Video Marketing – What You Do Not Need for Success
Video marketing can bring tons of traffic to your website, leading to the potential for increased sales and profits. It is a great tool for people who want to really create a buzz on social networking, video sharing sites and across the web. You need to put in a bit of time and effort, and a certain amount of creativity. However, there are a few things you do not need to be a video marketing success.
1. Fancy Video Equipment You will definitely need something to take video with, but you do not need top-of-the-line professional video equipment to create a superb marketing video. If you have a nice camcorder, then by all means, use it. On the other hand, some very fascinating and popular video has been recorded with nothing but the equipment included in a camera phone.
2. Expensive Editing Equipment While it is true that there are people who use expensive equipment to edit their videos, there are as many or more people who do not. Between the software you probably already have on your computer and some free software you can download from the Internet, you can put your marketing video together just the way you would like it. 3. A Professional Director Large companies which make marketing videos may hire video directors. If you have a great idea and people to participate in your video who understand you concept, you should be able to manage without an expert director. You can express your ideas and instruct the people who will be shown in the video to follow your prompts. For a short video, you can do the directing yourself. 4. Expert Knowledge of Technology You do not have to be technologically gifted to get a video made and uploaded to a video sharing website. Inexpensive video equipment is easy to use. Once you move the raw video to your computer, you can use simple programs to edit it and make it ready for viewing. Next, you go to a video sharing website and upload it following the instructions on the site. The video sharing sites give such straightforward and simple instructions that even children upload videos with ease. 5. A Large Budget You probably have everything, or nearly everything you need to make and distribute your marketing video already. What you do not have, you can usually get for free. You can get into the business of creating amazing videos with just what you have on hand in many cases. There are so many things that you do not need to make fine videos; it would be a shame not to jump into this special type of Internet marketing. As long as you have an imagination and a desire to succeed, you should do fine.
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Online Video Distribution Help – How to Spread Your Video across the Internet
You have just produced a video you hope will go viral and you upload it to YouTube. You figure your work is done and you can sit back and wait for the customers to come to you. That is possible to a certain extent, but you can have an even greater effect on the Internet scene with your video by making sure it is distributed to a variety of video sharing websites.
You can upload your video to a large number of video sharing sites yourself, manually. It does take a lot of time, and since time is money in the business world, you might not want to spend your time this way very often. You will first need a list of the video sharing sites. This type of list is available on the Internet, in most cases with their websites included. Go to each website and enter your information into the forms. Then, upload your video. After that, all you have to do is repeat, repeat and repeat until you have completed your list. It sounds time consuming and boring, right?
However, there is a better way of doing this. There are businesses devoted to video distribution of your material with little input from you. Look for video syndication sites which supply many of its services for free. They allow you to fill in the different types of fields that will be used on video sharing contribution forms. Then, they automatically send your video out to all the video and social networking websites you have chosen.
Other sites concentrate on matching relevant videos with clients who need content. This can spread your video to sites that are within your niche. They choose your audience more carefully, and get your message across to many people who would likely be interested in your products.
Be aware that many of these video syndication and distribution sites are paid sites. You will have to come up with a place in your budget if you want to use them. However, even if you stick to the free sites, you can accomplish much in a short time with excellent distribution of your video.
It is true that a video can go viral on just one video sharing site. It is also true that your presence across a broader section of Internet users will get you even more viewers. With links to your website, you will get more visitors there, and potentially a larger number of new customers. Next time you produce a video to market your products and your company, think big. Work hard or get help to send it out to as many sites as possible.
Short Reports Gone Viral – Give Away Info for Your Marketing Campaign
Everyone thinks of video going viral, but just about any kind of content can do the same if it is compelling enough. Short reports have the potential to reach a large number of readers if you handle them correctly. Here are a few things you need to know.
1. A short report is a 7-10 page report you write that can be on any topic you choose. As long as it is informative and specific, it will usually fill the bill.
2. Write what you know the most about that is related to your industry. This is just another way to establish yourself as an expert.
3. Give your report a great teaser in the Introduction to get people curious enough to read more. Then, follow through with fascinating information and insights that they can get nowhere else.
