Tradeshows are a classic marketing tool. After all, coming together and networking with professionals in your field is an important part of growing your company. In a 2015 report, B2B Content Marketing cites in-person events as the most effective B2B marketing tactic. Considering 52% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI, it only makes sense to combine the two to maximize the potential of your next trade show event.

Vision is the most sophisticated of the senses; 65% of the population are visual learners. This makes video a compelling tool at a trade show for grabbing the attention of potential buyers, business partners, and leads.

The trade show video should be a bit different. The trade show video is developed to stand out amongst the other participants and draw your prospects to your booth. It delivers a concise message that is quickly delivered while capturing the crowd’s curiosity.

A video at your booth could be a major draw. Whether it be a brief overview of your company and its services or a demonstration of your product, a visual aid can only help and strengthen the presentation of your booth amongst the competition. Packaging and handing out the video in a USB stick or SD card along with your white paper or other original content also works. Basically, you are using the video as a “reward.” This video and others similar to it can and should be used in your initial email invitations, post-event emails, and future nurture emails. Hosting the video on Wistia will help with lead generation, considering Wistia has built-in lead generation plug-ins on their video player.

Aside from the more informative videos that you can display, trade shows are fantastic opportunities to stage and film interviews and testimonials. Whether you are a bigger company and your top executives will be present or you are a start-up and your entire team will be there, it is always great for your visual content to include members of your team for more personalization.

Viewers will be left with an impression of what company you are and what they can expect if they decide to do business with you or use your products. A high quality, creative video will do wonders to your brand’s image. Trade shows are about passing information about your company to spread awareness of your brand. Video delivers that information in a fascinating, eye-catching, and concise medium. At a trade show a prominent video presence with a quick message can both intrigue and prime your target audience to discover more about your business. But like all great marketing tools, the effectiveness of video is determined by who is designing and using it.

This is where it comes handy to have a trusted video production partner to have handy so that you do not have to go around hiring and managing freelance videographers. Lightswitch has done video work for trade shows in the past and is more than happy to work with you to fulfil any video needs you may need for that upcoming networking event.

by Joe Valdez

There are tons of video platforms out there. Of course, the most popular one of all just so happens to also be the Internet’s second-largest search engine. However, I propose that YouTube is actually not the best video hosting platform for your marketing needs.

Rather, Wistia should be your go-to when it comes to hosting your video content.

Lead generation and conversion is one of the most common goals for video marketing campaigns. With your videos, you are trying to increase the amount of interested people in your target audience who may very well one day use your services. You want to convert these leads into customers.

Wistia does a terrific job helping businesses collect useful information from their potential leads. Wistia Turnstile is a tool developed by Wistia that asks viewers for their email on the video page (also their first and last name if you wish). It’s a clickable call-to-action that is easily inserted into every video. Wistia recently did research on video forms and found that 43% of videos with forms in the first 20% of their duration lead to a conversion, so it drives more traffic to your sales page or any other place you would like to direct your viewer.

Those emails aren't just lumped into one huge pile of addresses, either. Wistia gives you the option to integrate their email forms with your email marketing service of choice (Mailchimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, etc.). This means you can then target based on where the customer is in the buying cycle, which you can determine based on the video they entered their email address from! Someone who gave their information while watching a video guide you created probably is still in the beginning stages. However, a lead who entered their email on your company explainer video is probably further along.

But having the option to gather lead information doesn't do much if the videos themselves aren't doing very well, does it?

Luckily, Wistia has a plethora of analytical options for its users to evaluate their videos’ effectiveness. Trend information is easily accessible, from ones pertaining to your account to a single project to the media level.  Engagement graphs show how the audience as a whole has seen your video. Quite literally, these graphs show where in the video your audience engages (rewinds, pauses, fast forwards, etc.). Similarly, heat maps show a graphical representation of a single viewing session. This can give you a better understanding of how a certain viewer or demographic views their videos.

All this information can help you better optimize your future videos and guide you in making better ones in the future!

What’s a good video platform without functionality, though?

While YouTube is the juggernaut of the video platforms, it’s not without slack. YouTube has become a bit notorious for the increased ad presence on videos hosted by them. We recommend keeping your videos on YouTube for SEO purposes and reach, but using Wistia for direct hosting and sharing.

Wistia’s SuperEmbed Builder is another unique aspect of the service that separates itself from a functionality perspective. With it, you are able to alter the size, color, and add social sharing links, among other things. This comes in really handy when you want a custom style to match a certain page or the branding that your company is already intimately tied to.

If your business is foraying into video marketing (which it most definitely should), you should definitely give Wistia some consideration. Your sales numbers will thank you.

The year is 2016 and your business has probably, at the very least, thought about creating video content for some kind of purpose.

Testimonial videos humanize your brand while personally telling your potential clients the benefits of your services. Business profiles allow businesses to deliver the perfect pitch. Video content for marketing purposes greatly increases a website’s visibility on search engines such as Google and YouTube.

There is long form video, the sort that keeps a viewer on site and watching in the same way as a viewer might have previously watched television. This is valuable to those users, businesses, and advertisers. Those types of videos, however, are tough to share in the exponentially increasing immediacy age of social media. This need for immediacy has spawned a new demand for short form video.

We say we are living in the age of social media, but could we at some point transition to the age of online video?  According to Contently, users spent an average of an hour and 55 minutes watching online video as opposed to spending an hour and 44 minutes on social media. Video content has been enough of a booming trend for business marketing strategy to the point where we have to start questioning if it is really a trend or a new standard.

But wait...don’t these videos need to be created by someone?

Many companies do their own production in-house, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It is always great to have your production needs handled by someone that you personally know and already trust.

But many companies also outsource their production to video production partners like Lightswitch. In Lightswitch’s case, we utilize a network of over 5,000 videographers across the nation to serve the video production needs of clients all around the country, no matter what it is they need to be filmed.

It is very tough to find and staff a videographer that can take care of every task that comes with a large-scale business video shoot. Even then, it is difficult for one to put aside bias attached to the company they work for to pinpoint and tackle flaws in the finished product. Now think about how tough it is putting together a team of these guys to all gel together and compliment what each of them bring to the table while also making sure the video is the highest quality possible.

Perhaps you’re hiring a team for only one job? A team hired on for a project can also be a logistical headache. Managing the video campaign itself can be stressful, adding the additional stress of having to juggle around the schedules of hired videographers (who tend try to book as many jobs as they can) to try to fly them out for a potentially multi-day shoot is just an unwanted cherry on top.

Working with a professional video production company gives you more bang for your buck while expanding your professional network. You will be able to create exactly what you had in mind for the project while still being able to stay within your budget. Besides, buying video gear is often the poor route of choice since cameras and related equipment are constantly changing. Using Lightswitch as an example, we would be able to have the talent ready for you wherever the shoot may be, the equipment already in-hand, and the post-production team to handle the editing.

This sudden boom in the need for filming video has made the need for high quality video a hot commodity. The desire to be active in new content delivery methods by nearly everyone has led to more video content being published.

Having an established and trusted video production partner like Lightswitch will ensure your video content is of the highest quality while also alleviating logistical headaches and staying within your budget.