The sudden and increasing popularity of videos on the web has created a niche for online video marketing that will only accelerate further. A wide variety of content on the web is constantly competing for the attention of the users. The average internet user easily dismisses any content that is not immediately appealing and instantly usable. Your customer engagement model with key components like live chat and a help desk is already first rate. It is time to rev up the marketing arm of your business.
By employing the power of attractive visual images, riveting dialogue, upbeat music, and clear text, online videos are fast becoming one of the best ways of catching the attention of internet users. In addition to using online video as a potent educational, learning and training tool, you can use videos to drum up business, increase targeted traffic to your website and accelerate your conversion rates. Here is how:

The Phenomenal Popularity of Online Video

Sites like YouTube, Meta Cafe and Google Video have turned online videos into an over night success. The ability to view and share videos in a simple format has caught the attention of millions of internet users worldwide. Advertisers and website owners like you can exploit this unique opportunity by hosting your videos on popular video sharing websites. Since you have one chance to make an impact on your prospective customer, your video footage needs to be short and entertaining. The landing page hosting the video can have a link back to the product's site. Platforms like blogs, portals, and social network sites are also preferred for placing online advertisement videos. If your ad is located adjacent to or with in the video, it spares your potential customer from having to make another click to discover information about the product being advertised. Videos from these popular video sharing websites can either be streamed or downloaded depending on your preference.

Active Interaction between your Customers and you

Online videos offer vast possibilities for interacting with your targeted audience. Viewers can rate the video of a product; say a book binding equipment demonstration. Higher ratings would capture the interest of more users. Allowing viewers to comment on the video will hand over more control to the viewer, and produce ample feedback for the developer of the product.
Besides the textual interaction, your ad itself can be interactive in nature. The text and the "InVideo" ads appearing as a banner at the bottom of a video is one possibility. When the viewer clicks on the video ad, a new smaller window can pop up displaying the video clip about the product after which the viewer can go back to the main video. Virtual product placement with in a video is also emerging as a promising method of online advertising.

Progress in Technology

The era of low cost broadband, DSL and wireless internet connections has made online video marketing even more lucrative. Consequently, investment in quality content of online videos has increased rapidly. Web 2.0 based social networks like MySpace are fast becoming a favored platform for sharing and viewing of online videos. The ability to embed Flash video files onto a web page has made the viewing experience smoother and less intrusive.

Cost of Production and Placement

You can choose from a portal (Yahoo), a video-sharing website (YouTube), a social networking site (Face Book), and the product site itself. Submitting a video to social media sites is free. However, the video has to captivate the internet audience from the word go. Placing videos on your own site is a good way to jumpstart your video optimization campaign. You should not only upload your search engine optimized video to YouTube but also embed the video on your website. Google's algorithm ranks videos also on the basis of how often they have been viewed. Hence the higher the view count, the higher its rank in Google's results. Ask your chat operators to promote your videos while they chat with customers and prospects. This can be done by using a short and informative canned message which can be pushed just before your chat operator says "Good bye."
Depending on your budget, you can produce a decent professional looking video for less than $500. The video can then be edited with an industry standard tool such as Adobe Premier Pro CS4, and uploaded to one of the sites mentioned above.
According to a survey published by eMarketer, online video advertising will grow about 44.9 % in 2009. Spreading the brand message through online videos is a strongly emerging marketing strategy which you should consider pursuing as an adjunct to your customer engagement plan.

Ten Quick Steps to Optimize your Website with Online Video

Here are a few points to ponder when considering video optimization:

1. Procure the right footage for your website
2. Tag the video so that it shows up accurately in search engine results
3. Use relevant keywords in the video's URL and the associated landing page
4. Test the video's performance in most major Internet browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Crome
5. Upload to your own web server and embed it on your web pages while simultaneously uploading to YouTube for best results
6. Set up a search engine optimized landing page which clearly displays a link to your online video
7. Provide links to your home page, product page and contact page from the landing page to facilitate easy site navigation
8. Embed a link on the landing page for analytics to help you track visitor traffic
9. Use keyword rich captions because captions too constitute searchable and indexable data
10. Visit your competitors' websites and examine how they are using video optimization to generate targeted traffic and new business

Most major search engines especially Google have begun to shift to blended results in their search engine results pages and featured videos prominently in addition to text pages. As an experiment, pick a few of the top searched keywords on Google and run your own test on Google US. You will be amazed at the number of videos being displayed in the search results.

Follow the steps outlined in this blue print and watch your success ratio embark on an upward spiral.