Video Distribution and Analytics – Send It Out and Watch It Perform

You have staged a stunt, written a script or put together a power point presentation. Next, you have made a video using your ideas and plans. Now you can upload it to YouTube or your website. However, if you want to send out your video faster and to more people, you can use a video distribution service, which might also give you analytics to help you watch its performance.

There are paid video distribution services that sometimes your video to send to up to two hundred video sharing websites, social networking websites, blogs, and other websites. If you want to pay for a service like that, you should be sure that you are going to have an extensive and powerful campaign.

If your budget is less or you want to spend less of it on video distribution, you can go with a free service. Free services still send out your video to several sites for you. All you have to do is get your video ready and click a few buttons to upload it and enter the meta data.

When your video is deployed to all the distribution points, you will quickly see it climb the search engine results pages. Your video will show up multiple times in a search result because it is coming from several places on the web.

Beyond the search engine advantages, there is also the fact that people who go on each of the sites your video is being distributed to will have a chance to see your video. You will get a kind of mass exposure that you could not possibly get from just one website.

Many video distribution services also have analytics. It is easy to see how many people have viewed your video. Data will show which search terms people are using to bring up your video. You can learn which of the sites is showing the most viewers for your video, and how long they are staying to listen to your complete video. Many services go so far as to provide sales campaign statistics for you related to your video, such as social actions and completion rates.

Since you can get the service for free, there is no reason not to ignore the opportunity. It takes no more effort to set up a video with a distribution service than with one video sharing site alone, once you have gotten started. Video distribution and analytics improve your video marketing campaign and take it to a higher level.

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Target Marketing Challenge – Aiming At Multiple Marks

You might be better off thinking outside the box when it comes to finding your target market. Conventional wisdom says that you should find the group of people who will use your product and market directly to them. That is true – to a point. Actually, you might have more than one target audience for your products. Consider how different people might use your product, and how you might cater to their needs.

For example, you might make plastic shower chairs. Your intended audience might be the elderly because of the fact that elderly people have trouble bathing themselves. The shower chair becomes a tool they use for grooming for the rest of their lives. You could market the chair based on the tastes and needs of the elderly demographic.

However, other people use plastic shower chairs as well. People who have had an injury sometimes use plastic shower chairs during their recovery period. These can be people of any age. You could discern patterns of users, such as accident victims, sports injury victims, or victims of violence. Aim at any or all of these demographics and you will find new markets for your product.

Your product might be much more commercial than a plastic shower chair, but it might have a variety of users nonetheless. The first step in marketing at multiple target audiences is finding them. Go on the social networking sites and notice what categories of people are responding when you happen on a discussion of your industry or types of products. When someone brings up the fact that they use your type of product for a different use than you expected, you might want to Direct Message them and have a private conversation about it.

The way to actually do the targeted marketing campaign is to have a multi-pronged approach in place. If you are doing article marketing, write some of the articles for the people who use your plastic chairs for sports injuries, including using keywords which they might type into search engines. Do the same for each different type of customer you are targeting. You should not spread yourself too thin, of course, but there is a way to do highly specific targeting to a variety of targets for better success.

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Start Keyword Research Only After First Clarifying Your Marketing Objectives

It is important to do keyword research before you attempt search engine optimization of your website, blog, articles or other content. Without knowing what people are looking for, you will not know what keywords to supply. However, there is one step to Internet marketing you need to do even before you take on keyword research. That is clarifying the purpose of your marketing campaign.

You need to determine what you want your customers or potential customers to do when they get your marketing message before you will know how to construct it. Some of the possibilities are visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, purchasing one or several of your products, sharing your company information with others, opting-in for marketing materials and subscribing to your blog by RSS feed.

Your keyword research will revolve around the choices you make in establishing the motives for your marketing campaign. For example, if you want to do campaigns for the purpose of getting people to interact with you over a long period, you would lean towards keywords that have staying power over a long period of time. If you just want to run a blast campaign to get people to buy a product to boost sales over the short run, the focus would be on the latest keyword trends instead.

Your objectives might be best suited for a particular age range in terms of keyword research as well. If you want to get people to sign up for a newsletter, you might be more likely targeting people in an older group than those who would sign up for an RSS feed, for example. When you do keyword research, you can break it down to age and other demographic groups in some cases, to get an idea of what different people type into the search engines as opposed to people in other groups.

Use everything you know about your intentions relating to your marketing campaign when you go to the keyword research sites and software. You will come up with the most winning words and phrases to reach your objectives if you take some time to think ahead before you get to those helpful tools.

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Developing a Content Strategy for Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

There is no worse way to start a social media marketing campaign than to dive right in without thinking. Although you are only writing in limited-character bursts of dialogue, you are still producing content. That content needs to have a focus and a direction or you will never accomplish anything productive for your company.

