How effective is Streaming Video on your web site?

After spending almost 10 years in the Automotive business, most of which in Business Development, I learned a few things about what to and NOT to do on the web. We struggled with posting or not posting price, picture positioning and fancy stuff like making the pictures look like a video by scanning across the photo, vin explosions, and how much information to post about the vehicles (we gotta leave some reason for the customers to come down don’t we?). And probably most of all, how to BE DIFFERENT than the guy down the street or across town. Of course, all this was in an effort to get more customers to come through our doors rather than the other guy’s doors.

Of course, I am thinking about Streaming VIDEO. But streaming video was pretty much garbage for years, and I wasn’t sure how far it had come, at this point. I was pleasantly surprised at the current quality!

After verifying that, indeed, video is ready for mainstream, I had to wonder what to put ON the video.  We need to feed the customer’s growing appetite for more, on the web. Coming up with more and valuable information is a constant challenge, and so is continuously changing and providing more, more, more!!

So I am having lunch with one of my clients who is also one of my great friends and I say to him, “what if we could do a personalized “walk around” a.k.a. vehicle presentation online for your customers so they could get a good feeling for the car and repo before they came down”? At first he didn’t think it was the best idea, but buy the end of lunch he was warning up to it and by the next day or two, he was IN. We ended up calling them Auto Tours and they have been a hit. They have drawn many hits both to his web site and also to YouTube.

Video Web Bios came next when I and another client were discussing a way to personalize their web site by having the owner or manager do an on camera walk through their company. We then filmed some B-roll to showing some images of what he was talking about and it turned out to be a nice and warm invitation to their company.

Descriptions of each service and a brief synopsis of the overall impact, I will have in part 2 of this blog.

Until then….