There are many different ways to promote your business online, including social media, banner ads, PPC, article writing, SEO, and podcasting. Of course, there are many others as well, but one method that has been on the rise for the last few years is video marketing. It’s not hard to see why. Video engages us with imagery and sound (usually) and captures our attention in ways that text, still photos, and audio can not do individually. Video can be used to deliver content, educate, entertain, or market to your audience. If your videos are constructed properly, they can perform all of these functions.
Benefits of Video Marketing
Here are some of the ways that video marketing can help your business.
- Video gives your prospects and customers a more intimate connection with you. Your video image can give them the feeling of connecting with a real person.
- Video has a higher perceived value than text or audio, which shows you are trying to give more value to the customer.
- Google likes video and often places high-ranking videos on the first page. Depending on your keywords, this can get you a place on the first page faster than other methods.
- If your video is truly amazing or entertaining, it could go viral. These types of videos are shared widely through social media sites and can get massive visitor counts. It is a rare occurrence, but not impossible to achieve.
Ways of Producing Video
There are three main ways to produce video:
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Presentation videos
These are videos that essentially have someone speaking while the video is showing them a series of slides or r screen capture video. This works well when your objective is to educate your audience. A great free tool for this is CamStudio.
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Animated videos
These allow you to create a dialog script and to move various characters and features around the screen. These can be very sophisticated (and expensive), requiring specialized software and expertise, and can take a considerable amount of time and money to produce. There are also simpler solutions that you can use to get an animated video produced in just a few hours. My favorite low-cost solution is Xtranormal.
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Filmed video
This consists of anything that you point your camera at and record. For business purposes, this could show the operation of your product, a tour of your store, your employees performing your services, or you talking into the camera. As for equipment, there are a vast number of reasonably priced video cameras of decent quality. The video quality on some smartphones is good enough for video viewing on the typical laptop or smartphone screen. If your audience is likely to be viewing on a large HD television, you might need to spend more for a quality camera.
Popular Video Sites
YouTube is currently the most popular video-sharing site, by far, but it certainly isn’t the only one out there. It gets about 450 million unique visitors per month and is second only to Google in the number of searches it performs. YouTube receives about 16 times the number of visitors as any of the other video-sharing sites. Other video sites include:
• DailyMotion
• MetaCafe
• Vimeo
• Veoh
There are also sites that give you tools for publishing your videos to multiple video sites all at once. I like TubeMogul, which can push videos out to 25 different video-sharing sites.
Other places to share your videos:
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Your website
Conclusion
There are a number of other considerations that I did not cover in this post, such as editing software or services, lighting, and sound quality, but I hope this post gave you something to think about.
The popularity of online video will continue to grow, especially with most new mobile devices now able to access it. If your competitors haven’t started making use of this medium yet, they soon will be. If you haven’t done so yet, you should seriously consider it. Since it is a technology you could test very inexpensively, what have you got to lose?