LAS VEGAS -

How popular, and ultimately impactful, is video in advertising and marketing?

Consider some of the motion-based displays at exhibit hall booths at this year’s NADA Convention & Expo in Las Vegas. Or the host city itself, where brightly lit motion-based advertising sparkles in the desert skyline.

Flick Fusion’s Gina Reuscher gave the example of the NADA booths during an on-site interview with Auto Remarketing and actually spotted a similar display mid-sentence.

Point is, that type of advertising grabs your attention.

Same goes for consumers and their use of video in the car-shopping process.

“If you’re serving somebody up something with movement, and it’s showing the walk-around or it’s showing the F-150 that has the voiceover … that’s pretty compelling, especially when you’re on Car Dealer A’s lot and Car Dealer B right down the street is showing you this,” said Reuscher, who is director of marketing at Flick Fusion, a company that provides full-solution video hosting, marketing and distribution platform to the auto business and other industries.

In Reuscher’s conversations at the convention, mostly with website companies along with some CRM providers, one of the themes she said came up was this: video can be a key component in each steps of the car-shopping process.

As such, it’s valuable for dealers to have a library of videos they can utilize, Reuscher said.

“We recommend that they start out with a library of 12, and that’s to kind of capture at least something automatically without a lot of effort from the dealership,” she said. “When (dealers) think video, they’re just thinking YouTube video or video on their website. They’re not thinking about the rest of the sales funnel.”

But perhaps they should, given some of the trends spotted by Flick Fusion, which were shared with Auto Remarketing in a follow-up email after the convention.

Vehicle review and test-drive videos may dominate the early stages of the shopping funnel, but thinking beyond those stages can be beneficial for the dealer.

For instance, Flick Fusion gives the example of the salespeople sending personalized video in a lead follow-up email to, essentially, say hello to the customer and give a bit more info about the dealership.

A good word for this, Reuscher said, is “humanizing.”

The company also notes that putting the word “video” in the subject line of an email can increase the open rate by 20 percent.

But the use of video is more than just grabbing attention.  It can be utilized in grabbing important information that can be used in follow-up.

Provided that the shopper’s information is already in the store’s CRM and the Flick Fusion platform is integrated into that particular CRM, the company said in the email, Flick Fusion can pinpoint which shoppers are viewing which videos. Additionally, Flick Fusion can decipher the timing and frequency of the viewing.