Video Marketing

There are two types of sales videos — the lengthy video that fully demonstrates your product and gives consumers all the information they need in order to purchase it, and a short video teaser that creates interest or buzz about your product or brand. Think of them as the online versions of infomercials and commercials. These tips will help you to create captivating short sales videos or sizzle videos.

Use high quality content

Your videos do not have to be slick and polished, or look like a high priced advertisement. However, they should not have grainy video or audio that is difficult to understand. Film your video in high definition, which is available from inexpensive consumer cameras. Properly light the subject of your video, and frame the subject of your video correctly. If your product is featured, it should be clearly visible. Film your video in quiet settings so that the audio recording is clear, or use studio voiceovers. Music should be appropriate to both your audience and the message you are sending.

Target a specific audience

You should know exactly who will be watching this video, based on your targeted demographic persona. Each persona should be targeted with a separate video, so that it can be tailored specifically to the needs and desires of that persona. Determine the style of video that will be most appealing to that persona, whether it is full of infographics, slow reveals of key product features, or a rapid montage of images.

Find five features

Each video should mention the benefits of at least 3 and no more than 5 features of your product. Determine which features and benefits are the most important to your target audience, and mention only those.

Keep things moving

Ensure that any still images in your video appear to be moving by using transitions. Avoid using static images or blocks of text, although short catch phrases or important statements can be used sparingly. Titles and closing credits should have some movement to the backgrounds, even if the text is static.

Think reusability

You’ll get more use from your video if the parts that change rapidly (such as sale information) or vary between otherwise identical scripts (such as location names) are done in a voice over or using a replaceable title card. When they change, the video can be easily updated, without requiring an entirely new video production. Similarly, if you are creating a number of different videos for different personas with different collections of featured benefits, careful scripting and editing will allow you to reuse the descriptions of individual features in multiple videos, rather than needing to shoot each video in its entirety.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: Morguefile)

Obviously, the most important thing you need to increase traffic to your website is fresh, valuable content posted regularly. The following techniques will help you to maximise visitors to your new content, as well as attracting new visitors to your older content.

1. Choose the right keywords

It is easiest to rank your content for long-tail phrases that are not as competitive. These phrases tend to be between 5 and 7 words in length. You should also include some of the other more competitive keywords that you want your site in general to rank for.

2. Use videos

Put videos on your website, as an option on your homepage or as a video landing page. Funny or informative videos get the most views, so tutorials or reviews are natural choices for video content. Upload videos to YouTube, Vimeo, and other video collections, with links in the description that direct video traffic back to your website.

3. Use social media

When you add new content to your website, create links to it from all of your social media properties. Tweet about it, link to it from a Facebook post, and pin a link to it on your Pinterest board.

4. Answer questions

If your content answers a specific question, such as how to do something, search for places where that question has been asked in forums, hubpages, or other online gathering places. Give a high-level answer to the question in a comment, with a link to the page for more information.

5. Offer something for free

You can offer discounts on your products with sales or coupons, give away something in a contest, or offer free downloads of ebooks, white papers, special reports, apps, or software.

6. Use an RSS feed

Most blogs automatically create RSS feeds. However you can also create feeds for website updates and other posts. By including your feed in an aggregator, such as infogroup.com, databyacxiom.com, or localeze.com, you increase both the number of people who see your new content and the rapidity with which search engines find your new content.

7. Get customer reviews

Have your customers give you positive reviews on review sites for both your local area and your industry.

8. Track your analytics

Discover which sites are generating the most referrals, and approach them about creating guest blogs or shared content. Determine which content is getting the most views and create more along those lines.

9. Use a profile signature

Make sure that your profile signature links back to your website, and use that profile signature when posting comments to blogs, LinkedIn groups, forums, or book reviews.

10. Tell the search engines

Let the search engines know when your content is updated by refreshing and reposting your xml sitemap, and pinging the fresh content. Useful ping sites include mass-ping, pingler, and pingomatic.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Creating an excellent video for your marketing is only the first step in video marketing. An excellent video is one that entertains or informs the viewer so well that the viewer is compelled to share the video with others. The referrals ultimately make the video successful, however search engine optimisation of your video is what will enable those first viewers to find it so that they are able to refer it to others.

Tag the video with keywords

Search engines are unable to search the content of your video in order to index it. Instead, they search the text provided by tags, annotations, descriptions, and transcripts. The names of these text fields vary depending on which video sharing service you are using. YouTube is the largest video sharing service, so the field names in YouTube that you should enter your keywords into are Captions, Category Listing, Keyword Tags, Subtitles, Title Tag, and Video Description. Use standard best practices for SEO keywords, including using natural language that includes keywords rather than merely lists of keywords and using similar keywords rather than one identical keyword over and over.

