Top 7 Reasons for Web Video

Web video and video email marketing can differentiate you from the competition in many ways.

1. Stand Out from the Crowd – While everyone’s ramping up their budget to send plain text emails, you can send video emails to gain the competitive advantage.

2. Be Remembered – It has been proven that the combination of audio and visual stimulus increases retention.

3. Stay on the Cutting-Edge – Web video and video email are a staple of communication, they’re not going to go away. Usage of this new medium will only increase.

4. Be a Leader in Your Field – Usage of web video is on the rise, but it hasn’t yet hit the mainstream markets.

5. Put a Face to the Name – For the most part, people like to do business with people they know. Video emails let your prospects get to know you before you even meet them.

6. Capitalize on Your Greatest Assets… You and Your Team – Unlike copy, you and your team can produce marketing videos with little more than a $60 webcam. Sales copy can be expensive and time consuming to author. The difference between making a sale and losing a customer can often be as simple as adding the human touch – that’s you and your team!

7. Improve Your Credibility – When people can see and hear you talking about the benefits of your products and services, they are much more likely to trust you. When you have trust, you have sales.

Learn more at The Media Zoo – Video.

Video Benefits

Create Better Call to Actions

When an actor says to fill out a form, statistics show that 43% more will do this task. If part of your websites sales objective is to get people to your site and then do a specific action plan, adding video will help your customers accomplish this task.

Saving Time in Man Hours

By having a quality video spokesperson answering confusing questions or showing a presentation of a confusing product, time and energy will be saved from having to answer these questions yourself.

What Do Customers See at Your Front Door

Your website is a reflection of your commitment to excellence and the look and feel of your website is no different. By having an informative video welcoming or conveying a strong call to action will let your visitors know you mean business.

You Can Increase Sales by Having Strong Call to Actions

Did you know that video is the best way for customers to identify with the branding of your company? Why do Coke and McDonald’s still advertise on TV; because it works!

More than Just Text for Testimonials

Testimonials look great on paper, but when someone sees a real person giving testimonials about a product or service, sales can increase exponentially.

Introduce Your Team

A great way for potential new customers to meet your staff and your office is by having them on your website.

Ask For the Sale

This may be a silly example, but if you were to ask people to follow you and started walking around the building, many people would follow you, simply because you asked them to. You always have to ask for the sale. Your script should have the actor ask for you, every time.

Video simply increases sales, builds rapport, and establishes trust.

Learn more at The Media Zoo – Video.

Why Website Videos?

Using Website Videos is an easy, innovative way to promote your business, improve customer relations, and increase sales. What does your business offer you customers and prospects when they visit your website? Is there just a wealth of text? What is the first impression a customer receives of your business?

With a Website Video, professionally produced and customized, tell your customers what you want them to hear about your business. Think of your Video Spokesperson as an extra sales person who requires no sales training or supervision, does not expect commissions, company benefits or vacations; and delivers perfect presentations every time.

• Of the people viewing marketing-orientated videos, over half will take some sort of action after viewing a video…including 12% who will actually buy the product being offered. To put this into perspective, typically only .5% to 2% of visitors

to a “text only” web site will end up purchasing a service or product.

• 65% of online surfers will view video advertisements to the end

(less than 20% read “text only” sites to completion).

• 68% of people who watch website videos, will in turn, forward links for these

videos onto their friends…turning them into viral traffic machines.

• 72% of online surfers are watching web videos every week. By the

year 2011, it’s estimated this number will climb to 87% of web surfers.

• An estimated 1 billion dollars will be spent on video ads in this year. By 2011, that number will climb to at least 4.3 billion dollars.

Learn more at The Media Zoo – Video.

How Videos Will Help Increase YOUR Business?

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Google bought You-tube because Live Video introductions on websites have a 43% higher conversion rate (appointments, sales, calls) than those without a video introduction(research conducted by Cormetrics).

How Videos Will Help Increase YOUR Business?

	- Promote your product or service, as well as any special features.
	- Motivate your customers to act.
	- Enhance your company’s image, and talk about your strengths.
	- Relate your mission statement and level of experience of your employees.

Why Website Videos?

	- Tell your customers what you want them to hear about your business. Think of your Video as an extra sales person who requires no sales training or supervision, does not expect commissions, company benefits or vacations; and delivers perfect presentations every time.
	- After viewing marketing-orientated videos, over half will take some sort of action...including 12% who will actually buy the product being offered.
	- 65% of online surfers will view video advertisements to the end (less than 20% read "text only" sites to completion).
	- 68% of people who watch website videos, will in turn, forward links for these videos onto their friends. Turning them into viral traffic machines. - 72% of online surfers are watching web videos every week.

Call and order your video today and start receiving more calls, appointments and sales.

All video orders placed in the month of May will receive a free You-Tube installation, plus other social networks sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, etc.

Call and place your video order TODAY!