4. Put the link to the report on your website and request people give their email information in return for the report, especially if you give it away free.
5. You can sell a short or special report, but it is often advantageous to give one away. As an Internet marketing device, its primary goal is not to earn direct money.
6. You should put your contact information on each page of the report. Put it in as a clickable link, in case the reader views it on her computer rather than printing it out to read.
7. Do not be stingy. Allow, and in fact encourage your readers to pass along your report in any way they would choose, as long as they include all your contact information.
8. Mention your report on your Facebook Page as an offer for your Fans. This is another way to encourage sharing.
9. Publicize your report through the regular Internet marketing channels. That means writing SEO articles about it for directories, blogging about it and even putting out a press release about the offer.
10. Be available to answer questions that you have not covered in the short report. When you do, begin establishing relationships with readers to gently convert them into customers.
All that being said; a short report may not have the viral potential of a video in most cases. Yet, you can encourage sharing and see it spread fairly quickly. If you have supplied uncommon details and information that is extremely helpful to your target demographic, your video can reach a large audience.
Get More Out of Customer Satisfaction with Video Testimonials
You work hard to satisfy your customers. You make or find an excellent product to sell. You launch a brilliant Internet marketing campaign to bring in customers to buy your product. Orders are taken and products are delivered. Customer service acts quickly to avert any problems. If everything goes well, you have gained loyal advocates for your business. Why not let them spread the word on your website through video testimonials?
When you put written testimonials on your website, there is little to distinguish real ones from fake ones. Adding a name and address helps, but these could be faked as well. Customers see right through it, and they suspect it many times even when you have legitimate testimonials. Use short videos to let your satisfied customers tell their stories directly, and your website visitors will believe what they see.
Many customers who are truly happy with the goods and services they have received will be happy to make a video for you. If yours is a bricks and mortar store, you might be able to take the video yourself, at your place of business. Imagine taking a video of a happy and satisfied couple at your new restaurant in town. You not only get a chance to let the customers rave about their great dining experience, but you also get to show off your restaurant.
The best time to get customer testimonials from people at your bricks and mortar store is when they first realize what a great product or service you have. If that happens at home, you might have to settle for the first time they come into your store afterwards. Let them know you would like to share their story with others if they are willing.
Capture your customers’ interest and excitement. You have made them happy in some way, or they would not have expressed their satisfaction to you. There is no need to be aggressive or overanxious, but you can certainly ask questions about their experience. You can encourage them to explain things more fully by praising them gently.
If you have an online store, the process is also simple. You can just request that the customers make their own video testimonials. People can make the video in the privacy on their own homes, at their leisure, with or without other people in the room as they choose. Sometimes, these are the best and most natural tributes to your products you can get.
It is terrific to find people who like your product so much that they agree to let you make a video of them discussing its benefits. These customers not only add believability to your website, but they also make unofficial brand ambassadors for you out in the world. If they are on the social media websites, they can be a force for your company there too. Make the most of the loyalty you have earned by sharing it with website visitors through video.
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Tie Your Marketing Video to Nostalgia to Go Viral With Baby Boomers
The Baby Boomers represent a very large segment of the market for many products and services. If you want to reach them with viral video marketing, you need to find subjects that speak to that generation. Here are a few facts to consider when you try making your video go viral with this crowd.
1. Baby Boomers remember certain products from their childhoods that are now obsolete or gone.
If you get a chance to show Baby Boomers a product from their past, they will enjoy looking at it. They will share the experience with others whom they know remember the same thing. This works best if the item is one that is rare or unusual now, but was common back in the day.
A great way to find out about these little items is to have a chat with a Baby Boomer and let her reminisce about the past. If you are a Baby Boomer, think back about your daily life and look at old pictures. You are bound to find old products that you had forgotten existed. Your video will be even more popular if you can show these products in action.
2. Social, cultural and political attitudes have been in a state of change throughout the lives of the Baby Boomers.
If you can aim your camera at the remaining evidence of a cultural revolution or a social shift in attitude in the past decades, you can capture the hearts and minds of the Baby Boomer generation. This group of people wants to be seen as intelligent, sensitive and caring people, and they want to see signs that their efforts to reform the world made a difference. Looking at signs of past successes reminds them that they can have a great affect on the world. It stirs them up and makes them want to share. Your marketing video will go viral in no time.
