An Introduction To Audio & Video Applications

By Bill Rudosky

Dear Reader:

Once thought of as entertaining novelties in site design, video and audio clips are proving themselves to be valuable additions to website content.

The typical application is as teasers to spark the interest of prospective customers. The best examples of websites that use this technology are retail sites. Borrowing from the idea of movie trailers or radio ads, these websites will design their pages so that a clip outlining product highlights is made available in hopes of persuading visitors to purchase the product they've just seen displayed.

So who can benefit from this idea?

♦ Sites selling movies or music can add clips of either product to give visitors a real sense of what they'll be buying.

♦ Websites selling published materials can add narrated passages or sample chapters of the material to the site.

♦ Retail sites can record a short video file of the product in action and add that to the site, so visitors can see it in use.

♦ Anyone wanting to give customer testimonials a more 'human' touch can record these and add them to the site.

These uses are probably the most common right now, but really the only limit to how you can use video or audio clips is your own imagination. Just remember that your main objective is to grab the customers' attention and spark their imaginations, then to make the product 'memorable' and associate it strongly with you.

This is the strength of marketing with audio and video...they immediately grab attention and have the potential to be remembered long after your text is forgotten. Make them entertaining and interesting, so they build on the initial interest your text created, and you have a winning combination! Also, when they're old enough to become too familiar, you can replace them with a new ones with less effort than rewriting your pages.

Don't forget about off-site uses like Podcasts. With this you're giving your customers another way to download your information, one that's becoming more popular all the time. We all seem to be busy these days, and a lot of people can benefit from being able to watch your clips or listen to your information as they're doing other things. Which of course means you can benefit as well.

With the use of video/audio clips, the consumer gets a clear picture of what your product or idea offers them. This is an added bonus - when a consumer knows what you and your product can do for them, they can begin to trust you. And a trusting customer is one who will keep coming back. As good as your advertising video is, it is still the quality of your product that matters in the end.

Resources that offer you this technology can easily be found online. Try to get a clear picture of what you want your clips to do, say or look like, and pick a provider/service who can make it happen the way you want it to.

To your success!

Bill Rudosky, YBM

P.S. To make your clips interesting enough to work for you, try to add some humor and social relevance into them. You also need to make your customers feel a need or craving for your product. This is especially true for products in competitive fields - people have to want YOUR version. A good video or audio message can help you do this.

I am the owner of Your Business Manuals (http://yourbusinessmanuals.com), which offers online business operators information and software to enhance their work-at-home success.