Using ‘video’ in marketing has changed drastically thanks to massive technological advancements and innovation in the web. No longer is moving image the preserve of the TVC (television commercial) or clunky corporate videos that date terribly. It has become more accessible, affordable, dynamic and much more usable across different media. And this is great news for small to medium business.
Leading the charge for video accessibility is the one and only YouTube, the Google of its class (and yes Google does currently own YouTube!). Created back in 2005 it has truly revolutionised video sharing with recent figures suggesting 3,000,000,000 videos are being watched every day (including 1,000,000 on mobile devices) and 35 hours of video are uploaded onto YouTube every minute. Need some context? According to the VideoTrafficAcademy, more video is uploaded every 60 days than the main three US TV Networks have produced in 60 years. YouTube is the 3rd most visited website in the world and the 2nd most popular search engine!
But what does that all mean for us in the world of small to medium business? Certainly it gives us an avenue to host video but more importantly it has paved the way for people using internet video clips for mainstream information and entertainment. We all know attention spans are getting shorter and video has proven to be highly attractive to those younger generations who didn’t grow up searching for information in weighty sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
As a SME, what can we use video for? Now that we have more channels and opportunity to use our video we can typically generate better return on our investment in creating the video content in the first place. Think about…
- TVCs
- Video testimonials
- Corporate DVD
- Virtual tours
- Product demo videos
- Podcasts
- Training / educational videos
- Event footage
- Media mentions (have you featured on a news item or a lifestyle TV show?)
Setting up a corporate branded YouTube channel is the first step. Uploading any video you already have (your TVCs etc) is the second step. Then over time you need to build a video library that you can start to embed into your website, link to in your electronic newsletters and email signatures as and when you want to use video in your campaigns to add an exciting dimension to print campaigns.
Integrating your YouTube channel with your other Social Networks is also a great way to build traffic to and from the different networks. You can now link your Facebook account with YouTube, so every time you upload a new video, it will add it to your Facebook timeline. This is a great quick way to build traffic. buy watch hours on youtube