If you have not defined your branding thoroughly yet, work on that before you jump into the social networking websites. Establish who it is you want to be, and how you want consumers to think of you. Consider the attributes you want consumers to associate with your company such as high quality, customer oriented, fast delivery or cutting edge technology. If you do not narrow down your branding messages, you will seem like you are trying to be all things to all people, and that rarely works. People want to know that you stand for something, and they want to know what that thing is.

After you know who you are, choose people who will be responsible for your social media marketing campaign. Make sure that you have enough people, working plenty of hours to connect with your list on a regular basis. Your social media team should be up to date on how to navigate the social media websites, accomplishing actions like uploading videos and other content as well as sharing content from other sources.

Work with your team to develop a social media marketing plan in detail. Make standard rules about what kinds of interactions are to be used. Find ways to encourage creativity in coming up with new and exciting content for the updates or Tweets. Choose individuals within the team to work with different aspects of the social scene, such as educating people about the industry, fielding customer service-related topics or establishing a brand presence on the social media.

After your social media marketing campaign has been running for awhile, reevaluate it and determine whether you are making any progress. Look at the number of people who respond to social media-only discount offers. Take note of the numbers of people who are being added and who are dropping off of your lists. Most of all have your team pay attention to the responses of others to the content they post so they will know how they are doing and what they need to change. Social media marketing takes dedication and patience; more than that, it takes awareness.

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Grouping Your Customers for Better Internet Marketing Campaigns

You already know that one of the best ways to succeed in an Internet marketing campaign is to have a highly targeted audience. You want to reach the people who are going to buy without hesitation because you strike a chord with them. One of the best ways to find these people is to group your present and potential customers into natural sets of consumers.

Some easy groupings can be done when you keep lists of the customers who buy different types of products. For example, you might sell two products – weight loss and bodybuilding supplements. Sort your customers by which of your two products they prefer to buy. Then, when you get a new product in either line, you will know which group to target with that marketing campaign.

If you are an Internet based business, or you ship products to faraway places, you might group people by location. You might sell the same things in different places, but your approach may not be the same from one place to another. A Midwest location might respond well to a marketing campaign highlighting traditional values, while a West Coast location might feel better about a campaign featuring earth-friendly values.

Another way to group your customers is by the way they interact with you. Are they a Facebook group, a Twitter following or do they actually come into your place of business? The ways you talk to them will determine how you approach them to get your sales message across. It will determine whether you are going to launch an information-based campaign or a more directly sales-oriented communication, as well as where you meet up with them in real or cyber space.

You can group potential customers by how they find you. Analytics software can show you how they get to your website, whether they came from another website or what search term they used if they came by search. Once you learn how they reached you, you can get an idea of their interests.

For the theoretical weight loss and bodybuilding supplement company listed above, they might notice that most of their traffic is coming from weightlifting sites. They could use that information one of two ways. Either they could focus on that group of customers and target them more heavily with the bodybuilding products, or they could put forth a renewed effort to get more action on the weight loss side of the business.

No matter how you group your customers or potential customers, there are many ways to use the lists and information. One thing is certain. The more you know about the people who might buy your products, the more products you stand to sell.

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What You Can Accomplish with Mobile Marketing Opt-In Lists

There are several ways to accumulate a mobile marketing opt-in list. You can collect permissions and mobile numbers on your website. You can announce on your Facebook page that anyone sending a text to your SMS number will be included in company offers and information. You can even ask for permissions and numbers through a print media campaign. The bigger question is what do you do when you get the lists? Here are a few ideas.

1. Offer coupons and discounts.

You can send a barcode on a mobile device now, so that customers can simply hand their mobile over to the cashier at a local store and have it scanned as a coupon. This not only makes them happy by saving them money, but it also satisfies their desire to use new technology. The novelty of digital coupons will not last forever, but the savings will go on and on.

For discounts or coupons, all you really need to do is send a text that says, “Show this text for [X] % off [X Service or Product].” Customers who are interested will have no problem redeeming their discount, because most people carry their mobile devices with them at all times. You have just made the process much more convenient for them than if they had to clip a coupon and bring it into the store.

2. Announce events.

If you have a grand opening or a special sale, it is a nice idea to send a message with the specific details to your mobile marketing opt-in list. An even better idea is to have a VIP sale, and invite your opt-in list customers to a special sale held only for them. If you have a big enough opt-in list, this can be well worth your time and investment.

3. Introduce products.

Use your mobile marketing opt-in list to send a short announcement when you introduce a new product. This is only effective if it does not happen frequently. If you are sending out too many new product notifications, people will soon opt-out on you unless they are very loyal customers in the first place. Yet, if you use good judgment, you can send out the occasional message on a new product and your customers will thank you for the information.

4. Get feedback.

Your mobile customers will be interested in giving you feedback if you do not push the matter too far. If you make a pest of yourself, your customers will be turned off. However, if you once in awhile ask them to vote on their favorite among your products or give a simple response as to whether they liked your service or not, you may get some information that will be useful to your company. More important than that, you will let your customers know that their input is important to you as well, and you will have the chance to develop some in depth consumer-seller relationships.

Photo: Mobile Phone by Anna Cervova