Using video marketing is a strategy that many business owners and internet marketers use to promote their business and to reach out to people. Having a website only allows you to reach those people who first find your website. However, combining social networking and simple video marketing techniques can drive more visitors to your website.
Why Videos Are Popular
Online video publishing is commonly used for marketing, promotion, news and PR online, and is a key strategic component and a key business differentiator for marketers who want to effectively communicate about their product profile and benefits within the shortest possible of time.
With increasing access to broadband connection, online video streaming as a form of advertisement is becoming increasingly popular.
Internet video blogging sites like YouTube get millions of hits a day, so companies are beginning to consider every possible way to target these people to buy their products or avail of their services.
All you need to do is create a demonstration like the infomercials you see on TV, through which you can mention the merits of your products, systems or services.
Here are more reasons for using videos to promote your products / services.
Videos can be more Persuasive
You’ve probably seen TV shopping info ads. Even if you didn’t end up buying the product advertised on TV, you must admit that seeing a demonstration of the product’s performance can be very persuasive and can induce many shoppers to part with their money.
Similarly, Demo videos are also quite powerful; and the good news is that you can now market your company or products using internet videos, for cheap.
Attention Grabbing
Consumers nowadays suffer from information overload. So when it comes to text, users may just glance over some bits and pieces, and if your text fails to hold their interest, they are quick to say goodbye.
Internet video presentations are better because in a matter of a few minutes, your customers can learn about your products, in a more interesting and engaging manner.
They can see your product in action; they don’t have to imagine it, and that is why they’re more attention grabbing than text ads.
Scientifically also, it has been proven that the probability of people remembering any message is higher if the message was received through both sight and hearing.
Video Hosting is Becoming Affordable
Video streaming allows consumers to watch your videos without the need to download the material. Moreover, because of technological innovations and increasing competition, these video hosting solutions have become much cheaper than they used to be.
Anybody today can create a video, upload it to popular sites such as YouTube, and use the streams. In an instant, without paying anything, you now have video streaming and access to millions of users worldwide.
Here are some important reasons why you should consider using online videos (such as YouTube, Vimeo):
Cost effectiveness: One of the biggest advantages is the high return on investment. Video production is not that expensive and getting your videos to rank on the search engines is also comparatively easy.
Easy to Target a Group: Its easy to focus on a targeted group of potential customers.
Easy to Add Personal Touch: Easy to put a face behind the brand, increases the confidence of people in your goods or services, leads to more sales.
Built-in Analytics Tool: YouTube has its own a built-in Analytics tool that gives you a deep insight into the total number of views your video is receiving, and also information of the demographics of your audience.
Reach a wider audience: Very easy to reach a broad audience (For example: the Gangnam video). YouTube is huge today, has already overtaken Yahoo and Bing in terms of capturing eyeballs.
Making the Video
Here are few things to remember when making the videos:
- Create videos with high image and audio quality
- Keep the videos short and simple (easy to understand and also to upload)
- Stick to the main features
- For additional details, you may include text and graphic ads.
Keep it Short and to the Point
Simply putting up 10-min video tutorial on your website or just slamming some video contents up on your web pages will not help you sell more products or services. This way you are more likely to be disappointed.
Short videos, ideally around 2-3 minutes and that drives straight to the point, keep the visitors interest intact. So keep the video clips short & never lose focus, as the visitors have lots of choices on the website.
Use Attractive Visuals
The video clip should give a glimpse of your company, products or services, so chose the color scheme, background, motion graphic and font accordingly.
Good Soundtrack
There are several videos and advts that are remembered for their catchy jingles, or for their background score. So choose a good soundtrack, use narrators that stress on keywords to delivery your marketing message to your visitors.
Keep the Clips Web Friendly
We are referring to the size of the video files here, as you want the video to download or render fast. Its very easy for the visitors to lose interest of your visitors. Use a format that has a smaller file (Flash format is internet friendly).
File-size Matters with Videos
Small is beautiful when it comes to videos so that they can be uploaded fast as well as loads fast on any page.
Statistics show that average web users spend their time waiting for a page to load is about 7 seconds. Web pages that take longer than 7 seconds to load, their visitors normally are on the verge of clicking away and visit other website.
Hence, you need to make sure your video file is small enough, ideally less than 1 megabyte and load almost in real time to keep the interest your visitors.
File sizes can easily be of 10 megabytes for a short 2-3 minutes video; but that is huge for uploading; visitors may probably not click it because of the long loading time.
Hence, you must get a video format conversion tool to convert your video to a more internet friendly format such as SWF format. AVI is the most common video format.
Video Marketing Tips
Here are some ways to ensure your video marketing campaign provides the maximum benefits:
Propagate It
How else will people know about the video?
You need to upload and distribute your Video Clips on the Internet; submit to as many video sharing sites as possible.
Your Videos need to be seen by as many as possible. If you want your video to be your effective marketing tool, it must be able to see by as many web users as possible.
Hence, don’t just keep and tight your video inside your web site borders. Let your video content be free and distributed to the majors video sharing websites such as YouTube and Google video so that not only others can watch and talk about it, but they can easily download it, redistribute it, if not even publish it directly on their own sites. The more people watch your video clips, the more it gets popular.
