Video blogs – or vlogs – are the latest innovation on the Mila website at www.mila.co.uk . Launched earlier this year, they add another dimension to our site and are part of our strategy to make the online experience as interesting and valuable as possible for visitors.
The website is an essential sales and marketing tool for Mila and is entirely managed in house. It is continually updated with news about the business and new technical and product information. It also has a full catalogue of product specifications and free marketing support material which customers can access and download as they wish.
Like all the best websites, it is continually analysed so that we can see how many people are visiting the site, how long they stay and which pages they visit and this helps to inform how the site is developed.
The idea for the vlogs came from the fact that one of the most visited sections of the website currently is the blog from our managing director Richard Gyde. We realised that customers were interested in our views and in the human face of Mila so we took the decision to put some of our other personalities centre stage in a similar but more dynamic way to help drive even more web traffic to the site.
The vlogs are filmed and edited by the marketing team here and are quite deliberately designed to be snapshots rather than full scale technical productions. Our objective is to be able to produce them quickly and cost effectively so that they can be regularly updated; and it is a technique which could be easily replicated by any fabricator or installer with a video camera and some standard video editing software.
Our first vlogs were essentially technical videos from our Technical Manager Strafford Cooke showing how to install new products. These allowed Strafford to focus on particular features and benefits of the products and to give practical demonstrations of how to optimise each installation.
Since then, Strafford has expanded into talking about new standards and legislation and giving customers the kind of advice which they might receive at a seminar or technical briefing.
The response to these has been terrific – particularly from customers who simply don’t have time any longer to attend outside events but who still want to keep pace with the latest market developments.
In fact, Strafford’s vlog has been so successful, with more than 6,000 views so far, and the feedback from customers has been so positive that they prompted us to launch a further vlog this summer from Rachel Attwood, Mila’s Head of Sales.
Rachel’s vlog is a new way of presenting sales advice on topics such as how to win new business and how to diversify into new product areas. Presented in simple two minute chats to camera, they give friendly, bite size pieces of advice and ideas which we hope customers will find useful and which will stimulate response and interaction.
The benefit of course of putting the vlogs online is that customers can access them at a time convenient to them and can watch them again whenever they choose. However, customers need to be aware that they exist so promoting the vlogs has been a key part of their success.
For example, the first day that we advertised Rachel’s vlog in the online glazing press, it received over 1,000 hits. We have kept up that momentum with press releases and e-signatures and we have made sure that all our customer facing employees tell customers about them.
In terms of analysing how successful the vlogs have been – they have certainly increased website traffic which was our main objective – with real spikes on the days that they are posted, but they have also had other benefits of stimulating greater dialogue with our customers and showcasing some of the expertise which we have at Mila.
For customers looking to incorporate similar vlogs into their websites I would offer the following advice – make sure the vlogs are useful and relevant to your customers, keep each one fairly short, compress the video files before uploading, and promote them well.