Turn Old Video Assets into Profits
June 8, 2007
By Sharat Sharan

The president and CEO of ON24 Inc. and Insight24 explains how B2B marketers can leverage webcasts, corporate videos and product demos.

Everybody in the industry is talking about how to make money with online video. Most of the discussion has focused on monetizing user-generated content (UGC) videos.

No doubt, there is a huge market in UGC and consumer videos. But one cannot ignore the potential for business-to-business (B2B) marketing using online video.

Per a forecast by private equity and mezzanine capital fund management company, Veronis Suhler Stevenson (September 12, 2006), the B2B media spend is expected to reach $30.17 billion by year-end 2010 with interactive media spending an instrumental part of an integrated strategy for B2B marketers.

What doesn't work?
Business and technology professionals are viewing rich media content to help with day-to-day business and IT decisions. Posting corporate content on consumer video sites competes with millions of other videos and is ineffective for reaching this targeted audience.

Likewise, focusing only on advertising -- whether pre-rolls, interstitials or other formats -- overlooks the potential of webcasts, corporate videos and product demos.

In working with our customers, we've found that marketers are spending a lot of time, effort and money creating rich media content for their lead-generation efforts. But after the campaign ends and time progresses, marketers are replacing older webcasts, podcasts and online videos with newer content. They bury older content on corporate websites or servers, without realizing the full ROI potential from these assets.

What works?
Our perspective is that the true potential of B2B rich media content lies not in where you place advertising within the video, but rather in cohesively marrying the interests of both viewers and marketers. B2B professionals want information, while marketers want to reach them in the most cost-effective way possible.

So rather than taking a gunshot approach that focuses on how to sell "traditional" advertising for short-term return, we believe that extending the reach and ROI of existing assets is the first step in monetizing B2B rich media content. Here are our initial thoughts on how B2B marketers can fully monetize their marketing dollars:

Quality vs. quantity: After the amount of time and effort that goes into creating one webcast, marketers mistakenly want to market this webcast to every accessible list. This may result in a higher clickthrough rate, but the conversion rate for these "leads" may be questionable.

Conversely, targeting a very specific audience of 3,000 key individuals for your B2B rich media content will translate into better results and value. This captive audience will be more receptive to your message, filling your pipeline with qualified leads.

Extend the shelf life of content: Marketers have libraries of webcasts, podcasts, videos and other content collecting dust. From a marketer's perspective, the content is no longer relevant after a particular campaign has ended. However, we believe that these videos or webcasts have relevancy to audiences not previously exposed to the information during the initial campaign. By identifying channels to expose existing content to new audiences, marketers can extend the ROI of their existing content without incurring additional expenses.

Measurable ROI: Many companies want to create a "wow" factor with their rich media, posting podcasts or videos on every website without a clear method for measuring the ROI of the rich media content. A valuable assessment goes beyond how many people viewed or downloaded your content. Measurable ROI answers key questions such as: what is the average viewing time, what type of content is being viewed, how many times has the content been viewed, how many pieces of content has been viewed by a single person and more.

B2B videos, webcasts and podcasts differ from UGC in content and audience. B2B professionals seek information, intelligence and insight to help with day-to-day business decisions, willing to spend upwards of 45 minutes on relevant, timely content. Having a holistic picture gives marketers more insight on how to better leverage their rich media content. There are tremendous opportunities for marketers to monetize their B2B rich media content. Making sure that the marketing dollars are fully monetized is an opportunity that many overlook.

Sharat Sharan is president and CEO of ON24 Inc. and Insight24