the research! eMarketer reports video is one of the top things people want to see in a corporate blog. Granted, it’s a distant third behind people wanting corporate blogs to engage the community and be current. It’s also tied with wanting the blogs to be educational, but video does make the list.

So, when’s the last time your company posted a behind-the-scenes video at its blog?

–Tony Gnau