If you’re looking for creative ways to market your product or service, you should definitely be looking at adding video into your marketing mix. Videos allow you to tell your story in ways that text just can’t. With video, you can condense detailed product descriptions, diagrams, and explanations into short two or three minute video clips that keep your visitors interested and engaged.
If given the choice, most people will choose watching a video over having to plow through pages of text. So rather than talk about why your product or service is better than the competition, why not show them.
Read on to learn about how you can incorporate video into your online marketing efforts.
Video Dos and Don’ts
If you’re marketing a product, don’t use a talking head to describe the product. Feature the product instead. Try to keep your videos under three minutes. When it comes to videos for online use, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on high production videos. Just about any consumer-grade camera will do. If you do want to step it up a notch, you might want to invest in a tripod, a light, a wireless microphone, and a camera that has audio input capability. The last thing you’ll need is video editing software. There are a number of inexpensive software packages to choose from.
Marketing Your Video
Once you have your completed video, it’s time to put that video to work. You have three choices when it comes to making the video available for view. You can upload the video direct to your server and provide a link to the actual video. You can upload the video to a site like Vimeo, which is advertisement free. Or you can upload your video to YouTube.
There are advantages and disadvantages with all three choices, but the advantages of using YouTube make it the better choice. First, by using high traffic keywords, you can expand your marketing efforts well beyond your website. Your video on YouTube can attract thousands of views that you might not get if the video was only available on your website. And if you’re willing to spend a little on advertising, you can get even more exposure through promoted videos.
Promoted Videos
You can promote your videos on YouTube without being an AdWords customer, but if you are also using AdWords, using promoted videos is even more powerful. When a user searches for content on YouTube, along with the many suggested videos that appear, you may also see a list or promoted videos that are a lot like an AdWords ad.
Here is a screenshot that shows what a promoted video on YouTube looks like after searching for the term bicycle rack.
One of the big reasons for using promoted videos is the ability to add a call to action link as an overlay over the video. This feature is only available for promoted videos. Here is a screenshot that shows how etrailer.com is using the call to action overlay. This is the first video that appears in the promoted videos list.
The overlay appears a few seconds while the video is playing and then once again when the video is done playing. Clicking on the link takes the user directly to the etrailer website.
Displaying the video
When it comes to displaying the video on your site, you can embed the video or you can use a light-box technique. Here is an example of an embedded video. For this example I’ll use the book trailer for 35 Miles From Shore.
The second option for displaying a video is to use a thumbnail that links to the video, which plays in a light box. Here is an example of this technique.
One thing you don’t want t0 do is to provide a link to the video that takes the user away from your site.
Conclusions
Our experience has shown that ads that mention calls to actions such as “video demonstration,” “watch the video,” and “see video” tend to perform better. If you would like to add videos to your marketing efforts but would rather not have to deal with the technical side of things, just give us a call. We’ll be happy to help you implement this valuable marketing tool.
Look for a future article on how promoted videos and AdWords work together.
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