Videos in your website and online blogs
Incorporate the videos in your website and online blogs, so that visitors find the content interesting.
Video Blogging
This is where you use popular video community (such as YouTube) and post you own interesting videos.
Video Email Marketing
You just need to provide a preview clip within the email or a link to the video; when clicked the user can see the complete video.
Remind the Users its a Short Video
You need to tell the viewers that the video is going to be short else they may not play it at all.
No one wants to sit through a 30 minute presentation on the history of your company; be focused on your products/services and deliver your messages preferable within 2 minutes.
Besides, if the web users do not know that it’s a video, they won’t click it and play it; hence your video isn’t going to get watched.
It is best to let the web users know that the “box” is a video on a website; the best way is to make it look like a video / VCR-like by having a play and stop button where the web users can click to play the video and stop it whenever they want to stop it.
Make more videos
One video won’t produce any major impact, but keep repeating the process over and over with new videos, including links to your site, and you should see an upsurge in traffic.
Use a Video Squeeze Page
A squeeze page is a type of landing page designed to capture the email addresses of visitors and potential customers. Its primary goal is to encourage visitors to provide their email address in exchange for something of value, such as a free ebook, newsletter subscription, or access to exclusive content.
You can make use videos on your squeeze pages. The advantages of video include:
- A video immediately draws your visitors’ attention, even before they start to read the text on your page.
- Its easier to understand concepts when someone is explaining something in a video or demonstrating it in a video tutorial.
Here are the various ways in which you can use videos on your squeeze pages:
- The video can be a welcome video, or have a demonstration of your product or service, or it can even be a testimonial from someone else.
- You may use several videos on the pages (welcome video, demo of the product/service, etc.)
- You can make your offer on the squeeze page within the video, and then offer a second informational video as a bonus.
- You may show the first part of an informative video and then invite your visitors to fill in their contact information to get the rest of the story (need compelling content for this to work).
As you can see, the possibilities with videos are endless. It’s better if you could have a person appear in the video, rather than just show the product, as it makes the viewer feel comfortable (easier to capture the contact details). A good animated video also works perfectly fine.
How to Create a Video Squeeze Page
Creating a video that can influence your audience to take some action, requires some thought and effort, and possibly a little bit of training.
The actual video creation itself involves:
- Conceiving the idea
- Shooting the video with professional equipment
- Editing the video to polish it further, and
- text that will enhance the video.
As with text squeeze pages, this video type of squeeze page will also have four main elements:
- A compelling headline (along with a pre-header and a sub-header if you wish),
- Bullet points explaining the benefits of what you are offering,
- testimonials (optional), and
- The opt-in form.
Other suggestions would be to:
- Keep your page simple and uncluttered,
- It should be very obvious what you want the visitor to do. Often squeeze pages will have arrows pointing to the opt-in form.
- Make the page search engine optimized, with the right keywords and keyword phrases.
Creating the Videos
You could hire a professional to create professional looking videos or you can try out squeeze page templates that offer video versions. In most cases, there is space provided for the video on the left, with the opt-in form on the right. Just embed the video, change and add the text as needed, and you are off to a good start with your new squeeze page.
It’s better to customize the Video Squeeze Page template though, to suit your requirements. You can learn to do this on your own, if you’ve the inclination and are willing to invest your time.
Viral Video Marketing for Flood of Traffic
Learning Viral Video Marketing can make your website a rage overnight and give you tons of traffic, besides increasing your revenue.
So don’t think of viral video marketing as simply a concept used by people who simply want their 15 minutes of fame.
But then business would go to any extent to get their “15 minutes of fame” on the World Wide Web?
Most websites don’t convert well because visitors are lazy. They get to your site and are faced with too many choices to make. Rather than make a decision and pick one, they get confused and hit the back button.
But when you add a video to your site telling them what to do it grabs their attention and greatly improves the odds of them actually following your instructions. And with video, lazy people don’t have to read as much. This is a critical piece of video marketing that you’ll need to understand.
Using YouTube for Marketing
There are several ways to create videos. You can create a live action video using your mobile phone or digital camera, or even a webcam.
Using a tool such as Camtastia or Camstudio you can capture the screen and demonstrate some software or a website. These are very effective videos because people can see what they are buying or what they need to do.
Promotional videos can also be created using Windows Movie Maker, which is installed on most Windows computers, or using online websites. These websites create some fantastic videos, which you can use for promotion.
To upload the video to YouTube, you need the following:
- Nice Title
- Description for the Video
- Tags
- Video file
- You also need to provide a suitable category for your video.
That’s it! You can now upload your video. In a few second, your video will be available for everybody to see.
Closing Thoughts
Online video advertising is cheaper (than print ads or TV ads), yet it works. You can launch an effective and competitive video advertisement, which levels the playing field for home-based e-business owners like you.
With video advertising, you will be able to reach different people, regardless of their age, sex, and race. YouTube alone has millions of viewers daily, and the good thing is that people are spending more time than ever before on such sites.
Effective Video Marketing is all about conveying the key traits and characteristics of your product/service within a very short amount of time in a unique, memorable way.
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