“I don’t think we are ready for Video Marketing”
This is one of those phrases we hear all to often when doing the initial consulting for businesses. As we are going through the process of identifying pieces of the jigsaw they haven’t even thought about, video inevitably comes up. Why? Well most companies we are speaking to have a similar aim, they want to increase their bottom line profit. They want to do this by leveraging the internet and want to be able to directly attribute specific ROI to marketing spend on a monthly basis. The internet is the vehicle of the moment and we end up talking about the requirement for optimisation of various site pages, the usual discussion about what SEO actually is and how quickly it will yield results as well as social media and PPC advertising.
What strikes us as funny is that when the topic of video marketing is raised, under the Multi Media Marketing Jigsaw piece. The words at the top of the post are usually the first out of the clients mouth. But why is that?
There is a fundamental disconnect there because we have just been talking with them about getting more from their online presence right? Well video is the most consumed media on the internet (at the time of posting this) At the moment there is upwards of 60 hours of video footage uploaded to YouTube every minute!!! YouTube is also the 2nd largest search engine out there after Google themselves. How can you not be ready for video marketing? You are missing out on a massive traffic stream if you ‘aren’t ready’.
Now we understand that the thought of video marketing can be daunting and that not all of us (we fall into this category) want to be or are comfortable being in front of the camera. But that’s ok as there are many different ways of creating a video that doesn’t involve you getting in front of a camera. Powerpoint slides or Keynote Presentations with a voice over make great videos – or portfolio presentations can be turned into video very easily.
Then there is the misconception that you need a lot of expensive kit. This is not true, we know some very successful video marketers that use their iPhone to create their videos. Services like Viddy now facilitate your video creation snippets for Social Media updates. You can get a very cost effective HD video camera from Amazon – Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera – Black
Then just a lapel mic and in reality you are ready to go. You want to make sure that you have a good recording area in terms of not much background noise or too echoey, but in reality you get to choose exactly what style you want to come across with. How do you want to personally represent your brand – again this will depend on your target market which you know far better than us.
Video engages more of our senses as human beings, with that in mind, we might spend longer looking at a video than perhaps an article. But be wary, the research shows that the length of your video is actually very important. Check this out for further information – Does Length Matter
Also this is a great piece from the guys at SEOmoz –
The YouTube Experiment – YouMoz | SEOmoz
www.seomoz.org5/4/12
It’s probably because we’ve been soured by the comparisons between it and Wistia for business video hosting. But for now, let’s ignore the comparisons between the two and focus on this question: can YouTube be used in …
