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.
The Inner Core Of Viral Marketing
Yesterday, I wrote a post defining viral marketing. Today, I’d like to go a little deeper.
An article at WebProNews discusses the essence of viral marketing in real simple terms. Here’s what Jonah Peretti says:
Simply, stuff that has the best opportunity to spread is stuff that people want to share with others.
You can’t get any simpler than that.
To get your content to go viral, you’ve got to create something that has a broad appeal. Remember, in social media, people share what defines them. If you want your content to go viral, then it has to define – even in small ways – some particular part of being of a lot of people. You want your friends to share with their friends, their friends to share with more friends, and so on. That’s how content goes viral.
But is that a spontaneous movement, or is it planned?
It can be both. But I think the best viral marketing is planned marketing. That means you have to understand your audience well enough to know what appeals to them. If you hit the nail on the head, your audience will do the rest.
The hardest part of viral marketing is creating the content. After that, it’s just putting it in front of the right people.
What Is Viral Marketing?
Viral marketing is a term given to a particular type of marketing that can involve several different strategies. The idea is to create a marketing product that catches on and gets a lot of people talking about your business. Another way of saying that is “it creates a buzz.”
So how do you create that buzz? You can do it through any number of marketing strategies that include:
- Article marketing
- Blog marketing
- Video marketing
- Social media marketing
- Mobile apps development
- Widget promotion
- Infographics
- Link baiting
These are just a few of the methods that online marketers have used to create a buzz around their product or service. Viral marketing is not so much about the strategy as it is about the effect.
Any time you do something that gets people talking about your business, it’s a good thing. You can then step back and watch the buzz being repeated over and over again. This usually results in an increase in business. It can be driving new traffic to your off line store or it can be driving new traffic to your website. Either way, you are more visible than before and poised to make a profit.
Viral marketing is powerful when done correctly. And it isn’t any more expensive than traditional marketing. In many cases, it can be done dirt cheap.
How A YouTube Channel Can Make You An Expert
One of the often overlooked marketing opportunities online is YouTube. Many people are using it to great effect, but not all of them are using it to its fullest potential. Rather than just upload a few random videos on various topics related to your business, why not start your own YouTube channel? It’s a lot of work, but it can pay off in big dividends.
A YouTube channel is almost like having your own television show. The difference is that people can access your videos anytime they want versus having to sit in front of the Boob Tube at a certain time of day on a certain day of the week.
Here are five reasons why a YouTube channel can make you an expert in your niche:
- It’s free. It doesn’t cost anything to start a YouTube channel so your expenses are low.
- If you can produce great video content that is entertaining and informative, then you can attract a loyal following of viewers on YouTube.
- A YouTube channel can be used to send targeted traffic to your website on a regular basis.
- You can monetize a YouTube channel and turn it into its own unique revenue source.
- As a reputation management tool, a YouTube channel can make you an expert in your niche.
YouTube has a powerful platform for anyone who can take the time to learn to use it. Start your own YouTube channel and become an expert in your niche.
Improve Your Video Marketing With YouTube
YouTube is offering video content creators a chance to improve their skills with the YouTube Creator Institute. It looks like a great opportunity for video content marketers.
Video marketing is here to stay, and I’m not just talking about video marketing for businesses, though that is certainly here in full force. More and more, I’m seeing YouTube channels that are like ongoing TV series. Some of them are of the talk show variety, others are news-oriented programs, and many more are entertainment programs that run on YouTube. These shows and their creators appear to be the market that the YouTube Creator Institute is aimed for.
Why is this program good? Because you can take your already awesome technical and creative skills and make them better. That’s the promise, and from what I can tell, the program looks like it could live up to its promise.
Obviously, YouTube is hoping to make money off of your content. But if they make money, then you can make money. The day has come when standalone video content on YouTube stands to be as popular and profitable as any TV program. And if you can run a business show of that type that also makes your company money and grows your business, even better. Give it a shot!
Can You Create A Viral Marketing Campaign?
Every marketer’s dream is to have all or part of their campaign go viral. It stands to reason then that most marketers look for elements that could help their marketing efforts turn viral. But can you really create a viral marketing campaign?
The term viral is important in this analysis. By its nature, viral relies on the efforts of others. So to rephrase the question, can you force others to market your products for you? Now that is a harder question to answer. You can certainly do a lot to encourage them, but forcing may be just out of the question.
You can create a marketing campaign that has all the elements to go viral. If it does go viral, then I guess you can claim to have created a viral marketing campaign. If it doesn’t go viral, it has just become another marketing campaign – possibly a failed one at that. What is important is to look at the elements that go into a viral marketing campaign – and there is really only one.
Something goes viral when people see it, and simply have to share with others. They in turn share with it their circle of friends and before you know it, it has spread around the web. It could be funny, sad, strange, important, new – I could go on. The important element is whatever hooks a visitor and grabs their attention. YouTube is quite possibly the king of viral at present. Videos go viral on a daily basis – why? Because they engage the viewer to the point they ‘have to share it’.
Can you create a viral marketing campaign? You can try. The web is littered with the failed efforts of others, but until you try, you just don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
Planning A Viral Marketing Campaign
Can you plan a viral marketing campaign? A glib response would be to say you can plan anything but as to whether or not it comes off, that’s a different question. You can plan a marketing campaign and you can include some of the elements that could, hopefully, deliver viral type effects. The hurdle to leap to human nature, what drives people to spread content today, generally doesn’t tomorrow.
Search Engine Journal has described one activity that did go viral – was it planned? The activities were and the end result was an article that delivered viral results. Can you copy that process? Sure, but there is never a guarantee of the results, and that is the problem with planning a viral marketing campaign.
Having said that, the approach was smart. The writer discusses creating ‘great’ content and building links to that content. They don’t worry about any other form of SEO, just content and links. I am not sure that this is a clever long term strategy, but it does work well short term, but then, that is often the result of any activity that goes viral.
The ‘smart’ part was involving a well known third party. They asked a well known New York Times best selling author if they would link to their article. It was related so what was the harm in asking? The author liked the article so much that they reprinted it on their website and from there, of course, it took off.
You can try the same approach, however, if business owners all over the world tried it, we would soon run out of ‘famous’ people to help the article along. I do agree with one point in the article – provide good content (it doesn’t have to be great – that, after all, is in the eyes of the reader) and developing a link building strategy is essential to any SEO program. Contacting those who are well respected in your niche for links, or perhaps even comments on the content, can help to promote your content. If, in the process, it goes viral – you’ve struck it lucky.
If it doesn’t, you certainly haven’t harmed your business (or web site). In the long run there will be some benefits from a link or comment. As to planning for this to become a viral marketing adventure – you can plan away; just remember, there are no guarantees of success.