How YouTube Improves TV Advertising
If you need proof that having your own YouTube marketing channel can improve your television advertising, then you should watch this video:
The interesting thing is that the target market this company was aiming at are are heavy iPhone users. In fact, more and more people are watching videos on their smart phones. So the time is ripe for a robust marketing campaign based on TV ads running simultaneously with YouTube videos.
Video marketing is becoming ever more popular. As is mobile marketing. And the two combined makes for a very rich experience – for you and your customers.
There are ways to make your TV advertising and YouTube video marketing pay. One way is to produce one video that you use for your TV ads and YouTube marketing channel. That wills save you on production costs.
Another way to save on costs is to produce two videos that are very similar. You can change the final scene and run one on your TV advertising and the other on your YouTube channel. This way you can drive traffic from the TV channel to your YouTube channel where you can engage your audience in conversation and track them. It’s the best way to measure the results of your video marketing.
If you’ve been looking for a way to marry your TV advertising and online video marketing, YouTube is the perfect medium. This is the perfect time.
How To Make Money With YouTube
YouTube has long been a great opportunity for webmasters and businesses to increase exposure for their brands and to monetize their video content. Now, the opportunities have been expanded thanks to the video sharing service opening up its partnership program to everyone.
The program is only available in 20 countries including the United Kingdom.
So what do you do to become a YouTube Partner? First, you need to have a YouTube channel. The first step is to sign up for a YouTube account. When you do that, monetize one of your videos. All you have to do is monetize at least one of them. Then, be sure that you follow YouTube’s guidelines for monetization.
One of the guidelines of course is to use only content in your videos that you have the right to use by law. You can’t violate the intellectual rights of others.
Next, start producing and sharing more videos. I can tell you that you won’t likely make a lot of money if you simply produce and monetize one video. It takes a lot of video content to successfully monetize a YouTube channel. You have to produce good videos on a consistent basis, but it doesn’t matter what niche you serve. If you produce good video content and you build a loyal audience, then you can make money with YouTube.
But making money isn’t the only benefit to having a YouTube channel. You can also use it for branding and building your audience. It takes time and commitment.
With iPhones growing in popularity and more people sharing videos through their smartphones, it makes a lot of sense to use your own video channel for branding building and marketing. And who knows? Maybe it will earn your company another revenue stream.
Can Video Marketing Win Friends – And Customers?
A new study indicates that if you want to engage an audience through video marketing and keep them engaged, then you should surprise them first and fill their hearts with joy immediately afterward. Seems simplistic, doesn’t it?
Well, it’s not really that easy.
Yes, you should engage your audience. But it helps if you know a little about them first. The object, of course, is to position your company or brand in front of a new audience and drive traffic back to your website. The question is, what video format is best for accomplishing those goals?
I don’t think that producing a video ad that is simply an advertisement, no matter how craftily executed or clever it is, will do what you expect it to do. Video viewing audiences are pretty sophisticated.
The best way to entertain, inform, and use videos for marketing online is to tell stories. Not long stories, but stories nonetheless.
Start by writing a video script. Make it creative and compelling. Introduce interesting characters with a conflict. Your product or brand may or may not be the solution to the conflict, but you can slip your product or brand into the entertainment somewhere along the lines. Audiences will forgive you if you entertain them and educate them. In short, engage them through storytelling.
Is this a challenge? Absolutely. But nothing worth doing is easy. Engage your audience well and your video marketing will go a long way to position your company as one worth doing business with.
Is It Social, Or Video, Marketing?
Video marketing is nothing new. It’s been around for about seven years, at least in its current form. YouTube was founded in February 2005. The first video was posted in April that year, according to REELSEO.
But what about social video? Is it the same thing?
To be sure, video marketing has changed a bit since 2005. You can make a few videos and post them on YouTube and call it video marketing. You can even expand a little further and upload videos to Vimeo, DailyMotion, and a few other video sharing websites. Technically, that’s video marketing. But is it social video marketing?
When you add the “social” aspect of video marketing it gets a little bit murkier, and of course it can be a lot more effective.
Social video sharing includes sharing your own videos through the various social networks. Upload them to YouTube, Vimeo, and other video websites – and your own blog, of course – and share them on the networks. But you can take it beyond that too, and you should.
It also includes sharing other people’s videos. And commenting on them. YouTube even has a way for you to establish your own video channel and taking subscribers. You can interact with your subscribers right there on YouTube. Why not? Make your video marketing more social.
Google+ is another aspect of social video marketing. You can record a video on your webcam live and share it in your Google+ stream. That’s pretty powerful, especially if you have a lot of followers.
Video marketing no longer needs to be about posting videos online. Social video marketing takes it a step further and turns video marketing into a networking tactic.
Why Short Videos Are Better
A lot has been said of online video marketing. In fact, a lot is continuing to be said. And one of the things that gets repeated often is that it is good for running an online business.
I agree with that. It is good. But it can also be bad.
One of the things that can work against you when it comes to online video marketing is making your videos too long. “Say, what?” you ask. Videos can be too long?
Absolutely.
How many times have you said “I’ll come back and watch that video later – when I have the time?”
People are in a hurry. There is a limit to how long someone will hang on and watch a video – for entertainment, for education, or for review purposes. The purpose doesn’t really matter. The length does.
So how long is too long? That’s difficult to say, exactly. But I’d hasten to say that shorter is almost always better. A thirty second video is more likely to get watched than a two hour video. A one minute video is more likely to get watched than a five minute video. Unless that five minute video really compelling.