Use all your options

Don’t limit yourself to a single YouTube channel for your videos. You should host videos on your website as well as hosting them on your YouTube channel. Use additional video sharing services such as Vimeo or the video platforms specifically associated with the Yahoo! and Google search engines. Whenever you post a new video be sure to blog about it, and include a link to the video in your Twitter feed. Use a still image from the video to pin the link to your Pinterest board. Make sure that all of your announcement links are easy for your customers to share by using buttons, and of course, make sure that links back to your website are included in multiple places in every video.

Monitor and split test

The key to successful long term search engine optimisation is constantly refining your keyword usage to match what your customers are actively looking for. Two tools to help you accomplish this with your video marketing are Google Analytics and YouTube Analytics. Google Analytics will tell you how many of your website visitors are arriving as a result of your video marketing efforts. YouTube Analytics further breaks that number down, to tell you how each video is individually performing. This way, you can change the headlines, change the descriptive text, change the still image associated with the video, or make many other tests and tweaks, then see which version of the video performs better in the search results. That will tell you what your customers want most, so you can better provide videos that meet their needs.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

To increase your conversions from website visitors, you need a professional website that visitors feel can be trusted. A clean, uncluttered website design that can be easily navigated lends a professional feel. One simple way to make your website more trustworthy is to use certification logos from your shopping cart system or other authentication system. The best way to make your website more trustworthy, however, is to use testimonials.

Text testimonials

Software exists that allows you to create a JavaScript text box on your website that can display a variety of different testimonials from your happy customers. Depending on implementation, the text may be replaced at various intervals or may slowly scroll up the box. This sort of feature lends itself to short testimonials of no more than a sentence or two. Because you are showing a great volume of testimonials, the individual testimonials do not have to be perfect. The human touch of unique phrasing, odd spellings, and unusual focus adds realism and additional believability. If your company is known for one thing, such as rapid delivery, the occasional testimonial talking about other facets of your company, such as customer service, rounds out the picture of your company as trustworthy and reliable.

Showcases

Showcases are longer testimonials, usually including photographs or other visual information demonstrating the situation for the customer before your company was hired, or your product was purchased, and the vastly improved situation afterwards. They are frequently multiple paragraphs in length. Because of this, they are often located on a separate webpage devoted to customer success stories. You can feature one showcase on your main webpage, or offer links to them in a JavaScript box similar to the one used for text testimonials. Because of the nature of showcases, images that capture the essence of the customer experience as well as a few key words make the best links.

Video testimonials

The most believable testimonials are video testimonials. After all, people have a finely developed sense of when another person is lying. They will trust someone giving their testimonial in video format more than they will trust that exact same testimonial in text format. The keys to making a convincing video testimonial are to connect the video with the product or service. Instead of simply filming a “talking head” against a boring backdrop, show the person using the product or service while talking about how wonderful it is. This engages the viewer and makes your product or service seem more familiar even while it stresses the value and trustworthiness. You can also intersperse video of a customer speaking with voice over still images. That lets you demonstrate the before and after nature of the testimonial much as a showcase does while keeping the power of video.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been discussing some of the niche social marketing channels, which I’ve suggested you consider in addition to the main markets of Facebook and Twitter. Today I’d like to focus on a type of social marketing rather than a specific channel—namely video.

A brief, well-done video can be a highly effective way to get your business’ message out to a wider audience. We’ve all seen the news about videos that have gone viral on the Internet (even if we haven’t had the guilty pleasure of having seen them ourselves). And with the technology out there on the market these days, it isn’t necessary to engage the services of a high-priced video production company to make an expensive video. You can obtain an inexpensive, easy-to-use software package to produce your own clips that help to tell your story.

Here are some tips to keep in mind.

Be Expert

Video marketing can be an excellent way to establish your bona fides. You can accomplish this through a number of video techniques. You might produce a how-to video to demonstrate the proper use of your product, or you might visit your industry’s trade show and interview other attendees to demonstrate that you’re part of the “in” crowd. How-to videos are especially effective and are among the most sought videos on the Internet.

Be Consistent

If you’re going to use video as a marketing tool, it’s important that you do it regularly. It’s not helpful to just create a video once or twice and leave it at that. Establish a video channel on YouTube and publish videos monthly or quarterly—or whatever works with your schedule. Whatever you decide to do, do it consistently.

Be Brief

The best videos in terms of popularity are less than three minutes long, so don’t be concerned that you have to produce a long documentary about your product or service. Try to say whatever you have to say succinctly.

