If you think your online videos have to be slick, hyper-professional productions to be effective as marketing tools to draw in traffic, you may want to take a closer look as I am here to tell you that may not entirely be the case.
Certainly, the main marketing videos of consultants or companies should be well done and represent the companies in a professional manner. But even a more casual, “amateurish” video can have a positive effect, depending on what you do with it.
How Online Videos Relate To Viral Marketing
You may have heard of “viral marketing,” where someone posts a marketing video or story that really gets noticed, and it quickly grabs someone’s attention.
It starts getting passed on and on and on, from one friend recommending it to another friend, who recommends it to another, and so on. Often these videos are actual commercials for a company or service, while others are promotional videos posted somewhere as part of a clear marketing campaign.
If the commercial or promotional video is very good and catches people’s attention in some way, it often goes viral and gets passed on to an extent far beyond anything the company originally expected.
Those are videos that are obviously promotional. But some companies have discovered that they can also use videos that make no obvious promotional push at all, which still lead people to the company website and induce them to become potential customers. A certain hysterical bride having a bad hair day ought to spring to most people’s minds as an example of this type of video.
In 2006, the MarketingExperiments.com website created several amateur videos about all sorts of topics not directly related to their business, and uploaded them on YouTube and Google Video, with a link to their website. These were “amateurish” videos, some of them funny and others talking about world events or personal ideas. And even though they didn’t push any product or make any sales pitch, the videos increased traffic to the MarketingExperiments.com website by a significant amount, and increased the number of subscribers to their newsletter as well.
The people conducting this experiment reasoned that if they had used a cost-per-click advertising method, each new subscriber would have cost them about twenty dollars, while acquiring these subscribers from clicks through the videos cost nothing extra.
Make Sure The Videos Contain Relevant Information
They key, of course, as always with any sort of online video marketing, is for the video itself to be well done. In the context of a more casual YouTube type video, this no longer has to mean slick and professional. But the video still has to grab viewers’ attention and keep it, for any sort of viral marketing plan to succeed. It also needs to be fairly short, because ten-minute videos don’t often get passed around in the same viral manner as bright, fast-paced, short ones.
Your video also needs to be seen on several of the different social media websites. So as well as uploading it to YouTube, you might try to place it on Vimeo, Daily Motion, set it up on MySpace and Facebook, on your blog, and so on. It needs not just to be good, funny, interesting, or somehow gripping, but it must be sharable. You might call this “Social Media Optimisation” to go along with the Search Engine Optimization used on searchable texts.
Make Sure You Publish On Different Video Sharing Sites
The videos that officially represent you or your company or service should of course be professional as well as interesting. But you can add to your online video marketing by using more “amateurish” videos as well. Not only do these show your more casual, human side, but they can also help to grab people’s attention and get your professional services noticed in new ways.
YouTube should be your first choice as it is still the most visited video site online and you want to have as many YouTube videos as you can to make this an effective exercise.
Discussion Time….
Do you think that video marketing is effective? Do you have the tools to create a video for your business. Every site we now build for clients has some sort of video presence, the results we have seen doing this far out way any other type of online marketing you can do.
One site that can get you started very fast with graphics and even PowerPoint templates for your videos is Presenter Media.
