Online Video Marketing

Did you know that the 2nd largest search engine is no longer Yahoo? That’s right, people are using YouTube to conduct searches more than Yahoo. That being said, do you have an online video marketing strategy?

Gone are the days where making commercials cost millions of dollars, not just in production costs but in air time as well. Welcome to the revolution of social media and web 2.0 technologies. You don’t need a high end camera anymore, you don’t need uber expensive software either. What you do need is a strategy and some congruent follow through. Without those, just throwing up a video will allow you to flounder or even fail.

Online video is now becoming more about strategic marketing than ever before. Without first thinking about “what’s in it for the audience” first, anything you set off to do will likely get a chilly reception, because you are thinking about it from your own perspective. As with anything these days, understanding that people really hate marketing being shoved down their throats, making your video piece be more about what the end user wants is more important now than ever.

While the subject of your video may be the most important thing, there are other aspects companies need to take into consideration when they look at an online video marketing strategy. Making sure your identity, your marketing measures and your branding are congruent with not just on your print media or on your website, but across all your marketing channels is imperative. What I’m talking about here is avatars, colors, skins and graphics. Companies pour thousands if not millions into these efforts, its their identity, its how people recognize them. A lot of times companies forget to carry this over into all the aspects of online marketing, especially video, and they miss out on big opportunities when they do. In the video below I talk to Greg Jarboe about this at SES London this year.

YouTube by all means is the giant in this space, but its got such a broad user base. Reaching that target market you are really trying to get to engage with your company or brand, can be a pretty tall task when you are dealing with millions of searchers a day. This is where knowing where your audience hangs out becomes vitally important because of all the niche video sharing site out there. Research into this area can really pay off. Sometimes if a video goes hot on one of these sites, it can have a ripple effect into other video sharing sites, even YouTube.

Big companies do not corner the market on this online video marketing world either. Small business with just a flip camera and some simple video editing software can create compelling and engaging videos that can be marketing boons for their businesses. Small business can that produce commercials that can cost less than $100 can hit very targeted markets can be extremely effective. Think about a weekly “specials” video for a restaurant, seeing the food being prepared and then served hot & fresh is more compelling than just a staged photo of a plate with food on it. Attach that to your local profiles and you give people more reason to come to your establishment!

So if you haven’t thought about online video marketing yet, perhaps you should take a second look. This is becoming one of the fastest growing marketing mediums out there, and if you don’t have a strategy to plan and track it right you could loose out!

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8 thoughts on “Online Video Marketing

  1. Li, you’re absolutely correct, and the early adopters will benefit most. Rather than spending thousands on PPC to a dull and static website, it makes more sense to invest in a short compelling film that not only makes a homepage into the shop window to one’s business it should be, it can also be placed on a host of video sharing sites that help to draw traffic and valuable inbound links.

    We’ve been producing corporate web videos since 2005, and have a very affordable web video package at £600, in order to bring the benefits of the format to a wider array of businesses and organisations that are looking to innovate in these uncertain economic times.

    http://www.spectrecom.co.uk

  2. I totally agree with the points you made.. video marketing is the latest trend nowadays in social media and many marketers are considering to do video marketing.. Search engine loves video content.. Thanks for sharing this insightful posts.. Looking forward to reading other great posts.

  3. The proper use of videos on the websites can help the publisher gets better attention online. Just make sure that the videos are of the right lenght.

  4. I agree with what Li says – “This is becoming one of the fastest growing marketing mediums out there, and if you don’t have a strategy to plan and track it right you could loose out!”

  5. You’re right video is totally on the rise. I know it’s nothing new, but it remains untapped compared to other forms of content. There’s a site called Adwido that’ll allow you to link a video back to your own business site. You can also target keywords, which’ll enhance your ability to be located in the major search engines. This is good for many reasons. You can get a free account at http://www.adwido.com I hope this helps you out.

  6. Now this article has come of age and the video marketing waves have settled, what do you think the relevance of YouTube is to online video marketing today? Online video sites have gone through the roof and YouTube has become vastly saturated. It’s power as a search engine has continued to grow there’s no question of that, but is it still ‘the’ place for online video marketing? Or are other video hosting sites more beneficial for online video productions?

    Great article nonetheless.

    AH
    Skeleton Productions

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