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!