Serious about Business

Online Video Marketing: Friend or Foe

We recently came off the mountain at Whistler, British Columbia where we attended the Adventure Travel World Summit sponsored by the Adventure Travel Trade Association (see prior post on Conversion: Lookers into Bookers).

The theme of the 3rd annual summit was Conversion: Transferring Possibility into Reality. Here, conversion wasn’t just about turning “lookers into bookers” but also “converting travelers into adventurers” and the “unaware traveler to the aware traveler.” In a way, then, this Summit was not just about conversion but also about convergence of perspectives that are unique to Adventure Travel.

We came to this conference to introduce Mixpo and share our insights on the belief that online video marketing will become the new way businesses, especially adventure travel ones, start to attract customers leveraging video technology to convert them into customers.

We participated on a panel entitled, Pacing the Web’s Lightening Speed Advances, and reported on trends we were seeing that point to a seismic shift in how businesses, especially travel-related ones, are already leveraging video for useful purposes (rather than just tagging a 15 second ad as a pre- or post-roll add on to a piece of entertainment content).

We came to the Summit to connect with: travel operators, destination marketing organizations, travel experts, and adventure travel publishers; but we also found a connection with other marketing providers like: PixelMill (who design web sites for many of the travel operators as well as the ATTA), Conversion Associates (who help businesses with landing page optimization), Media Arts and Weld Creative (two companies that provide high quality video production), and, even, some traditional brand advertising agencies.

Given how new online video marketing is, we thought these guys might see us as a competitor but what we found was the opposite. They all understood the power online video marketing will have for business if the technology is there, and saw a huge opportunity for synergy with us to augment what they already do and help their clients, further, with our video marketing solution.

The Weld Creative folks, for example, whose booth was next to ours, displayed beautiful videos of resorts in West Virginia and tours at the Grand Canyon on a couple of plasma televisions. When people came up to us asking what we do, we’d say, “Let us first tell you what we aren’t - we don’t produce the video. Those guys next to us do that. We take your content, promote it on the web, drive action back to your business, and optimize it over time. If you need great video, talk to those guys!”

And the same convergence of thinking happened with PixelMill, Conversion Associates, and other agencies we met with at the Summit.

So many customers we’ve talked to over the year say the problem with their online marketing is that it always seems to be a one-off series of executions where the web design doesn’t tie to email campaigns, and, especially, offline marketing. We were excited to hear other marketing providers at the Summit (both online and offline) say that video marketing could actually tie all these disparate pieces together to help drive sales.

Now that’s convergence that drives conversion!

Conversion: Lookers to Bookers

We attended the Adventure Travel World Summit in Whistler last week. This is the premier international event for the adventure travel industry with executive level participation, excellent networking, and just a cool venue (Whistler). It turned out to be everything we expected, and more. The most energizing thing for us was the lively discussion with customers (ranging from tour operators to destination marketing companies to resorts to publishers….), which is refreshing compared to so many other industry events where industry people talk to each other about what customers are asking for and need. But where’s the customer in all that discussion?

First why Adventure Travel and Mixpo? We have been working with ATTA over the last few months and have a strategic partnership in place to be their online video marketing solution. And of course, Richard Bangs is on our Advisory Board. But the reason for this is that adventure travel is all about the experience. It’s involves exotic locations, exciting adventures, a little bit of a fear of the unknown, a niche market today but expanding to much broader audiences….but it also happens to be a high-touch sale that is increasingly starting with some research online. We went to Whistler with the belief that Online Video Marketing has the potential to revolutionize sales and marketing in this segment. How better to ‘experience’ the destination and trips than Video? Text and even static photos just can’t do this justice. And this was completely validated at the conference. We had numerous conversations involving the words ‘Experience’, ‘Authentic’ and ‘Emotion’. No question that at some point, every single business involved in adventure travel will be using video to market themselves online.

The underlying theme of the conference was ‘Conversion’. How apt for what we are trying to do. What does conversion mean for online video marketing? Of course, the overall promise is ‘converting lookers to bookers’ but this manifests itself in all different customer touchpoints online, e.g.

• More engaging and interactive websites.
• Better response from email newsletters.
• Impulse purchases.
• Word of mouth referrals.
• And of course the biggest potential of all – to stand out in Search results as people are doing some research about where to go.

To the last point, I was invited to speak in a panel discussion about the Web’s advances and how it can help businesses. I gave a 10 min presentation on Video and some of the trends. The thing that was the biggest eye-opener for all was Universal Search (i.e. the trend for Google, Yahoo and others to combine text, image, videos, maps etc in the main search results). Imagine if your videos can start appearing in the Search results contextually and help differentiate your listing from others. How many people go to Youtube to search for a trip? None. This is a hot new trend that points to the emerging area of Video SEO. But the key is to be able to connect search results with lead generation, as it’s all about the results and ROI. Mixpo is very heavily focused on this and we believe that this will be a huge factor in online marketing in the next few years. Certainly many of the early adopter businesses at the conference were extremely excited about this.

