As organizations look to harness the full potential of social and mobile channels and data in their customer engagement plans, one question dogs even the most well thought out strategy: will they notice?

Consumers have never been more distracted, with new social options, second screen apps, and networked devices.  For B-to-B organizations looking to reach buyers and influencers at the top of the funnel, the challenge is ever greater: how to cut through the competitive haze and reach buyers even before they indicate their intent to buy your product.

The Case for Video Content

Over the past two years working with The Pulse Network to create Social TV programming and other types of rich content, I’ve come to several conclusions.  First, rich media isn’t just for consumer brands anymore.  In fact, research by Trip Kucera at Aberdeen highlights the benefits of using video and virtual events to engage B-to-B buyers.  Second, video content is becoming essential to inbound marketing and an effective SEO strategy.  Why?  Consider these facts I compiled recently:

• Videos are 50x more likely to be on Google’s 1st page
• People stay on websites 5x longer with video
• Product videos make consumers 85% more likely to buy

What does this mean?

First, brands need to think like broadcasters. This means developing and delivering regular, multi-part features, exploring ‘talk-show’ type formats vs. traditional corporate video, and recruiting analysts or other industry personalities as co-hosts or commentators to tap their expertise and social graph.  Of course this is exactly what DCG has been doing via the CMS-Connected show produced on The Pulse.

Second, get to know YouTube.  The capabilities being added to YouTube for making online videos more interactive, promoting content and even hosting live events is impressive.  Yes, there’s a lot of noise, but if you think of YouTube as your launch pad for testing and reaching targeted audiences via Adword campaigns AND feeding your SEO, you will realize it’s quickly becoming an essential business tool as much as a consumer video channel.

Third, less is more.  Short-form video (less than 3 minutes), video blogs and rich media infographics like the example below are a great way to engage B-to-B buyers and executives.  On the consumer front, innovative brands are thinking mobile first, and making second screen apps their first priority.  Even better, video creation can be structured so one shoot produces multiple segments, which can each be post-produced into formats for YouTube, Facebook, podcasts, etc.

What You Can Do Today

Great customer engagement relies on creating the most compelling content, and delivering it on the right channel – at the right time.  Which is why the future of Web content management is rich, and the future of CRM is social.  And why both are coming together.  Organizations can get ahead of this curve if they:

1. Map out a plan to combine insights from social campaigns, Web analytics and transactional data to create rich buyer personas,
2. Identify internal content experts, connectors and producers for each persona,
3. Pick a CRM / CMS / marketing automation vendor with a clear mobile, social and rich media vision to deliver the right content to each audience,
4. Align your content creation with demand on emerging channels (informed by #1),
5. Identify syndication partners to grow your audience, explore new personas and create scale in content delivery, and
6. Explore small data tools and techniques to harness the power of big data in bite size pieces, and facilitate delivery of content, insights and answers on target channels.

Next time I’ll explore my perspectives on small and big data, and how there’s a growing movement to simplify the ‘last mile’ of business intelligence and analytics for both customers and those who service them.