3. Baby Boomers like to see styles of dress and appearance that they had all but forgotten.
You can touch this group with images of people dressed and made up in the same ways that they saw them in past years. To get accurate portrayals, look at old photos or home movies. Make a compilation video, incorporating your own marketing message. You could also use the details of the images to make up period-accurate dress and style for a nostalgic-looking video you make yourself.
The Baby Boomer generation is a group with money to spend. They are particularly prone to purchasing health products and services, retirement homes and leisure products. What is more, they are a great market for general products such as cars, clothes and furnishings. Target them for your viral video by using nostalgia to wonderfully engage them with your company.
Free Stock Photo: FreePhotos.com
How-To Videos: How To and Why To Teach on YouTube
You have heard by now that informative, educational and entertaining content is your friend in many Internet marketing ventures. You may already be writing articles, interacting as an expert on Facebook and Twitter, and giving your authoritative views in your blog. You can add to your body of work in a powerful way by producing some great how-to videos for YouTube.
Why do how-to videos?
First of all, how-to videos are very popular. Anytime someone wants to learn about something she is interested in, there is a good chance she will go to YouTube to see a how-to video on the subject. If she does not go directly to YouTube, she might go first to a search engine. There your how-to video will pop up in the search results if you have optimized it carefully. In either case, your video will reach her.
Not only will she come across your video, but she will also watch it from beginning to end if it is truly informative. A video can capture attention like no other medium can. What is more, the how-to format is easy to follow because the steps are laid out clearly and directly. Your viewer’s attention will not get sidetracked as easily as it might with some other types of content.
Finally, how-to videos can bring in more customers to your website and ultimately to your business. Always include a link back to your website. Tell the whole story that the how-to is supposed to cover, but leave your audience wanting more. Mention a new topic that they might also be interested in and tell them how to reach you at your website to get the additional information. The more you engage your viewers, the more traffic and business you will see.
How are how-to videos done?
You need an interesting subject related to your products or industry. Remember that it is not a sales video, but it can touch on the products you do sell. For example, you might sell fishing gear. You would not do a sales video for YouTube and pass it off as a how-to. Instead, you might make up a video that discusses how to use a particular type of fishing equipment.
Once you have your topic, make an outline of the steps needed to do the task. Depending on the complexity of the task, decide on the length you need for your video. Write up a script and practice saying the words distinctly, relatively slowly and in a pleasant voice. When you are satisfied, get your props or photos together to flesh out your video.
Set up the camcorder yourself or have someone take the video for you. Then, you can edit it to make it run smoothly, without a hitch. Upload your how-to video to YouTube, and you will soon improve your status as an authority on one more subject.
Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Creating a Call to Action for Your YouTube Marketing Video
As you know if you have been doing Internet marketing for awhile, good content generally needs a good call to action to succeed. Video marketing is no different. You should produce your video with the expectation that there will be some kind of response from the viewer. Otherwise, how will you know if you have done a good job?
The first thing you need to do in crafting a video call to action is to define for yourself what you want your viewer to do. Sometimes, you want something as simple as for them to share your videos with their friends. If your content is compelling enough, the little nudge you add can remind them to click the Share button when they finish. With enough sharing, your video can go viral.
You might want to prompt your viewers to visit your website. YouTube’s Promoted Videos gives you the opportunity to add a Call-to-Action Overlay. The overlay shows up on the video frame beginning a few seconds after the start of the video. Then, it will stay there until the viewer closes it, clicks on it or moves away from the video.
Clicking on the overlay will direct your visitors to the destination URL you choose. Once you get people going to your website from your videos, you can see the direct impact your YouTube activity is having on your website. You can track the traffic through programs such as Google Analytics.
However, a great call to action is more than a clickable link. You need to engage your viewer and remind them several times that you want them to do the action. You can do this subtly by showing the website address you want them to go to within your video, saying the name of the website in passing, and letting it appear on the overlay. Besides all this, you must tell them what is at that site that will benefit them personally.