A few such businesses we met were the owners of Matava (Fiji), Tui Tai (Fiji), and Roam (Canada). They are all extremely passionate about the Internet as a sales channel, and took the leap of faith early on to move their entire marketing online, and are now extremely knowledgeable and creative to make use of its full potential. In fact Stuart from Matava mentioned “We realized 3 years ago that there was a freight train coming. Brochures, DVDs etc weren’t working. We decided to move 100% online especially as Fiji is so remote. And now our growth is better than ever. This has been fantastic for us. It truly is the world wide web”. Pioneers such as Stuart, Tige and Brian from these 3 companies will continue to push the boundaries with emerging technologies. We have a lot to learn together in this exciting journey.

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised at how many businesses were talking about ROI and effectiveness of marketing spend. The beauty of the Internet is that everything is measurable. It’s not opaque like other forms of offline marketing. Scott Adams from the Ontario Paddling Alliance summed it up best: “Why market if you can’t measure”? Absolutely. That’s what we believe at Mixpo for sure. Overall a great summit, and we hope to contribute a bit to how this industry will do its sales and marketing in the future.

The Luxury Real Estate Conference Recap

The Luxury Real Estate (LRE) Conference up in Vancouver, British Columbia just came to a close. Reflecting on the conference, it was amazing to see the high level of energy, passion, and professionalism of the members attending.

And speaking of professionalism - exactly what does that mean in real estate?

What’s always confused me about real estate is the various acronyms and titles people have in the real estate industry and how that translates to some level of professionalism and expertise. We spent an evening with Brett Sawyer, from The Kentwood Company of Denver, Colorado and listened as he described the difference between a real estate agent and a Realtor. He talked about the rigorous requirements it takes to become a Realtor and contrasted that to the many real estate agents who simply “dabble” in the field. Brett also talked about the common thread of professionalism that connects the attendees at LRE and how, although their knowledge of how to market online may vary, their knowledge of real estate, their passion for their craft, and their professionalism is uniform.

We also spent time with Shari Chase of Chase International, Lake Tahoe, Nevada as well as some of her team: Kerry Donovan and Debbie Hansen listening to their thoughts on professionalism and how technology should free them up to do what they do best.

Kerry Donovan talked about the need to tailor their marketing to the “now” buyers and the “future” buyers. “Today’s buyers are high tech with laptops and i-phones. Our goal is connect with these customers. We’re looking for pros on the tech side to help us do that. We own the conversation here in Lake Tahoe. That’s what we do. We’ll pay someone who can help us link it all together so we can focus on the customer. We’re pretty ego-less. It’s all about putting buyers and sellers together.”

Debbie Hansen’s comments were of a similar vein, “Tahoe is an extremely affluent market with clients that expect a “high touch” relationship when it comes to real estate. My expertise is in working closely with my clients. I don’t have time to worry about technology but I understand that technology is key to our success.”

Part of being a professional is knowing what you do best as well as knowing areas where you can use some help. After leading the breakout session on Marketing with Video in a Web 2.0 World, we got a lot of feedback from LRE members about our technology marketing solution and how they felt it would “free them up” to focus on what they do best – working hands on with their clients.

And isn’t that what technology is supposed to do? These professionals knew it and that’s what made the Luxury Real Estate Conference an amazing event.

Mixpo Means Video For Business

Welcome to Mixpo! Over the past year we've been quietly building a video marketing solution designed exclusively for business. In the process, we've spent countless hours, weeks, and months working with dozens of businesses, particularly, in travel and real estate - listening, watching, and digging deep to understand how they market their businesses, the challenges they face, and how video can help them market better online.

What we found is that there is a lot of frustration out there. Many businesses feel marketing, today, especially online marketing, is confusing, takes way to much of time to figure out, and has no measurable benefit. They want to know what works and actually are willing to spend more if someone can prove it. What frustrates businesses the most is not knowing how to move forward. We think we’ve come up with the technology and expertise to help businesses not only move forward, but leap forward with video marketing, and we hope to prove it. We’ve shaped our entire video solution around solving businesses’ problem of how to stand out online and drive measurable results.

As we start offering our video marketing solution to businesses, working with a private group of clients, we will continue to learn. In fact, right now, we are up at the Luxury Real Estate Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia where we’ve been invited to lead a session on “Marketing with Video in a Web 2.0 World”. This event, brings together some of the most influential real estate professionals in the world and we’re hear to talk about the explosive use of video on the web.

Funny, we find ourselves doing more listening than talking here. But that’s our tact at Mixpo. Listening, working deeply with clients, and getting clients' results with our video marketing solution is what we do because we’re Serious about Business.