10 Reasons To Have Video For Your Business

Tuesday April 27th

1. On-Demand Accessibility
   Widely available, low-cost, high-speed Internet connections are available almost anywhere these days. And, with the influx of portable, Internet-ready devices (cell phones, iPods, laptops, etc.) capable of streaming online video content, viewers will soon be able to access video from virtually every corner of the world.

   Read up next week for #2

10 Promising Free Web Analytics Tools

Tuesday April 27th

Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to glean meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the big guns such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete.

We go off the trodden path and explore a few lesser-known Web analytics options. In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent and free tools and applications to help you gather and analyze data about your web content.

1. Piwik

Go to Live Demonstration of Piwik.

Piwik is an open-source Web analytics application developed using PHP and MySQL. It has a "plugins" system that allows for utmost extensibility and customization. Install only the plugins you need or go overboard and install them all – the choice is up to you. The plugins system, as you can imagine, also opens up possibilities for you to create your own custom extensions. This thing’s lightweight – the download’s only 1.9MB.

2. FireStats

Go to Live Demonstration of FireStats.

FireStats is a simple and straight-forward Web analytics application written in PHP/MySQL. It supports numerous platforms and set-ups including C# sites, Django sites, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and several others. Are you a resourceful developer who needs moar cowbell? FireStats has an excellent API that will assist you in creating your own custom apps or publishing platform components (imagine: displaying the top 10 most downloaded files in your WordPress site) based on your FireStats data.

3. Snoop

Snoop is a desktop-based application that runs on the Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista platforms. It sits nicely on your system status bar/system tray, notifying you with audible sounds whenever something happens. Another outstanding Snoop feature is the Name Tags option which allows you to "tag" visitors for easier identification. So when Joe over at the accounting department visits your site, you’ll instantly know.

4. Yahoo! Web Analytics

Yahoo! Web analytics is Yahoo!’s alternative to the dominant Google Analytics. It’s an enterprise-level, robust web-based third-party solution which makes accessing data easy especially for multiple-user groups. It’s got all the things you’d expect from a comprehensive Web analytics tool such as pretty graphs, custom-designed (and printable) reports, and real-time data tracking.

5. BBClone

Go to Live Demonstration of BBClone.

If you’re looking for a simple, server-side web application that doesn’t rely on third-party services to monitor your data, check out BBClone – a PHP-based server application that gives you a detailed overview of website traffic and visitor data. It supports language localization for 32 languages like English, Chinese, German, and Japanese. It easily integrates with popular publishing platforms like Drupal, WordPress, and Textpattern. Since it’s logfile-based, it doesn’t require you to use a server-side relational database.

6. Woopra

Woopra is a Web analytics application written in Java. It’s split into two parts which includes a desktop application for data analysis/exploration and a web service to monitor website statistics. Woopra has a robust user interface, an intuitive management system that allows you to run it on multiple sites and domains, and even a chat feature so that you can gather non-numerical information by talking to your site users. Woopra is currently in beta and requires you to request for a private beta registration.

7. JAWStats

JAWStats is a server-based Web analytics application that runs with the popular AWStats (in fact, if you’re on a shared hosting plan – AWStats is probably already installed). JAWStats does two things to extend AWStats – it improves performance by reducing server resource usage and improves the user interface a little bit. With that said, you can’t go wrong with just using AWStats either if you’re happy with it.

8. 4Q

A large part of Web analytics deals with number-crunching and numerical data. Raw numbers tells only part of the story and it’s often helpful to perform analytics by way of interacting with actual users. 4Q developer Avinash Kaushik puts it perfectly when he said: "Web analytics is good at the ‘What’. It is not good at the ‘Why’".4Q is a simple surveying application focused on improving your traditional numerical Web analytics by supplementing it with actual user feedback. Check out this YouTube video on how easy it is to set up 4Q.

9. MochiBot

MochiBot is a free Web analytics/tracking tool especially designed for Flash assets. With MochiBot, you can see who’s sharing your Flash content, how many times people view your content, as well as helping you track where your Flash content is to prevent piracy and content theft. Installing MochiBot is a breeze; you simply copy a few lines of ActionScript code in the .FLA files you want to monitor.

10. Grape Web Statistics

Go to Live Demonstration of Grape Web Statistics.

Grape Web Statistics is a simple, open-source application geared towards web developers. It has a clean and usable interface and has an Extensions API to extend and customize your installation. It uses PHP for the backend and you can run it on any operating system that runs PHP.

Let’s talk about it.

What Web analytics software do you use, and why? Do you have any extensive experience in using any of the above application? Share it with all of us in the comments!

Mark Burnett's Branching Out?

Like many people, the first thing I do when I get to work each day is check my email. There are the usual emails from customers needing me to take action on something, or follow up with them. At The Media Zoo, we've really taken pride in the level of customer service we provide so, I almost always take care of my customers first. After my customers have been taken care of, I move on to the Spam. I do this next because it's quick. Click, click, click, delete, delete, delete. And done! Next, I read any interesting articles that get delivered to my email box. Here's one from Advertising Age that I thought you might enjoy too. It's about Mark Burnett, producer of hit reality show "Survivor", branching out into other avenues. Read it here.