You have a website for your business and you are trying to decide what marketing techniques to use to help promote your website and your business. One approach is through the use of multimedia. Offering podcasts, videos and webcasts/webinars to your customers and potential customers is a technique that many businesses are using.
How Websites are using Multimedia
You can utilize multimedia in a few different ways. The first is to create your own videos and podcasts and have them available on your own website. The second approach is to create a presence for your business on one or more social media sites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook and offer your videos and podcasts there. You could also have your videos in both locations but that means a lot more maintenance then you may have time for.
Some good examples of using multimedia include the following:
- Customer Testimonials: For example, you have a landscaping company that wants to show potential customers your work. Have a video walking through a satisfied customer’s property with audio commentary on the work you did and an interview or comments from the customer talking about your services.
- Advertisements: Probably one of the biggest markets today is advertising via online videos. MySpace is trialing integrating targeted online advertising into their site.
- Product Demonstrations: What better a way to show how good your product is than to demonstrate it through a video? It’s one thing to talk about how a product works; it’s another thing to actually show how it works.
- Seminars: Create a podcast series that discusses a service offering you have. The intent is no to just sell your services, but to provide useful information on what the service can do. For example, if your service is copywriting, have a series of podcasts on how to write copy for different situations (print, web, etc).
- Webcasts/Webinars: Have a webcast that reviews a new product you have or a new approach to doing something. A garden center may have a series of webcasts on selecting plants and planting techniques. You can have a real time session where people can ask questions or you can pre-record your session and provide answers to commonly asked questions users pose on your website through comment forms.
These are just some examples of using multimedia to market your business. Your next decision is whether you will create these videos and audios yourself or if you will pay a marketing company to do them for you.
- Pay the Experts: If you have the money, you may be better off to pay someone to do it for you. Marketing companies specialize in creating multimedia products and you don’t have to worry about the quality or the time to work on them.
- Create your own videos and podcasts: So many people today are creating their own videos and audios themselves and posting them on social media sites and their own websites including small to medium sized businesses. If you can’t afford a marketing firm, try to invest in some good software for video editing and audio editing.
Take a look at your products and services and think about how you could utilize video and audio to promote them. Look around at competitors and see if they are doing something similar. Online multimedia is definitely a competitive advantage you should carefully consider for your marketing plan.
