In The Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort’s primary talent is shouting. The overdressed conman goes from zero to hero (and back again) seemingly on the back of one grand hype-fest which, let’s be honest, is how most B2B marketing conmen attract your attention online. They might not do it ALL IN CAPS because their well-hewn tools are lies, damn lies, and hype. It’s tough to separate hype from genuine hope in a market jam packed with content marketing tools. Could a web video resurrect your comatose website, or is it the pen knife you’ll be taking to a gunfight?
Dropbox has generated its share of shouting. Once the web’s most epic fail, the service spun around on the axis of a homepage video, and generated the kind of statistics that declared, from great digital heights, that one minute’s worth of video can put any business on the gravy train of online success.
Eish! But I’m not Dropbox
Face it, though. Dropbox is a great service and it has always been a great service. We also live in a country where Gareth Cliff is the biggest brand, so things work a little differently here. Nonetheless, South African users upload 48 hours of YouTube video per minute, so let’s look at what website video has done for unsexy products that can’t stand out all by their lonesome selves:
Dollar Shave Club
Is there anything duller than a cheap razor? Apparently not. For the Dollar Shave Club, convincing guys to bin their sexy shavers in exchange for cheapies was as easy as creating a sexy website video. It went viral and 12 000 orders were made in the first two days afterwards.
Cisco
If you said ‘networking equipment’, plenty of Seffrikens would think you were swearing at them but Cisco turned a router video into an absurd romance, winning 30% more sales.
Pasta Baronia
It’s the sauce on the pasta that counts, but Pasta Baronia’s web video turned humble spaghetti into Michelin-Star-worthy cuisine that won an Honourable Mention in the Video in Web design Awards.
With all those web video goals being scored, even Benni McCarthy would be proud. And you know McCarthy’s name isn’t built from hype. Laduuuuma!
