Video marketing is the future of marketing. In the past, marketing was about getting your name out there. Now, it’s about creating an effective brand, compelling storytelling and measuring the success of that story. It’s no longer enough to create a brand and expect it to sell. Effective marketing requires both long-term thinking and short-term quick wins, which is why effective storytelling will be even more pivotal to a company’s success than ever before. Video marketing will become crucial to the…

It’s being called native advertising, brand journalism, branded content, sponsored content, content marketing and custom content, often interchangeably. So, what exactly is it? Native advertising is when an advertiser’s message is integrated – often seamlessly – into the rest of a platform’s content. The approach is designed to provide audiences with relevant content, rather than simply another ad. It’s part of the shift away from interruption marketing; its goal being instead to deliver value via education or entertainment, or a…

My last column on brand journalism sparked some great discussion and more questions from my network on exactly how businesses can implement a brand journalism strategy. Just to recap: Brand journalism is a useful way for brands, big and small, to use the approach of professional journalists to create, curate and share expert content in the form of blogs, articles and video. Businesses are essentially becoming their own media houses too, whether hiring internally or contracting out to people with…

My career as a journalist spanned nearly a decade. When I left to launch a web-video startup, BizBOXTV, I quickly discovered storytelling was part of my DNA, evident in the process and style of my new media company and how it approached its first productions. It wasn’t about story-boarding or scripting, it was about asking questions, getting answers, and weaving content together to produce an interesting and useful story. The benefits of combining the approaches of traditional journalism and brand…

Content Marketing: Why Online Video Is Vital If you feel online video is just another over hyped, passing fad, think again. In fact, online video is gaining strength as a source for content marketing, as highlighted by the recent B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey for 2012. The take-away? Most respondents prefer video over white papers, case studies, even live demos with reps. And you should factor that into your 2013 content marketing strategy. By the way, this survey was compiled…