With marketing dollars potentially growing tighter next year, it’s important to make every dollar count, and real return for online content and marketing efforts is a must. We continue to see Google loving sites with video, and further optimization strategies we are using in conjunction with video are making real differences for our clients.

We just recently heard from one such client who told us he landed a new customer with a projected business transactional worth in the mid-six figures next year. The reason his client told him he got their business? “Your persistence in contacting us, and your amazing web site and video.”

Since these were marketing services we had provided, we were thrilled to hear the results in such quantifiable terms! But were we surprised to hear it? Not in the slightest.

Our web video and design services provide real returns to clients. If you have fewer dollars to spend on marketing right now, shouldn’t you be thinking about how online video can act as an inexpensive, tax free employee, working for you 24/7, 365?

How does video help with SERPs when Google can’t digest the content? Here’s one answer. We know that Google is getting better at understanding how much time someone spends on a page. Bounce rates factor into Google’s value assessment of page relevance. So video can help keep a person on a site for longer, which in turn communicates a higher value message to Google, thus increasing SERPs for page content. We have been testing this strategy, and we are seeing it work.

From PubCon this week, there have been some interesting speculations about the future ranking of sites that do not contain any video. Bruce Clay predicts the rapid shift toward heavily favoring sites that employ video and other Engagement Object Level tools during the first quarter of 2009. All the more reason, during challenging economic times, to make sure you aren’t finding your site becoming irrelevant to Googlebot.

Turn on the tv, and you will see no end of fancy spinning logos, scene transitions and lower thirds titles. You probably don’t notice them much they’re so common, but imagine a newscast without them, or an infomercial with nothing but a stationary camera, and you’ll soon see that modern visual production can’ t happen without motion graphics, and a lot of them.

When the job of video is to create effective branding, motion graphics use comes fully into its own. Tying together the corporate message and the brand conceptuals in a coherent and meaningful way is what motion graphics artists thrive on.

The advances in the software tools used to produce animated artwork and imagery has brought the cost of motion graphics work down to the point of being affordable for even the smallest businesses.

If you are considering using video as part of your brand messaging, whether online or in broadcast or DVD, plan on motion graphics design to factor heavily in the final professional product.

Recently Google refined its algorithm (that mystical unknowable divine fate by which we all live and die) and I was pleased to learn that our SEO and content strategy efforts on behalf of our clients and even our own site have yielded positive results in page rank, organic search results and traffic. We are proving that a video strategy, when combined with other best practices, really can propel a site to higher places.

To that end, we are making a shift in our basic assumptions of web site design, and will be focusing much more on making SEO decisions from the beginning, partnering for much of this work with Taylor Hill, a consultant with a good and growing track record for helping new and existing sites fare better under the omnipotent rule of Google.

We just wrapped a large video project for the World Bank, and in it one of the people being interviewed made a comment I have been quoting to clients for two weeks: “No one changes their behavior when confronted with naked facts and figures. If we expect people to see things our way, we have to tell stories. It is the narrative that motivates change.”

Every company, no matter how large or small, has a story worth telling. A story that, if told well, can cause customers, clients and prospects to react in a desired way. I have thought about how video interviews and productions can help to accomplish certain conversion goals, such as overcoming purchase resistance, managing fears (medical, etc.) and helping to introduce people to concepts and ways of thinking that funnel them deeper into the sales process.

Even if it’s just about helping prospects get to know your company better before making first contact, video is a powerful storytelling tool. See below for two examples of how video is being used by one of our clients in San Antonio:

(Patient Testimonial for Integra Clinical Research)

(Hiring Video for the medical group including Integra Clinical Research)

Those of you who took high school economics will no doubt recall the way in which a product market works: we start with design, then production and manufacturing, then distribution, advertising and finally purchase and consumption (I invite any high school economics teachers to correct my over-simplified explanation of complicated market dynamics in the comments below).

As a company involved in mostly early stage market activites – media design and content creation, audio and video production – we rely on other companies in our market to supply us with manufacturing and distribution, and ultimately we need consumers to complete our existence.

These days, audio and video distribution is easily accomplished via the web. But in a crowded marketplace with more choices than ever before, consumers rely on search to bring them what they want, when they want it.

For this reason, it makes a lot of sense for Google to offer a media server gadget, essentially bridging the gap between the TV set and the vast content offered on the net.

Sure there are other media player/content services out there that promise to deliver web content to the home theater, but none have the power of Google’s search to find virtually any audio, video or photo file on the web. And while Google is notoriously boring in the GUI department, no one can argue their superiority in their stock and trade. Combine that with the content from Google’s subsidiary YouTube, and this is clearly the future.

For now, it’s a Windows-only gadget, and judging from the comment thread, it is not without some beta-stage issues. Still, who can blame Google for testing the waters and extending the usefulness of its search to the TV?

(Self-Promotional Addendum: I think this gadget would be made all the more amazing if the content it displayed became participatory through the CrowdAbout Social Media Player technology!)

Harkins Creative took on the challenge of using viral video posted on YouTube to stir interest in a web project we were involved with. It was like research into what makes web video work, and with 100,000 views as of Sunday morning, I think we are proving the point and the concept petty well!

This was a fun little project, and the intent was to simply make an entertaining video with a “hook” (pardon the pun, watch the video and you’ll understand) that would get people to visit a site. We did very little promotion, other than posting it on YouTube, but we thought very strategically about what might work there.