Effective Video Marketing in 2014

Nowadays, Video Marketing has become an essential element of online marketing strategy to generate brand awareness, popularity, high quality pre-qualified leads, traffic and sales. Video Marketing has been here since ages in the mode of TV commercial, but it is a newly adopted and most viral marketing concept by the online industry which is gradually turning into a trend. Many surveys have proved that even the search engines love videos and give them a lot of priority over other results. Video Marketing creates trust in your prospects. It gives you authority, value and credibility. It provides confidence to the customers/clients in you and your business.

Nevertheless, some business owners as well as online marketing experts still have their doubts regarding the success and effectiveness of Video Marketing.

Why is Video more important than other traditional marketing techniques?

Users hate reading:

Science has proved that visuals are easy to understand by a human brain. Thus video gained great popularity in marketing, a one minute video is equal to 1.8 million words that’s, roughly 3600 web pages! Say, if you could write one web page an hour it would take you 150 days to write enough content that can create the same impact that a 1 minute commercial did. Weird isn’t it?

But, these facts prove that a user looking for a particular product or service is more likely to watch an informative video rather than loads of content. So rather than creating long and descriptive articles for your product and services its more suitable to create a simple video to impress your clients.

How can I start Video Marketing for my business?

Create Storyline:

Storyboarding is basically a combined graphical presentation of two main parts- images & description of a scene. In other words it is a collection of photo, drawings or graphics that elaborate the sequence of scenes in a video. To start with your own storyboard you can first as yourself, What message will your video deliver and what will it all be about?

Brainstorming can be done by asking yourself questions like:

What’s currently popular in mass media and news?
Does someone working for you have an interesting talent?
Is it possible to do a parody, song, TV show or something?
How can we make our target audience laugh and smile with us?
What information does our target audience need and what they want to learn?

Or else simply list out your frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) that you think your customers/clients will ask before they buy your products/services. It hardly takes time. Now based on that questionnaire, create a good story line with answers and solutions for it. You must provide a good story or a case study with visual animation, more like a television commercial (TVC). Beside this you can create video for promotional offer and informative video which may help your end clients to take buying decision.

Product Demonstration or Tutorials
Rather than giving descriptive contextual information related to your product, service or promotional offer using a small video to do it would be a really great idea.

Collect Feedback, Testimonials and Reviews
Request your satisfied clients/customers to provide you their positive feedback, reviews and testimonials in form of Videos.

The Right Tool: It is very simple. No matter whichever business you are in, you just need to answer your customers, educate them, give away the right information, and earn their trust.

Technical knowledge is preferred, but if not, then one requires the right tool to create the video. That is it. Here I have listed a few amazing video creation free and paid sites list.

Prezi – www.prezi.com
Youtube Editor – www.youtube.com/editor
Pixorial – www.pixorial.com/educators
Animoto – www.animoto.com
WeVideo – www.wevideo.com
Powtoon – www.powtoon.com
GoAnimate – www.goanimate.com
Magistro – www.magistro.com
Wideo – www.wideo.com

There are lots more tools and Technics to create and edit the videos but this post is for generic people. So I have not included in depth technical stuff like camera, lights, audio and other editing tools which are available for free and paid.

Name your Video Wisely: The title of the video is the most important factor, thus it is very important to name the video carefully. Keywords could be of great help here. Research about keywords and use the ones which are more likely to be searched for by your customers/clients.

Call to Action: At the end of the video, you can provide a link (View more/For More Information) where users can see more videos related to your services or product queries. Along with this link, you could provide a ‘call to action’ like the email id, or phone number.

Spread/Share it: The last but a very major part is to upload your video on major video sharing sites.

Video Publishing Sites

YouTube
Viddler
Vimeo
Break (Video Humor)
Blip.tv (Podcasting)

Once you upload the video, share it with the top 50 social bookmarking sites and various social media platforms such as Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn etc. It has proven to be really good for the SERP’s.

Of course, at the end of the day sales and conversion counts! Many times a video doesn’t bring in leads and sales directly. But, it can be used as a supplement to promote other lead generation campaigns indirectly. For example, when you publish a video you may see a boost in website or blog traffic and these visitors may end up buying a service or product related or completely unrelated to the video.

Also, video gives you an authority over your audience and helps differentiate you from your competitors. If you have a direct sales team that communicates directly with leads and potential prospects, and luckily if one of your potential client has already seen your video before he meets your sales rep. he will most likely have a more personal conversation regarding his hurdles and requirements this info could help your sales guy close the deal easily.

We suggest you to try video marketing and yes, do not forget to share about your success in the comments below also let us know if you feel we have missed anything.