If you are serious about creating marketing experiences, start creating and marketing videos. Video marketing is a universally valuable marketing strategy. It does not matter whether you are marketing yourself, your business or your startup. What matters is that you set aside some time for making videos and marketing them to your audience.
Creating, uploading and sharing video content has never been easier. The cost to create high quality videos is low. The barriers to entry to distribution are non existent, and the potential benefits are high. This post will show you how to take full advantage.
Why am I so adamant about video marketing? To me, video marketing just makes sense. Video is the most preferred form of online content, and the demand for video content continues to grow. I don’t even think of it as marketing; I think of it as supplying demand. In January 2014, Americans viewed 48.7 billion online videos. That’s 1.13 million videos watched every minute. Watching videos online is popular outside the United States, too. Online video traffic represents over 66% of all global Internet traffic. Cisco estimates this number will rise to 79% by 2018. That’s +20% in a five year period.
My 4 video marketing tips
1. Upload your videos to YouTube before anywhere else.
I have more YouTube channels than I can remember passwords for, and many of my low-cost videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. YouTube is my preferred video marketing channel because it is the most popular destination for video content. YouTube’s internal statistics reveal that YouTube reaches over 1 billion unique monthly visitors from around the globe. Furthermore, YouTube reaches more 18-34 year olds than any other cable network. I tend to be skeptical of every statistic I read online, but I believe what YouTube says because of my own behavior. There’s a free software application called RescueTime that analyzes how you allocate your computer time. Using RescueTime, I know for a fact that YouTube video watching is by far my most preferred from of digital entertainment.
Something interesting I think is worth bringing to your attention: The August 2014 comScore rankings of the top online video content properties. Of course Google Sites ranks #1 since YouTube is under the Google umbrella. Facebook is securely in the #2 position. I looked up last year’s data and found that Facebook’s total unique video viewers grew 74% year-over-year (Aug 2013 vs Aug 2014). While I still recommend you focus on YouTube, Facebook is definitely worth keeping on your radar.
2. The quality of your content is more important than the quality of your production.
Don’t feel pressure to buy an expensive video camera or hire a production assistant. You can use your smartphone as a camera or a webcam. As long as your videos are not filmed in a dark room or during a windstorm, you’re good to go. A good portion of the videos I streamed on YouTube last month were not made by professionals, and I cannot think of one brand that became less likable in my mind because of their YouTube videos. I can remember some of the brands that produced content that I watched and enjoyed, though. If the content is valuable to your audience, they won’t nitpick about the camera quality.
3. YouTube SEO will boost your video marketing efforts.
The video metrics of a one of my recent YouTube clips illustrates the importance of video SEO. The largest source of traffic to my video was YouTube search (42%). I wasn’t too surprised by this. After all, YouTube is technically the second most popular search engine behind Google. However, what I did find interesting is that viewers who watched the video for the longest period of time found the video via YouTube search. Organic search traffic delivers high quality customers, and YouTube search is no exception.
4. Don’t forget to regularly analyze your YouTube analytics.
If you are marketing videos through YouTube — and you should be — then definitely take the time to analyze the metrics. The one thing that has changed most since I began using video marketing to grow my businesses is YouTube’s analytics dashboard. It is full of valuable insight about your videos, and is extremely easy to understand. YouTube provides a useful analytics dashboard to anyone with a YouTube channel. The above example (Tip #3) of YouTube SEO success cites YouTube’s excellent video analytics that all free users can use to help their video marketing.
If you have a smartphone, you have a video camera. If you have iMovie, you have editing software. If you have a YouTube account, you have a TV channel. What’s holding you back?
