You’ve watched videos on YouTube, so you already know what video marketing and advertising is all about. What you may not realize is that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google itself. More people search for content such as products and reviews on YouTube directly than on all other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. Combine this knowledge with the fact that people are reading less and less, getting most of their information through video, you can see why advertising using online video is absolutely the direction of the future for driving brand awareness and visitors to your website.
Type of content
The first step in video advertising is to understand that there are different types of content that you can focus on. They all add value to your marketing campaign, but can be costly to produce. Here are some the main types of video content:
- Standard 15 or 30-second ad featuring your company, product, or service. This type of video works best for pure advertising purposes and can be used for traditional television ads as well.
- Product demonstrations and a great way to get started creating videos. A video shows so much more than a static image.
- Authentic and authoritative content designed to answer your customer’s questions. Think about a food manufacturer producing cooking videos or a home contractor creating videos of home improvement tips and tricks. This type of content tends to attract an older audience and can go a long way to creating trust in your brand.
- Humorous videos which attempt to generate a viral following. I worked with a company recently that sells a product designed to back up the content of your cell phone. They created videos showing people destroying their phones ending with why you need their product. This type of video is best in attracting a younger audience.
- Explainer videos are short cartoonish animations with narration that attempt to make complex concepts simple and understandable. You see these a lot in the finance and banking industries.
Build interesting and engaging content
While homemade videos can be beneficial for some businesses, in most cases it is important to create professional, well thought out and designed videos that match the attitude and marketing focus of your type of business. I’ve seen, for example, many videos produced by realtors that are off-putting. They are selling a multimillion-dollar homes and they post on the Internet videos that are obviously self-produced by walking through the property with their phone held out in front of them. Video is an area where, really, if you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all.
No matter the type of video you choose, think about questions that your customers have, and answer those questions. One of the most effective uses of product demo videos that I have seen is at zappos.com. They sell thousands of different products and one of the reason they are so successful is that they have taken the time to create videos of just about everything they sell. I purchased a back pack from them a few years ago, and the reason I was comfortable with the purchase was that I was able to see, in their video, what the bag looked like on someone’s back. It was a simple video that took just a few minutes to produce, but it gave me so much more information than a static image.
Generating more traffic to your site, and more leads
Once you have great videos to work with, now you can begin to use them to expand your reach. Here are some ideas:
- Create a YouTube channel and begin posting your videos. You will start to pick up search traffic. End the videos and place in your descriptions a clear link to your website.
- Pay YouTube to improve search rankings within the YouTube search engine. You only pay when a user clicks on your ad.
- Pay YouTube to show your show advertisement “in-stream” or before the actual video that they user selected to watch. You only pay when someone watches 30 seconds of your ad. If the user clicks skip before the 30 seconds are up, you do not pay.
