Market Your Business with Online Video

One of the most popular activities on the web is watching video. People of all ages and backgrounds love watching videos, and the genre has grown well beyond funny clips, sports highlights, and music videos. In fact, online video isn't just for entertainment purposes now, and you can use that to your advantage to help promote your business.

First, let's talk about just how popular and powerful online video is. Here are some stats about online video consumption.

1. Nielsen reports there were over 141 million unique viewers of online video in 2010
2. That figure represents a year over year increase of 10.5%
3. The average time spent per viewer watching online videos was 181.9 minutes
4. YouTube alone pulled in 108,776,000 million unique viewers monthly

Are those numbers large enough to get your attention? Within such huge audiences, there are bound to be people out there looking for the products and services you provide. And what's more, these consumers exhibit high engagement levels. Not only in the amount of time they spend watching videos online as referenced above, but also in the fact that in order for them to see a video, typically they have sought it out or had it sent from a credible source like a friend or family member. So someone watching your online video is doing so of their own free will (as opposed to someone subjected to a commercial during a TV show) so they stand a much better chance of converting to becoming a customer.

Of course, it is easy to say there's a great opportunity out there on the web. It can be more difficult to figure out exactly where your specific opportunity is. There are lots of potential starting points. For instance, how-to videos have a huge audience on the web. These could be anything from how to repair something to how to apply makeup and put together the perfect outfit to how to increase your fuel efficiency. You need to think about what you can offer the public that adds value to their lives and will help position you in their minds as a positive, helpful force. To do this, you could ask yourself, "What questions do my customers most frequently ask?" or "What parts of my web site draw the most visitors?" Knowing what people are interested in will help you determine what kind of content to produce for them.

A second way to go is to produce an interactive Q and A type video. You could invite your customers to send in questions about your products and services, and then you could respond to them via online video. You could make this a weekly or monthly occurrence, and then customers would know to visit your web site, YouTube, or wherever you decide to post the video on a regular basis to see if their question was answered.

If you produce commercials for your business, you can upload those to video sites as well. People search for your brand online on lots of different sites, including sites you may not initially think of like YouTube. By uploading your commercials, you will be able to have more control over what people see when they search for your brand name. Wouldn't you rather have them exposed to your professionally-shot commercial than someone on a webcam reviewing your product?

Video promotions are always a big hit as well. One popular way to execute online video promotions is to have customers submit videos of themselves doing some specified action, and the person who does it the best or correctly wins a prize. This is an especially powerful form of online video marketing because in this scenario, your customers begin creating your marketing messages for you. Even if the videos they make do not mention your brand, the fact that people are making videos at your request lends credibility and respect to your brand.

Getting these videos online is quite simple and costs nothing. The best course of action is to begin by uploading your video to YouTube. Why is this the ideal starting point? 

1. YouTube is owned by Google, and Google constantly crawls YouTube for its search engine results. So by posting a video to YouTube, you are increasing your odds of it also showing up in the Google search results.
2. Whenever you post a video to YouTube, you will be given a code snippet that you can copy and paste on pretty much any site. So you can then add the video to your site, your blog, your social media pages, and anywhere else you want to promote your web site.

Online video offers more opportunity to your business than you may realize. It gives you access to an audience that is quite large in size and extremely engaged with the content they are consuming. There are many different ways to successfully execute an online video marketing campaign, and the barriers to getting videos online are quite low.

Taken from blogspot.com  Written by Stanley Quinn