Recently,The Voice of IT in India ,Nasscom had a cover story emphasising a Six Point Agenda to sustain the business momentum during the seeminly testing times the industry is facing now.
Some of the Key action points are related to Creativity ,Collaboration and community building as cited is going to be highly essential equally for IT Services and Product companies to drive ,sustain and compete successfully in the present market scenario and in the days to come and indeed in these testing times they carry a great relevance from various Business aspects.
In my viewpoint, I believe that an unprecented proliferation of Visual communications through Online Video today,offers tremendous possibilities for the Indian IT/ITES firms to creatively communicate and engage successfully with their (prospective) customers,partners and employees. In the near future, the role of static text and web image banners for Promotions,PR,Branding and Marketing will take a back seat while dynamic and interactive videos will take the lead. Already the trend in some of the countries to leverage on online Video (especially in the United States) is reaping benefits in numerous ways.
Some of the Key Challenges of SMB IT /ITES & Product Companies in India
The Marketing Challenge :
Most of the Smaller to Midsize Indian IT/ITES companies face major challenges to promote and market their services and products in the Global market especially in the US and Europe.Typical issues revolve around not having a direct prescence in those countries,funding issues,lean and unproductive staff.The net result is that they are not able to reach out to the prospective customers and make the right impact.
In my own experience and observation,I have seen a number of Indian product and services companies spending days to fix a webex demo and then spending 30 minutes or an hour on webex to do a ladder presentation of the company and the product demo with half a dozen people. It may be worth the time,efforts and money. But a better marketing-productivity ,efficiency and returns could be possible if the same company did an intro and product demo VIDEO which could be discovered through major universal search (Yahoo,Google etc) and Video Search engines (Blinkx,Truveo,Pixsy etc) or through Video sharing sites such as YouTube,Omnisio ,Bestechvideos.com,Experts-Village ,5min.com etc
Check out Omnisio’s website and content – a pathbraking Video mashup company recently acquired by Google. How many Indian start up tech companies have a prescence there!? Even those who may be dealing with Multimedia technologies? Check out Demo.com’s start up or Tech company videos, What is the prescence of Indian IT /Tech companies? How may of ours have attempted to reach out to prospects or developers? You will find Nil or meagre prescence!
Check out the “Moment of Truth” Video clip by Vivek Ranadive on Tibco.com. Tibco is a well known and respected company. But how many of Indian IT company leaders have tried to reach to their prospects or stakeholders through such a online Visual communications (video) strategy and make an impact from their own company websites or blogs?
Check out the Video interviews and talks of CXOs or Tech Leaders which you can discover in CNET or Vimeo search? Again , How many of Indian IT firms are are reaching out in the market either with local or foreign content publishers ,making an impact? Online search metrics will suggest that there is a significant opportunity for our companies to adopt these strategies and reap the benefits! -:)
I remember instances a few years back when I used to work for a couple of mid size US based IT companies in its India centers that had difficulties in attracting talent.Almost in every Management review meeting, a set of people would voice their concerns about the company not having enough visibility and branding in India followed by hammering the head of HR or COO that the company does not have a single ‘ Hoarding’ in strategic locations in any of the cities where it is present! Today, Videos present across websites and search engines (strategic locations) can help create many such cyber hoardings across the Globe at a fraction of the cost of erecting one huge hoarding! But how many are taking steps?
The opportunity to Brand,Market, Sell , do PR and Make an impact globally is phenomenal given the possibility to visually communicate with a global reach through various online Video marketing strategies.
The Relationship Challenge
Global relaionships need to be established for realising global business ambitions of IT Companies.
But plenty of challenges abound going about creating and sustaining potential business relationships nationally and internationally with various stakeholder categories, if a company doesnot have enough funds,infrastructure,resources and prescence.
Online Video – A meaningful way to create awareness,relationships,branding,trust,response and engagements
Here are some of the online Video Strategies IT/ITES companies may adopt.
The cost of doing it could be significantly less than deploying traditional ,time consuming marketing techniques. This is not to suggest that traditional techniques doesnot work,But a Video marketing strategy aligned with standard practises can surprisingly improve a mumber or marketing and sales metrics.
1) Invest in Video content creation
Video based visual communications helps in creating a better relationships,trust and impact.
- Create Product demo videos (Topic based, How-to sort of)
- Direct the content to be highly relevant ,riveting and sticky
- Create company Profile/presentations/concepts in to Videos
- Include appropriate expert participation in the vido content.
2) Video SEO & Marketing – Enabling Global Discovery of your Video content
- Optimise the Video (encoding type,size,length,Topic,meta data,tags so on..)
- Distribute the Videos Globally to all search engines,appropriate video sharing sites,blogs
- Write articles along with the videos and and submit them to leading websites and blogs
- Include the videos in a dedicated part of your website or Blogs
- Drive significant traffic to your website
- Improve reach and time to market.
3) Brand building,PR & Communications
- Create short videos of your Senior management to be posted on your website , they may address your customers,partners or employees to fuel and grow better trust and engagement (eg.tibco video ref. above)
- Do Live webcasting of a launch or MR meeting to employees or global developers or prospects
- Do a live video streaming of presentation/promo event in SecondLife,Invite your prospects to
participate in such a second life event! (Virtual Seminars,Tech events, hiring through Live Video
prescence!)
- Do Video interviews with media agencies and distribte it across national ,global network
4) Video Advertising & Lead generation : Sticky engagements with the prospects
1) Interactive Video advertising /communication enables you to make a significant reach/ impact.
2) Enables you to do direct lead generation (check out a sample interactive Video Ad in our website)
- Drives response, Creates conversions
3) Helps in reaching across many prospects through Viral mechanism.
4) Generates traffic to your website,Improves engagement dynamics
5) Improves your branding
6 ) Ad performance Metrics will give you insights in to the traffic and lead /conversion metrics.
In Essence, Online Video can be strategically used for growing and optimising IT Business of companies with global ambitions. It can also come handy to engage and create a better relationship with internal stake holders (partners and employers). The investments made in this rapidly growing medium is bound to offer significant benefits to companies to perform and compete better.
In my next article, I will write about How IT/ITES companies may effectively use Online Video and collaboration to optimise some of its internal operations and costs.
http://www.globalvideoworks.com
