An article I read recently stated that by 2013, Cisco predicts that 90% of online traffic will consist of video.  Pretty astounding.  But we don’t have to wait another year for the tipping point to come, because already more than 70% of online retail sites use video on their product pages.

What this means is that if you are a retail operation with an emarketing site, you are already behind the curve if you aren’t using video on that site.  And it’s becoming more prevalent for B2B marketers to use video, too.  There’s just no better way to engage and communicate with your audience (and potential customers) than video.  Increasingly, it will become what people expect to find when they get to your site.  If all you’ve got is a page of text with a still photo, you’re slackin’.

So what exactly can web videos be used for?  There are many options, and lots of examples of each already in the market, but here’s a short list:

– new product introductions

– product demos

– video FAQ’s or instructions

– video newsletters

– customer testimonials

– promotion of / recapping live events

– community building

– good old-fashioned advertising

I hesitated to put that last one on the list, because I think it’s a huge waste of the potential of web communication when clients take their traditional Broadcast commercials and put them online.  Most ads don’t work in a “pull” environment.  But, on the other hand, if the ad is interesting or entertaining enough, it can be a great (and cheap) way to distribute it.  Just check out how many hits the VW “The Force” ad got on YouTube as an example (over 44 million views so far).  So it works, but only for great content that your audience wants to see.

The biggest reason to use web video comes down to engaging the audience.  Nothing else comes close.  Now, this term “engagement” gets thrown around a lot lately, and I saw an interesting discussion about defining what it means the other day.  Beet TV sponsored a web panel in NY about online video and online advertising the other day (link to the program), called “The Value of Engagement”.   During one of the sessions, Jason Krebs from Tremor Video spoke about what it means to engage an audience.  Tremor recently started selling ads on a “per-engagement” basis, so this is not an academic issue.  They are staking their revenue stream on being able to deliver engagement (and they are the first, I believe, to do so).  What Jason said was that they defined engagement as causing the viewer to take some physical action, to click on something embedded in the video.  That “call to action” could be many things depending on the client’s strategy (a link to more info on a product, to a store locator, to an ecommerce site, etc.).  But the key point is that the viewer had to take some action, not just watch the video all the way through.

 That’s a pretty high bar compared to traditional measurements of advertising effectiveness (awareness or  positive opinion) so it’ll be interesting to see how often they achieve that result.  If they succeed, you can bet that many clients will want to be a part of that deal.  And we may have a new, better predictor of ROI, and measure of effectiveness, than ever before.