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.
Is Video Marketing In Your Future?
Video marketing and viral marketing are becoming synonymous terms. That’s especially true since video marketing is increasingly becoming more and more popular.
With YouTube serving up billions of videos every day and viral video campaigns delivering clickthrough rates of 750%, video marketing has become a force that no online marketing company can ignore.
If you decide that video marketing is something you want to engage in this year or next, keep these points in mind as you move forward with your viral marketing plans:
- Make your videos creative. The competition for eyeballs is growing fierce, and it’s going to get a lot fiercer. Online video viewers will not tolerate shoddy videos, unentertaining or uninteresting concepts, or anything boring. Make your videos creative and entertaining as well as informative.
- Use your videos as opportunities to brand your company and its products.
- Include testimonials. They are very powerful – especially in video. But if you use testimonials, don’t make them up. Don’t use actors. Use your real customers and make your testimonials real.
- Be personable and real. Speak to your prospects, not at them. People relate to real people so make your videos relatable. Don’t make them stuffy.
Video marketing has the potential to drive targeted viral traffic to your websites. Do it well and it will pay big dividends. Do it poorly and you’ll just be throwing away your money.
How To Go Viral In 7 Easy Steps
Viral marketing is nothing new. It’s been around since 1997 when Hotmail put a simple link at the bottom of every e-mail its users sent out inviting recipients to sign up for their own free e-mail account. Within 18 months, the service had 8 million sign ups. Viral marketing was born.
David Jackson has a great article that discusses the 7 very effective techniques for helping your content go viral.
Those 7 techniques (in a nutshell) are:
- Video marketing
- Social media marketing
- Article marketing
- Tweet/Retweet buttons
- Share widgets
- E-books
- Newsletters
I would add one more viral marketing technique to this list: iPhone apps.
Each of these techniques has its own methods. They each have their own purposes. What will work for one viral marketing campaign won’t necessarily work for another. So if you think that you can just include all 8 of these techniques in every marketing campaign and your content will go viral, think again. It doesn’t happen that way.
Viral marketing is a fancy way of saying “word of mouth advertising” at break-neck speed. And that’s the key. When your content goes viral it’s because a lot of people are talking about it and telling their friends. This causes your content to rise in popularity at a rapid rate.
Are you ready to go viral? Create something awesome and tell your firiends. If it truly is awesome, they’ll tell their friends. Then they’ll tell their friends. And they’ll tell more friends. And so on and so on ….
Why Video Marketing Is Viral
We live in an age of video. Online video. And you can use video to market your message to the world and make it go viral. Al Qaeda did.
When terrorist leader Osama bin Laden died, his organization, Al Qaeda, could have disappeared into the shadows. But they didn’t. Instead, the No. 2 leader used the opportunity to post a video message to the world that Osama bin Laden will be just as effective in death as he was in life.
Like the message or hate it, it was effective. It kept Al Qaeda in the public eye and the public conscience. And people are watching the video in droves.
The video in question is a video eulogy memorializing terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. He’s an enemy to the West, but he’s a hero to many others. Thats makes him a newsworthy icon. And online video is the perfect viral tool to keep his message alive while he is all-but-forgotten.
Here’s the lesson: Any organization can do this – even yours.
What’s your message? You can use video to get it out there and keep it out there. You can play off of current events to get your message to the public and keep it there. It’s an easy lesson to learn, but a hard one to implement. With the right planning, however, I’m confident you can do it.
How A Twitter Hoax Went Viral
Twitter is a tool that can be used for extreme good or extreme evil. I’m not saying a hoax claiming that a popular celebrity has died ranks as extreme evil, but it certainly doesn’t fall in the “good” category. Nevertheless, we can learn from it.
The key to this hoax’s success was in reaching a Twitter account with 60,000 followers. While being popular is itself not an indicator of viral success, if you’ve got the right message, then your message can go viral really quick. And that’s what happened when “RIP Jackie Chan” reached @tweetmeme.
The ingredients for a successful viral marketing campaign are these:
- The right message
- The right audience
- Obtaining legitimacy with support of key influencers
- Perfect timing
When these four elements line up just right, you have the perfect recipe for viral marketing success.
Twitter, like no other tool in history, makes the viral impact potential of any message better just because of its nature. You can have access to hundreds of thousands of sales people for your idea within seconds. Even if you yourself only have 100 followers.
If this is the kind of viral marketing success that you are looking for, start by finding the key influencers, what Malcom Gladwell calls connectors, within your niche. Then hone your message into a concise expression of content that appeals to your audience. Time it right and you’ll be going viral in no time. Just like Jackie Chan.