One of the biggest mistakes I see dealers make with video marketing is the use of a “single purpose” video strategy. This strategy involves purchasing multiple different video types from multiple different video providers in order to have the right video content for various marketing touchpoints.
For example, a dealership will develop a video to promote a sales event that is used one time in an email and social media campaign. A month later, they’ll create another video to be used in a display advertising campaign that pushes a new make and model. A month later, they’ll create yet another video promoting a new manufacturer incentive.
These videos are specific to only one marketing campaign, giving them a single purpose and an expiration date. Unfortunately, this strategy is expensive and inefficient. Of course, this strategy benefits the marketing vendors you work with, but it’s really not necessary.
A better, more affordable strategy is the “multi-purpose” video marketing strategy. This involves creating a series of evergreen videos that can be used over and over again.
With this strategy, you can easily use technology to repurpose video content across multiple touchpoints and multiple marketing campaigns without an expiration date. This makes video content very affordable, especially when you consider the increased engagement and conversions that video content delivers from each of the various touch points and campaigns.
Examples of evergreen video content include:
• Sales value proposition; “why buy” from your dealership?
• Sales customer testimonials
• Make/model test-drive videos
• Service value proposition; promote quality repair work, trained technicians and how trustworthy your personnel is
• Service department customer testimonials
• Service department “how to” videos; emphasizing safety and importance of repair work
• Sales and service FAQ videos
Creating a series of evergreen videos doesn’t have to be expensive. We live in a video world. I bet that you have several people on your team with excellent video skills who can generate some creative content if given the opportunity. Start with your staff and their friends or family. Have a contest and offer a small prize.
If you can’t find any personnel to create videos, consider hiring a local video production company or one that specializes in the automotive industry.
Today, many of these evergreen videos can even be auto-generated, requiring virtually no time investment and very little cost.
Once you have a series of evergreen videos, you can leverage them for a long time across multiple channels. Post them on your website and your social media channels, and use them in email marketing and display advertising campaigns. Your salespeople can use them for lead follow up, and your service advisors can send specific repair or FAQ videos to customers.
The benefit of hosting evergreen videos on a smart video hosting platform is that you can use video data, CRM data, viewer data and even marketing data to automatically deliver the right video content to the right shopper at the right time in the buying cycle.
A smart video hosting platform can change or update the content of a video in real-time, based on each individual viewer’s viewing data, customer or lead data in the CRM or DMS, marketing and promotional data, the touch-points the videos are viewed on and even the viewer’s geo-location.
The more video content that you have on the smart video hosting platform, the more data you receive. The more data you receive, the more data you can utilize to provide the most relevant experience possible to the viewer. The better experience you provide to your viewers, the more likely it is that your video content will impact your sales.
In addition, you will get measurable results and have full visibility into each shopper’s path to purchase as they watch multiple videos across all of your online marketing channels. The fact is, video can give you greater insight and visibility into your customer’s path to purchase than any other media, bar none.
This feedback is far more valuable than a “single purpose” video campaign. All that kind of campaign tells you is how many views or website visitors you got.
More important, your prospects and customers will only see videos relevant to them. Every marketing expert knows that relevant content:
• Increases customer engagement rates
• Increases time spent on your website
• Boosts search engine rankings
• Improves important metrics like click-through-rates, conversions, appointments and sales
• Produces higher quality leads
It’s these two components of a video marketing strategy — data collection and data utilization — that produce results. Most dealers fall short in these areas, which is why they don’t see the results they were hoping for.
So, the next time a marketing vendor encourages you to create a “single purpose” video for a single-purpose campaign, realize there’s a better way. Create a series of evergreen videos to use in a multi-purpose video marketing strategy. You will save money, time and get better results.
Click here to view more solutions from Tim James and FlickFusion.