Your goal may instead be to engage your viewers in a long-term relationship. If so, invite them to subscribe to your channel. Request that they visit your Facebook Page. Invite them to join you on Twitter. All these things can be accomplished with a simple call to action stated briefly within the content of the video. You can also keep viewers interested when you present your video as one chapter of a series on an informative subject, and direct your viewers where to see the other chapters.
Any website URL you want your viewers to remember must be fairly short and catchy; you should get all the traffic your content warrants. Remember that content is what keeps people viewing, and if you drive people away with blatant sales pitches and boring ad copy, they will never stay to follow your call to action.
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Viral Video Status – A Secondary Concern
Everyone wants their videos to go viral, and why not? It is a great way to get your message out to hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers in a very short time. Viral video is certainly an effective way to market your products if you can. There is only one problem: a lot of video that is made up to be viral video simply falls flat.
Much of the supposed viral video content is silly and stupid. That would be excusable if it were funny, but much of it fails in that regard as well. A video created with the sole purpose of making it reach viral status often misses the mark, maybe because it is trying just a little too hard.
It is easy to fall into the trap of pursuing the viral video into inane ideas, shoddy performances and shaky video production values. When your focus is on making something outrageous enough to catch fire with the audiences, you can lose all sight of the brand image you want to present to the public.
A better alternative is to place your emphasis on creating good, quality videos. It is okay to think about the possibility that your video might be seen by millions of people, but if you leave that as a secondary concern, your videos may actually have a better chance of achieving it.
Think of it this way – it is just like the kid in junior high school that wanted to be popular and tried way too hard. The harder he tried to be liked, the more desperate he seemed. In the end, nobody wanted to be his friend at all. You do not want your company to be that guy.
Instead, be the confident one who is relaxed in the knowledge that he is likeable, and does not have to keep shouting it into everyone’s faces to be noticed. This one lets his character speak for itself. You should too.
That is not to say that you should not promote your video through as many channels as you want to, or even that you should have a low-key video. Your video can and should be as interesting, funny, entertaining, outrageous or silly as you want it to be. Just do not sacrifice the quality of your content to promote an idea because you think it will go viral.
If your content is great, and you execute it well, you will have an excellent chance of having a viral video on your hands. You might have to promote it through other channels such as the social media networks and blogs, but it can happen. Keep the viral aspect secondary and focus on quality content. Your videos will be more viewer-friendly and you will have a shot at reaching that elusive viral zone.
Woman Holding Video Camera by Petr Kratochvil
Viral Video Marketing and Branding Your Company
Video sharing websites have become some of the most popular sites on the Internet. It only makes sense to take advantage of this wide audience to market your company. Just remember that the kind of video you present will influence what people will think of your company and how they will perceive your brand.
Creating a viral video is something like getting struck by lightning. You can take certain steps to make it more likely that you will get struck by lightning, like going out in a thunderstorm, holding a lightening rod to the sky, and waiting on a hill for lightning to strike you. While videos impact a much wider group of people than lightning does, you still have to take action to make it more likely for them to go viral. Quality, relevance, humor, impact, tagging, descriptions and importance all come into play.
Many businesspeople do not think about their company brand when they are focused on creating videos that will go viral. They are so concerned with making up zany stunts and amusing group scenes that they forget that the whole purpose is to give people the right impression of their brand.
If you want to get the most positive success from viral video marketing, start by figuring out what you want to say about your company and your product. Perhaps you want to say that your product is for fun-loving people. You might want to say that your company is trustworthy or customer-oriented. Make a list of these attributes that you are trying to put across in your viral videos.
Next, make up a list of messages you want to avoid sending. Maybe you want to avoid sending the message that the quality of the video reflects the quality of your product or the casual appearance and professionalism of your staff. These messages can be whatever is contrary to the branding you want to establish for your business.
When you produce your video, or have it produced for you, make sure you consider both what is important to have and what is important to avoid in branding your company. A viral video can be made with a few people engaging in a crazy stunt or an unusual activity. On the other hand, it might be a large mass of people doing a song or creating a scene together.
No matter what the size of your cast, you need to be able to have some control over how the video will brand your company. Then, when the video goes viral, everyone who sees it will see the company you want to portray.