Video Marketing – Is Your Business Firing on All Cylinders?
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, can you image what a video is worth?
If you are a business owner and your not using video marketing to promote your product or service, your not only leaving money on the table, but your making it easier for the competition to make out like a bandit. Here are some sobering stats on YouTube in 2010 (From ‘Website Monitoring’):
- Exceed 2 BILLION (with a “B”) views a day (That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all 3 major US broadcast networks combined.
- 24 Hours of video is uploaded EVERY MINUTE
- More Video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 Days than all 3 major networks created in 60 YEARS!
- 94 of “Advertiser’s Age” 100 top advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube and the Google Content Network.
YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine on the internet (technically they are not a search engine, but that’s a topic for techies to debate, but this article is about making money for your business).
In case you didn’t know, YouTube was purchased by Google in Nov of 2006, and recently Google has started to include video results in the search results. Not only are they including links, but they are also adding video thumbnails . This is part of what’s called “Blended Search”, and includes not only videos, but also Google Maps, Social Media, Blog and News Feeds.
Ok, what does that have to do with my brick and mortar business?
Here is a quick example to illustrate how a very short video can help your business. As a Atlanta consumer who is considering replacing my shower tiles, I go to Google and type in “atlanta shower tile”.
There are almost a half a million pages that Google associates with that phrase. On the FIRST page of Google I see the following :
I’m much more likely to skip the links above and go straight to these videos first. The video on the right was uploaded by a local business back in 2008 and has been watched 108,603 times.
The video itself and the description of the video provides contact information for their business so a viewer can easily go to their website or simply pick up the phone and call.
There are a lot of video marketing strategies that can’t be covered in this brief article, but suffice it to say, local businesses are not yet utilizing video to it’s full potential. Those few businesses that are starting to market with video are getting customers that could be coming to your business.
It’s important to understand that you do not have to hire a professional videographer in most situations to produce your videos. Most of the videos that people are accustomed to watching online are not high end expensive productions. We’re accustomed to and actually appreciate real video from real people. If your camera shy, I have more good news. You don’t have to be on the video for the video to work. Direct marketing videos are normally 30-60 seconds in length and oftentimes do not include the owner.
For the video version of this article, go to http://www.MarketingHunters.com/cwj