Video is red-hot. Everyone is getting in on the action or wants to. At the same time, as with other media, everyone wants to stand out from the crowd and create content that delivers value to their target audience. Few marketers are taking full advantage of the potential that video offers for delivering creative and value-dense content to both existing users and raw prospects. Here are seven ways your team can get more value out of video.

Vlogging

Video blogs (vlogs) can take the place of text blogs. There is so much text content on the web that video blogs are the exception and they offer a number of advantages over traditional text blogs. In fact, they may actually be the best bang for your blogging buck. Your brand will have more personality with a vlog, and your blogger will make your brand seem more human by talking from an outline instead of hammering out a few thousand words of indexable verbiage. All it takes to demonstrate value is give it a try with a webcam and a one page outline to test the waters. If your site visitors like it, you can invest in better equipment later on. It’s worth a try.

Interviews

Give your site more presence and improve its search rankings by interviewing subject matter experts and thought leaders. Work out a format, and map out some questions in advance, and let it fly. Not only will it come off as casual and relaxed, but it will also be authoritative. Then link back to your video from social media sites using the cachet of your interviewee’s name.

Webinars

Most marketing is at least part educational. There also plenty of opportunities to serve up educational content to existing customers. Webinars are a perfect vehicle. Just record them while you are on the air, and then post them on your site for future reference. Webinars don’t require any special equipment. For example, Google+ offers Google Hangouts where multiple people can see and interact with each other simultaneously.

You can also vary the format of your webinars to make them more interesting to users. Think about panel discussions, product demonstrations, tips and techniques, and even roundtable discussions.

Event Documentation and Promotion

Video is the perfect way to give remote users a sense of what the event they missed was really like. Think about capturing snippets of your event in 15-sec. Instagram clips, all with a smart phone. Or just using a smartphone for “man-or-woman-on-the-street” type interview or opinion polling. If you want to go all out you can set up a laptop with a webcam and conduct interviews from the event. Any video footage you gather can be used to promote the event next year.

Tutorials

How-to and Do-it-yourself videos are great ways to build audiences. This type of content has a persistent demand and gets plenty of link backs from other sites. Anything that requires actions to be done in a sequence and which can benefit from insights provided by an instructor or subject matter expert is material for a tutorial video.

Check out this tutorial made on Wideo:

Product Reviews and Testimonials

We’ve already mentioned product demonstrations, but reviews are also a great way to use video. Video has more impact. A short video from one of your customers reviewing their experience with your product or delivering a testimonial for a service your provided will have exponentially more impact than a text-based review or testimonial.

You may even want to consider doing reviews of products you know your users are using and find helpful. Stay away from reviewing competitor’s product.

All the activities mentioned above are activities you should be doing anyway. This article simply suggests using the video equipment you already have on hand to enhance the value you are delivering to your customers. It’s just that simple. Keep your eyes open for opportunity and your smart phone handy.

Your customer will love it.

Guest Article written by Ivan Serrano.

Ivan Serrano is a social media and business journalist residing in the Bay Area of California.

@IvanSerrano55