Why Video Works in Industrial Marketing : Neuro-Linguistic Programming

EDITORS NOTE: There have been many questions related to the legitimacy of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. For a more complete ongoing discussion please check out the responses on Quora: Is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) scientifically proven? If yes then how? And if no then why are some people getting powerful results and some psychologists giving it the green signal?

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Why is television such a great medium compared to radio? It has to do with something called Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

According to Neuro-Linguistic Programming Model people learn in different ways. This is often called the VAK Model (visual / auditory / kinesthetic). According to this model the general population learns according to the following percentages:

• Visual – 75%
• Auditory – 6%
• Kinesthetic – 19%

It would then follow that since 81% of people learn via visual and auditory ques, as the theory goes, video is the best method of communicating a message.

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Why YouTube is Awesome!
Until the advent of YouTube, where you are creating your own video channels, there was no way to utilize this in marketing for the manufacturing sector.
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This social media platform is probably the BEST one that we have found for communicating with our customers about new products AND for our salesforce to learn more about the product. Here’s why:

1. Statistically, knowledge retention from a sales meeting is about 20% at the termination of the meeting. Without “refreshment” and “review” this tracks down to a 5% after 14 days. (That’s why it’s important to have simple bullet point sell sheets, but that’s a topic for another time)
2. The more the salespeople show the video, the more they learn about the product. Kind of like my old college friend who saw Monty Python’s the Holy Grail so many times that now, 20+ years later, he can still recite the lines verbatim.
3. At the distributor level, creating a YouTube channel and “favoriting” your vendor’s video’s allows the salesperson to cross-sell other products because of the “wow, what’s this?” factor
4. SEO! Again, you are cross-linking by “subscribing” or “friending” others. Hence you are creating broad cross-links which raises YOUR profile in searching.

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Do’s and Don’ts for YouTube:

• DO look at several other channels within our industry before creating your own channel if you have not created one before. Yes, my 11 year old created his own channel for his stop motion videos he makes but you want to observe what others are doing, what you like, and what you don’t like.
• DO add every video of every product that you still make and stock. Even if the video is 12 years old, load it. Our industry is disconnected enough that someone may be seeing it for the first time.
• DO add different versions of the same video. You may have an old video and you’ve since redone it with some other language but you deleted some sections that you know longer felt where important.
• DO add a link and and Icon to your company website.
• DO create “tags” for your videos. Remember the meta-tagging section up top?
• DON’T let your marketing person make it part of his or her own personal youtube page: it shouldn’t contain a picture of the family dog in the profile.
• DON’T assume that “we already have that video embedded in our own website so we shouldn’t load it on YouTube”. YouTube let’s you enlarge to a full screen, provides embed code (so people can add it to their blogs, etc) and it’s ON the NETWORK.