From Shirley Temple pulling Americans through the Great Depression to2001: A Space Odyssey inspiring The Information Age toStar Wars giving us our next generation of scientists, astronauts, and futuristic technologies, video has always had the power to motivate and inspire us, now only imagine what it can do for your business.

Implementing video as a tool to transform and accelerate your business always needs an ROI and some pretty convincing numbers in orderto influence your stakeholders that it is truly a strategy that needs to be invested in.  Video may seem on the surface like an expensive proposition and a nice to have, but is actually quite the opposite.

Video is on the rise and the number of videos that are created and consumed every day continues to grow.  Instead of providing you with a list of stats regarding this, I thought that providing you with an actual video that covers this topic was more in line with this article:

Watch how The Power of Online Video created by YouOn TV explains just how fast the video revolution is taking off:

Marketing Strategy

Let's first start off with looking at video in and by itself as a part of marketing strategy and the numbers that support its positive impact to the bottom line.

For starters, Jeff Platt from Animoto, shares some very powerful numbers in a recent survey of 1,014 adult US consumers conducted by the company.

• 96% of consumers find videos helpful when making purchase decisions online
• 58% of consumers consider companies that produce video content to be more trustworthy
• 71% of consumers say that videos leave a positive impression of a company
• 77% of consumers consider companies that create online video as more engaged with customers

Embedded Video in Email (EVE)

Another implementation for video as a marketing strategy is Embedded Video in Email also known as EVE.  In a recent study written by David Daniels, the CEO of the Relevancy Group, he covers many of the opportunities that have only recently developed with technology advancements that now allow for seamless integration of embedded video within email.

David writes that 204 million emails are sent every minute, compared to 6 million Facebook page views per minute and 1.3 million video views on YouTube per minute.  In the article, he also covers the findings of this survey that they had conducted around email usage in that:

"Mobile email adoption is now ubiquitous. In 2010, The Relevancy Group found in a survey of 1,000 consumers that forty-two percent were using smartphones to engage with email. Two years later, in 2012, Return Path found that mobile email usage had gone mainstream with eighty-eight percent of consumers using email on smartphones."

Benefits of Using Video In Email Marketing

• 55% percent increased click through rates
• 44% percent increased the duration of time that subscribers read the email
• 41% percent increased sharing and forwarding of the email message
• 24% percent increased conversion rate
• 20% increased the dollars generated from the email message  

In another research article written by David and sponsored by StreamSend titled: The ROI of Video in Email Marketing, he states that:

"marketers adding video had monthly revenues that were forty percent higher than those that were not using video in their email marketing."

Internal Communications:

So what about the benefits of internal business communications when using video?

In a white paper written by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), titled Video in the Cisco Enterprise: Calculating the Return on Investment it covers the different types of uses of video in the enterprise such as organizational communications and internal events but also leveraging TelePresence for customer engagements and events as well as using IP video surveillance solutions.

One of the topics that the white paper covers is the ROI of transforming Cisco's Global Sales Meeting to Global Sales eXperience (GSX):

Cisco's annual global sales meeting, GSX, which is the company's largest internal event. The last time the event was held in person, approximately 13,000 attendees flew to the U.S. meeting location. The event cost US$70 million, including an average of$4300 per attendee for travel, hotel, and food.

Now Cisco produces GSX as an online video event. Employees can log in from anywhere, using any device, to view sessions live or on demand. The ROI from moving GSX to a video event includes:

• Per-person costs dropped 90 percent, from$4300 to$430.
• More Cisco personnel can participate because attendance is no longer restricted by hotel availability or to participants' ability to travel. In 2012, 16,000 people attended, a 19 percent increase for a negligibly higher cost.
• Extending event sessions to people outside of the direct sales organization strengthens alignment within the different organizations and business units.

Watch how Cisco Systems has transformed their Global Sales Meeting:

How much can all this production cost?  My esteemed colleague, Bob Dennis, covers this in his blog: Video: What Will It Cost?

So now it's really no longer a question ofifyou should be using video, it's now a matter ofwheredo you start?  But for now, those topics and others will be covered in future blogs.