Why is that? Time. People are busy. They want to save time whenever possible. And if your video is a marketing message, no matter how creative and entertaining, then shorter is definitely better. If you expect people to take action based on your video, you’ve got to hit and get out. Move on. Present the call to action and end the video.
If you make your videos shorter you’ll likely get more views and more traffic to your website. It doesn’t produce any more SEO benefit than a longer video, but it doesn’t produce any less either.
6 Types Of Online Marketing Videos
Viral marketing can take on many forms, including video. In fact, some of the most successful viral marketing campaigns have been videos on YouTube and other video sharing services. Here are 6 different types of videos you can produce to market your local Ayrshire business.
- Business Introduction – In this video you simply take 30-50 seconds to introduce your business and what you do. Tell your potential customers why they should care and how you can benefit them.
- Product Demonstration – This one’s pretty simple. Demonstrate how your product works so that consumers can get a good idea about its strengths and how they can use it.
- Vlog Post - If you have a blog, post a video to your blog. That can be your blog post for the day or you can set aside one day a week where you post a video blog post instead of a text blog post.
- Customer Testimonials – Do you have satisfied customers? Compile a few testimonials on video and put it on your website.
- Video Interview – Conduct an interview. Invite a third party, a journalist, or someone else to ask you questions about your product or service and videotape the interview.
- Company Headlines - Has your company made headlines? More than one? Produce a short video featuring your company in the news.
These are just a few ideas for using videos for marketing your company online. Can you think of a few of your own?
Why Video Marketing Is Getting Better
Ever since video marketing first started taking off about three years ago, there have been several efforts to turn it into a powerhouse marketing strategy. The search engines themselves and the social networks like Twitter and Facebook have done everything they can do to improve it, but it appears that Google+, the newest social media community, is the one to make YouTube marketing even better.
And it didn’t take much.
In fact, if you are a Google+ user, you may have noticed in the last couple of days that there is a YouTube icon in the top left part of your computer screen. If you click that icon you’ll see a search field extend left into your screen a couple of inches.
Now, enter a search term and you’ll see a popup box about the size of a YouTube video. A video related to your search term should start playing immediately. Below it you’ll see a playlist of videos that will run in succession. Once you find a video you want to share, click the green Share button. Google+ will load in the popup with the video and all you have to do is choose your circles and write a message. Click the green Share button again and be on your way.
This is seamless video marketing. Upload your video to YouTube. Share it on Google+. Much easier than Facebook or Twitter.
Video Advertising: Is This Your Opportunity?
Video marketing has been growing as a new medium in the past few years, but it’s about to get even better. Google has announced that it will soon add 100 new YouTube channels. What a golden opportunity.
The opportunity here isn’t that you can get your own YouTube channel. You already have that opportunity. The real opportunity in this case is that you just might gain access to these channels as an advertiser.
You can bet that Google’s plan is to turn these channels into revenue streams. Look who their talent are: Shaquille O’Neal, Madonna, Ashton Kutcher, Jay-Z, and CSI creator Antony Zuiker, to name a few.
So what’s that mean for you? These channels are going to need sponsors. And who do you think Google is going to target for that sponsorship? If you are currently a TV advertiser, you know their hope is that you will switch to being a YouTube advertiser. Are you ready?
The benefit to advertising through a YouTube channel is the potential for a larger, more global, audience. And the advertising will likely cost less per viewer. Even if you’re local, there will likely be opportunities for advertising through an appropriate YouTube channel.
These 100 new channels represent a beginning. Will you be ready to advertising through videos when YouTube has 1,000 channels, some of them possibly local?
Why You Should Use Infographics
Infographics are powerful viral marketing tools. They rely on two very powerful media themselves – information and graphics.
The alternative to using infographics is text. Textual content is important and I would use it to support your infographic. But textual content on its own can be difficult to consume. It can take a lot of time to read and analyze and cause some of your visitors to leave your website before they’ve been able to complete reading your web page.
An infographic, on the other hand, takes your detailed information and presents it in a visual package that is easier to consume, takes less time to analyze, and is visually appealing.
The downside to infographics is that they are more difficult to SEO than text because they are images. All the on-page SEO you can do is to add an alt tag. You can also link from one page to the infographic to help increase your internal link structure. Beyond that, there’s not much on-page SEO you can do besides augment your infographic with SEO content.
However, a good infographic will attract links. You can use it as link bait.
A powerful infographic that attracts a lot of inbound links can increase your website’s visibility in the search engines and increase its social sharing clout, not to mention your website’s traffic.
6 Viral Marketing Tactics Still En Vogue
Viral marketing has become somewhat of a catch-all word in some circles, but there is a very distinct flavor to viral marketing that keeps it in its own category. I’d like to highlight 6 specific viral marketing tactics that still work.
- E-mail marketing – E-mail marketing was one of the first types of viral marketing online. Hotmail used it effectively just by putting a message at the bottom of every e-mail its users sent out to get new subscribers. E-mail marketing still works today.
- Article marketing – Article marketing is another early Internet marketing tactic that could be used for viral marketing success. Do it right and you can still see great results with articles.
- Video marketing – One of the most powerful viral marketing tactics is video marketing. It’s a johnnie-come-lately in Internet marketing, but it’s just as powerful a marketing tactic ever.
- Social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, the list goes on. Social media has become its own viral marketing tool.
- Twitter – Twitter is so powerful it deserves its own category. You can use Twitter as opt-in list and drive massive traffic to your website and landing pages.
- Blogging – No discussion of viral marketing is complete without mentioning the king of viral marketing, blogs. You can put blog marketing into the social media category, SEO, or group it on its own. Either way, you can make it go viral.
Viral marketing is not a thing of the past. In fact, it has a very bright future.