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Skeptical About Online Video Advertising? I Used To Be, Too.

Advertising trends are always changing and everyone might be skeptical about jumping on a new one at first. Online video advertising has been making a huge impact as an excellent way to attract and retain customers, and I admit that as a marketing professional, I too was wondering if this was just another fad, designed to suck money out of business owners’ pockets. However, I realized that this stuff really works, and it works on me, even as someone who has seen so much marketing that I have become immune to it.

One particular moment when I realized just how awesome video marketing is happened when I was working on putting together some advertising copy for a client’s site. They sell travel accessories and on first glance, it seemed like a fresh and cool idea, but it wasn’t clear what exactly they were selling, and I was a little confused. I was about to write it off as just another pointless site, and then a video on their home page caught my eye and I was intrigued by the colors and the images and saw that it was only one minute long, so decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a minute to watch it. I had other stuff to do and don’t usually spend time watching videos on people’s sites, but I just couldn’t help myself. I was very curious what they put in this video.

The short video told me way more about the client’s site than the text on their site that I was taking a lot longer to read and make sense of before watching the video. (I never really did get what the site was about just by reading the text). Before watching the video, I was confused and the site seemed complicated and I had trouble making sense of what kinds of travel accessories they were selling. It said they were selling travel tools, but did that mean literally tools like to repair things? Were they focusing on dry bags and outdoor travel? Were they offering phone chargers? After watching the one minute video, my mental fog was instantly cleared away and it was crystal clear what they were selling. I went from thinking that I would never buy something from them to thinking that it would make my travel a whole lot easier if I did buy something from them for my future travel needs.

The video explained very clearly and effectively what the website is offering and why I should care. After watching it, I learned that they are helping to take the stress out of traveling by offering great ways of getting organized, powered up, and packed, in a nutshell. The video explained that travel is stressful and how the site’s products would help me to have all the electronic chargers I would need, all the packs and bags I would need to hold my things, alarm clocks, even outdoor supplies for camping and hiking. The video even highlighted a few products towards the end, and I thought, yeah, these would be very valuable to have and I was already picturing myself using them on future journeys. The video reminded me of the stress of travel and offered some great solutions. There was just something about seeing a real person talk about the products in the video that was interesting and drew me in. The video was really simple, with just a person basically talking for a minute in front of the same background, but it did its job.

As someone who has been in marketing for a long time, if something catches my interest, it means that it must really work. The video that this site had on their home page made me go from being inclined to brush off my initial interest to thinking that this is a really nice site with some really valuable products I would love to purchase. I no longer needed to spend time going through the product categories and trying to make sense of what they are selling because the video said it all very quickly. The moral of the story? Online video advertising works!