Editor's note: Kevin George is an MBA student at Wayne State's School of Business in Detroit, MI and has taken ISM 7994: Digital Content Creation.

The use of the internet has exploded in the last decade.  To take advantage of this phenomena, organizations have shifted into using inbound techniques that focus on earning the visitors’ attention.  However, this shift resulted in an increasing demand for talented individuals with a varied skill set.  The demand is very high for individuals with inbound skills, according to a recent study.  Yet, employers are struggling to find well-rounded individuals with the technical and creative competencies needed to succeed in today’s marketing landscape.  It is crucial for you to start understanding, creating, and incorporating video concepts as part of your resume enhancement strategy. 

Did you know that 74% of all internet traffic in 2017 will be video?⁷

Here is my story! 

I began my career in Inbound (Internet) Marketing about 10 years ago.  Since, I have learned from the best in the game and I have learned some very valuable things that truly make me an expert in my field.  

I get many questions from my peers regarding “my secret”.  Well, to be honest, I do not have a “secret”.  My answer is much simpler than people think.  My answer is, “Do you actually KNOW your customer? – where they live, eat, work, sleep, EVERYTHING.”  

Without the proper data about your consumer, you can literally waste thousands of dollars and at the end wonder “Wow, what did I do wrong? Was this all a failure?” When in reality, you are probably doing (or saying) the wrong types of things to the wrong types of people at the wrong time.  

I am in the Education Business:

I am in the education industry, more specifically, real estate education.  One problem I had when starting out was generalizing my message to my customers.  One day, I had a 10% off coupon to give people who wanted to take a real estate class.  I thought, “I will just send it out to everyone, it will be fine.”  Well, after 250+ unsubscribes, 50+ spam complaints, and a throttled email, I was pretty confident I did something wrong.  What did I do?  I sent a “real estate related” message to builders, appraisers, home inspectors, and brokers.  I sent out the wrong message to the wrong type of people.  This was a very BAD CALL.   

Determined, I decided to send out another message.  But, this time, I sent it ONLY to my Real Estate people.  And low and behold: CONVERSIONS!  The biggest lesson I learned focusing on targeted CTA’s (calls to action), that’s when I realized how simple it was to find success in marketing. 

Use of Video:

Considering the huge amount of video content that I produce in my business, I needed a platform that could not only host my videos, but provide me with my favorite thing: DATA.  That’s when I found Wistia.  The image at the right shows the Trends for my projects according to views over time.  You can generate detailed insight into how the video was viewed at an aggregate level. 

Wistia is a great video hosting platform that provides an A-Z solution for Inbound Marketers like me.  Not only can it help you customize your videos, but it does something so magical that your jaw will drop: it provides heat maps.  Wondering what a heat map is? No worries, I did not know either.  Put simply: If you have a 10-minute video on “How to Build a Birdhouse” and you find 90% of people stop watching at “minute 3” when you start babbling on about your precious kitten, Whiskers, you will see that maybe you need to get back in front of the camera and keep it relevant to birdhouses.  So, a video heatmap is a graphical representation of a single viewing session of your video.  Each viewer of a Wistia-hosted video is assigned a heatmap, which shows the specific interaction they had with your video. Heatmaps contain viewer information, contextual information, and a color-coded timeline which represents how the viewer interacted with the video.  In the image below, the blue section of the graph shows the of viewers who clicked play on the video. The orange section on top shows the number of times that section was re-watched. 

These Audience Engagement Graphs show how the audience as a whole has viewed this video.  By looking at this image, you can see where individuals have rewound and when they have stop watching the video. 

The Play Rate metric helps you develop insights into the positioning of your video on your web pages.  The play rate is the number of people that played your video divided by the number of unique visitors that came to the web page containing the video.  Not only that, but Wistia can tell you where in the world people are watching your videos.  This could be really helpful if you’re marketing a product nationwide and you want to market in specific regions.  For me, most of my views are Michigan-based, and that’s where most of my marketing dollars go.  Overall, Wistia provides several features that are really fun to experiment with.  Once you know your customer, you can try some different split tests and see what gets your customer to bite. 

Just remember, at the end of the day, do not be lazy.  Take the time to segment your lists so you know exactly whom you are speaking to and how to position your message/offer.  Otherwise, you will waste time and valuable marketing dollars.  Inbound Marketing is a really fun industry; but, it takes a lot of patience, testing, and a willingness to learn.  

Items of Interest:

1. Did you know that using the word “Video” in an email subject line boost open rates by 19%?⁷
2. Sites that include video have, on average, an extra two minutes dwell time compared to sites which do not.⁸ 
3. The online video search ads are increased rapidly towards in the year 2015 and are estimated as 12.89 billion in the same year.⁶

Your Next Step:

Ok, it is now up to you.  You must decide to enhance your career.  Take the next step and learn about Inbound Marketing and how to compete for these exciting careers by enhancing your Inbound Information Technology skills.  

References:

1. The Inbound Marketing Economy: moz.com/blog/the-inbound-marketing-economy  
2. Why Real Estate should go Inbound: sparkreaction.com/blog/why-real-estate-marketing-should-go-inbound
3. Career Path to Video: wistia.com/blog/unconventional-path-to-video-career
4. 20 Video Marketing Statistics: blog.hubspot.com/marketing/video-marketing-statistics 
5. Integrate HubSpot and Wistia: wistia.com/doc/hubspot
6. 20 facts about Online Video Advertising Spending: reelnreel.com/20-facts-about-online-video-advertising-spending/ 
7. Video Marketing Statistics & Trends: syndacast.com/video-marketing-statistics-trends-2015/
8. 2015 Digital Marketing Predictions: merchantmarketinggroup.com/news/merchants-2015-digital-marketing-predictions/