YouTube is the second most visited site in the world and as social media dominates the communications airwaves, PR people are turning to sites like YouTube to promote their companies.
As an online platform, YouTube provides a continuous presence 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and it’s completely free. It also offers the notion of a brand channel, which provides an appropriate structure and context for a company’s video. More…
Online video sharing has revolutionised the way in which we interact with media. With free access to a worldwide audience, it has become a forum for every possible form of expression; from serious political messages to entertaining home movies.
Huge global events, such as the current swine flu outbreak, have helped raise the profile of social networking sites with video sharing capabilities, most notably YouTube. World leaders and health authority figures have been able to speak directly to millions of people in order to provide advice and information to halt a potential worldwide pandemic.
This kind of major news story being presented through an online forum highlights just how important sites like YouTube are in effectively communicating to a wider Internet savvy generation. So why not harness this same potential and use it for marketing purposes? The audience is constantly growing and the costs are extremely low, giving you the freedom to be creative and really help boost your site’s online presence.
There are of course many ways to advertise your company and products, be it covert or otherwise. Video marketing can be as simple as a quick demonstration video to a full-blown advertisement, giving fantastic scope for creating a real brand identity and style. Multi-national companies may well integrate a successful television campaign with an equally popular online version, helping to create a brand buzz; Cadbury’s and T-Mobile would probably be two leading recent examples of this. However, we don’t all have the resources to achieve this.
Just as with site copy, any video marketing you choose to do should remain focussed on exactly what your Website actually offers. Whether embedded on your site or being distributed through an external source, the ultimate goal is to drive incoming traffic and get customers in who will turn hits into sales. So whilst your video’s purpose may be simply to inform, ultimately a video user-guide isn’t going to serve its purpose if no one actually invests in the product or service you offer.
Striking a balance between simply shouting ‘buy me’ repeatedly and offering a service that, while useful, doesn’t manage to convert clicks into anything meaningful isn’t always easy. Creativity and originality is often what we find ourselves looking for, albeit subconsciously. If you can entertain, create attention and keep costs low then you’ll be on to a surefire winner; however, the theory is always easier than the practice unfortunately.
Overcrowding your site and external social networking sources with low-quality video isn’t going to have the desired effect, no matter how well-intentioned. If consumers stumble across your advert on YouTube, just as with a search engine text advertisement, you need to ensure the content of your message reflects that of your site and vice versa. Obviously you can’t expect to secure the same blanket coverage of some of the more established advertisers and aforementioned political messages, but ensuring a good quality video with purpose and a message is great way to boost your online credibility.
To get the very best out of your Internet video campaign you may well want to consider investing in a little professional assistance. At Impact Media we offer fantastic online video marketing services suitable for companies of all sizes and from all backgrounds. Your corporate video will be submitted to the very best sources to ensure the optimum results, adding a fantastic audiovisual aspect to your online marketing strategy.
On the 6th day of Xmas….
Video on the web is becoming an essential part of the marketing mix and below are a 6 ways you can use video to promote your business online:
These are just a few ways you can promote your business online but all will do wonders for your online visibility.
It is finally out of development and ready for download:
The theme aptly named “WordPress Video Theme” is just that and has a whole host of other goodies built in like:
Using the widgets module you just cut and paste your code and your video and newsletter is embedded and can be easily updated at any point. Other useful features are:
This theme is free to use and can be downloaded right here. If you are looking for a stylish theme with all the features you could want and need then this is for you and the best part is its totally free.
Why? because WordPress is a great platform and by promoting this theme we help further promote this great platform and make life easier for people starting out by giving them a great starting point.
We are going to keep this up to date and keep adding functionality to it so if you have any ideas or things you would like to see added, removed or changed leave a comment as we will be using this to work out the changes for Rev. 2.
To download the theme click here.
To download the instructions click here.
If you would like to be walked through the set up just watch the video below:
The value of video marketing is growing at a pace that businesses cannot ignore. In the past, television advertising was priced out with the budgets of most SMEs but online video has opened a huge window of opportunity for SMEs that never existed before. Online video makes video advertising affordable to all!
If you’re wondering what video could do for your business, consider the following cases and see how the use of video in each created an online buzz that has boosted their brand, product or service into a web-wide phenomenon.
An excellent example of how regular genuine blogging combined with the use of video can transform a small family business into a national name is Gary Vaynerchuk and his wine business, WineLibrary.com. He went from anonymous Russian immigrant to the youngest winner of US Market Watch Magazine’s ‘Market Watch Leader.’ Using a combination of expert wine knowledge, simple web video technology and marketing know-how he became a household name. Just one man, his product, and some video.