Be a Star

When looking for the person to feature in your video, look beyond the company president or the PR person. You want to feature the person with the most enthusiasm and the biggest smile. Maybe that person is the person who answers the phones or sorts the mail. If that’s the case, then so be it. You want to use the person who has the best ability to tell your story.

Be Optimised

As with all of your online marketing efforts, when doing video marketing think about SEO strategies. While your video’s title should attract attention, you also want it to show up in search engines, so include keywords. Also use keywords in the video’s description and tags, and be sure to include a link to your website in the description.

Following a few simple steps can lead to a great deal of success with video marketing. In addition to sharing your video on YouTube, you can also consider sharing to Vimeo, Yahoo! Screen, and Flickr. Do you have a success story with video? Tell our readers in the comments below.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image by Ukberri.net)

YouTube is, by any measure, one of the most popular sites in the world. In terms of page visits, it is the third most popular website. In terms of search queries, it recently surpassed Yahoo! to become the world’s second most-popular search engine. More than 10,000 videos are uploaded to the site every day, and some experts think that that number could actually be as high as 50,000!

Yet, despite these numbers, YouTube seems to get left off of most small business marketing campaigns. If you’re choosing to focus only on blogging, Twitter, and Facebook, then you’re making a huge mistake.

First, Engage

The golden rule of social networking applies to YouTube just as well as it does to any other site. If you want your videos to be watched, you need to engage with the community. Create an account, and search for relevant videos in your industry. Rate them, comment on them, and share quality videos via Facebook and Twitter. If you’re socially engaged with the social network, you’ll see that a lot more people will be watching your videos.

Make a Great Video

The next step is to create a quality video. This, I believe, is what turns most small business owners off of YouTube. But it’s actually much easier than it seems.

Start by looking at your competitors videos. What format are they using? How are they telling their story? Look at the composition of the videos in your industry that you think are the most effective, and try to emulate the best aspects.

One word of caution – don’t make the advertisement obvious. YouTube users don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to. They want to be educated and informed. A quick product mention at the end, or something to draw your watchers back to your site will suffice.

Optimize for YouTube

Much like you would optimize a website to make it more easily searchable, you need to optimize your videos to make them more easily searchable on YouTube. As I mentioned before, in excess of 10,000 videos are uploaded every day. If you don’t optimize your video, it will be lost before anyone even has a chance to watch it.

Like website SEO, YouTube SEO is all about metadata and titling. Do your keyword research, and make sure that your title incorporates your target keyword or phrase. Likewise for the rest of the metadata – descriptions, tags, keywords. This is what gets your video watched instead of the thousands of others with similar content.

Now get out there and start marketing your business on YouTube. You have the numbers – it’s the second most popular search engine in the world. You have the tools – the keys to getting your video watched are community engagement, great content, and metadata optimization. So start your video marketing campaign today!

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Consumers enjoy watching video that much is clear, witness the success of the magic box, also known as the television. What consumers hate about television is the commercials. You have probably already considered adding some video content to your website, but have you thought about adding it to your email blasts, as well? Video is much more likely to generate a click thru than any other email content. However, there are some things to remember about creating video marketing content for online distribution.

Keep it Informational, No Hard Sales

Consumers enjoy watching video content, but commercials are something to be endured or tolerated. Don’t put a commercial in your email blasts; it works against your marketing efforts. Instead, take the opportunity to teach customers about solutions that may help them. Consumers are more interested in researching products before purchasing than ever before. The availability of information via online sources allows consumers to make informed purchasing decisions. You must ensure that your videos educate consumers, not only about your company or products, but about solutions to problems they experience. Keep video content focused on customer needs, rather than company sales directives. Video content needs to be used thoughtfully to build customer relationships.

Make an Emotional Appeal

Videos naturally trigger reactions that help develop trust, and including emotional content in the video will increase the potential impact. Your video should talk to customers about problems they face and potential solutions. The emotion should come out at the end, and connect with your brand. By helping customers determine what they need or want, and by appealing to their emotions, you generate potential sales. Including video content may not be something that you can do internally, so hiring a marketing company can help your business with the necessary production elements.

Email blasts are included in most marketing campaigns, and companies should always be on the look out for new ways to improve read rates. Email blasts are still popular because they are cheap to produce, but they do not have the best success rate. Many emails have a less than 10% read rate, which means that any strategy that can up that number is incredibly valuable. Video content embedded in emails can increase read rates by up to 500%. Make sure that your company is staying at the front of the marketing wave, so that you get the most benefit from your marketing efforts.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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