Vaynerchuk was recently interviewed on Ellen and Conan O’Brien. By drinking wine and talking about it online video, he not only skyrocketed his profits, but also become a major A-list media celebrity in the US. Vaynerchuk claims his success was caused by ‘fresh and current’ content. In his case, that means spending five days per week in front of the camera.
You’ve got an exceptional blender, but how do you make an impact in a market awash with good quality blenders? Blendtec came up with a novel way to punch into the market. Take a respectable looking science guy; take the Blendtec blender and an iPhone. Now drop the iPhone into the blender and switch it on. The blender totally destroys the phone, grinding it into a fine powder. One simple video and the Blendtec blender is an international name, flying off the shelves. They keep the content fresh by changing the object destroyed in their new videos. More than eight million people have viewed the videos. A great product, a novel idea, lots of video, and dramatic sales volumes.
In a market saturated with beauty products, how could ‘Dove‘ make an impact on its key customer, the average woman? They created a viral ad that showed how an average looking female could be transformed into billboard model using stylist tricks and photo editing. Again, a clever idea turned into a time lapsed video, was virally spread the video ad across the net. This ad spoke to their key customers, it may have started in Canada, but women across the world now have a feeling Dove stands for them.
The success of the examples discussed above give the strong indication that viral videos massively boost traffic and increase sales, leading to the question, how could video help your business? If you think there may be a fit with your business, take a look at our video marketing services page and get in touch for a no-obligation discussion with our Sales Team.
On the Internet, the written word has always dominated. Whilst a picture may be worth a thousand words, the word holds pride of place in online marketing and advertising. However, since the development of fully proliferated wireless access and high performance video technology integrated within the World Wide Web, the power of Video has really come into its own and it’s already becoming a multi-billion pound phenomenon across the globe.
The obvious example of the explosion of video on the Internet is from YouTube. The most popular video site on the Internet is owned and run by Google, the most powerful search engine company on the planet. If you want to advertise with a video on the front page of YouTube for a day, it will currently cost you a minimum of £25,000. Cheap enough if you’ve got that kind of budget. But what if you haven’t?
Internet analyst David Hallerman suggests that while Paid Search is very effective for direct marketing, nothing grabs the surfer’s ‘heart and mind’ like video advertisements.
Video Advertising is now considered an excellent choice if you want to drive brand awareness and sales. Research has shown that web users have higher levels of interaction with video than they do with traditional online image ads. The average surfer will click ‘Play’ on a video far more easily than committing to the click on a Paid Search ad.
Google have recently brought together the idea of PPC (Pay per Click) with Video Advertising in attempt to make the most of these rapid changes in the online advertising market. Like their PPC campaigns, marketers bid the maximum that they would pay per CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions). Google claim to offer a guarantee against overpaying by reducing the cost you actually pay to one cent more than the nearest next bid.
There are alternatives to the YouTube/Google monopoly, if you want to use Video Advertising as part of your marketing campaign. Many video advertisers charge via CPM. This type of advertising has exploded in the US, where sites such as MySpace offer a short 5 second video display at a cost of $25 per CPM. At the other end scale, the Wall Street Journal charges $90 per CPM.
In the UK, local search site SCOOT already offers video advertising deals. By building on their relationship with media group ITV, they offer localised video ads around online television programming. With SCOOT, 25,000 plays is just £500. Other companies offer more bespoke services and are therefore reticent to publish prices.
Recently, the Guardian predicted that by 2009, Internet Video advertising would outspend traditional television advertising for the first time. By 2012, it’s considered that £361 million will be spent on Internet Video advertising in the UK alone.
By 2009, to actively compete in the global marketplace, Video Advertising is an area of your online marketing campaign that you simply must factor into your budget. Whilst the costs are currently high with the most obvious main providers like YouTube, more cost effective video advertising services are being made available from smaller sources all the time.
If you can see video forming part of your marketing stratagy, take a look at our Video Marketing Services to evaluate whether we can help you.
Online video views in the UK went through the roof in June 2008 with 3.2 billion videos being viewed online by 27.4 billion UK Internet users according to comscore.
That works out at 78% of the UK’s Internet audience watching video online at an average of 118 videos viewed per viewer. That means that each viewer is watching an average of 4 videos online every single day.
If you would like to get your video out to the masses then why not look at our Video Marketing Services and see how you can increase your online visibility through the use of online video marketing.
