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How to get online videos seen by your target audience
Before pressing play
It’s one of the most basic pieces of advice in almost all areas of business: Plan ahead. Like any marketing or advertising plan, your online video content should be part of an overall strategy and it should serve a definitive purpose if you want to reap the rewards.
How much video content do you want to release? Where and when do you want to release it? Fine tune your messaging, and make sure everyone involved is on the same page. Timing is key, so you want to promote video on a regular schedule, which enables your audience to know when to tune in. If you can only commit to posting once a month, that’s fine, just make sure you are consistent. You’ll know soon enough what’s working and what’s not.
Create high-quality content
Low-quality content – whether it’s your brand’s white papers, blogs, or presentations – won’t be widely accepted. The same rule applies to video. Just because you can shoot it with your smartphone doesn’t mean you should, especially if you lack the skills to polish it to a level considered professional. Everything you put online with your brand name represents you and your business. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
Optimization
Once your video content is ready, take the time to have a professional properly optimize it so existing customers and potential clients can find it. Crafting an optimized title and description, entering meta-tags, and choosing or creating a captivating cover shot are all things that must be done to position your video content for maximum success.
Distribution
Unless you’ve been building your video marketing library for a while, and you already have an eager audience, it is critical to regularly and properly share your videos as they are released. Post them on your website, fan them out across social media, and send them to your mailing list. Research also shows that big brands – including Coca-Cola and Toyota – are not just creating effective video content, 61 of the top 100 brands embed YouTube videos on their websites.
Encourage your existing audience, regardless of its size, to share your videos with their networks. If you have a video advertising budget, you can give your content a targeted boost by having someone run a paid campaign for you. If you don’t have a budget for such things, you should strongly consider it.
Whether your company is business-to-consumer or business-to-business, video provides a chance to stand out from the crowd. We live in an increasingly visual, interactive and engaging online world. When you build your presence by telling visual stories, brand recall will greatly improve and you’ll likely get an excellent return on investment.
Lisa Ostrikoff is a TV journalist and anchor-turned-creator of BizBOXTV, a Canadian online video production, advertising and social media marketing agency.
- Published in Facebook, Lisa Ostrikoff - The Globe And Mail, Video Advertising, Video Marketing, YouTube
AUDI CARE ~ Glenmore Audi
- Published in Automotive Marketing, Calgary, Facebook, Video
5 ways to make video ads that increase sales
If you’re a business owner already using online video to promote or advertise your business, congratulations. You’re ahead of the curve. But if you haven’t yet considered using video to broadcast your brand, you’re missing out. Why? Because using online video will not only improve your search engine rankings and provide an effective marketing tool available to a worldwide audience, but also leave a lasting impression on potential customers and increase your sales.
Here are five things to keep in mind when using online video for your business:
1. Tell a story. One of the buzzwords characterizing the shift away from pure selling is ‘storytelling.’ In Carmine Gallo’s The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, she says, “the single most important thing to dramatically improve your presentation is to have a story to tell.” With online video, story-driven videos are becoming more and more popular simply because they’re effective; in fact, videos that engage viewers with a story are more likely to be shared, liked and commented on. Consider it an opportunity to visually recount your story and show potential customers something they wouldn’t be able to see anywhere else.
2. Get personal. If you’re a quirky business owner or your company has a killer corporate culture, let it shine. Standing out means being yourself, and highlighting what differentiates your business from others. And although speaking to a lens can be unnerving for newcomers, you’ll come across more naturally if the videographer asks you questions, rather than having you deliver hard line.
3. Boost views and conversions with clear calls to action . Effective online video educates and entertains, but what you also want to make sure it does is inspires the viewer to act. If your online video campaign is more about branding, make sure you include a clear call to action; whether it be visit your website and store, call a phone number, buy now or connect with you on social media. Before this, however, you want to make sure your video gets played in the first place. A recent study shows that using active calls to actions like ‘Click to Play,’ or ‘Learn More,’ can increase a video’s view rate by 12 times over passive labels like ‘Video’ or ‘Video Here.’
4. Go pro. While many business owners produce their first videos themselves, based on thousands of client experiences, it’s likely you’re going to pay a professional to re-do it once you realize it’s lacking narrative and polish. Save yourself the time and added cost, and work with professionals from the very start. Online video is arguably the best marketing tool at your disposal, and the ROI is unquestionable. Bottom line: just because you could do it yourself or hire an amateur, doesn’t mean you should. Has it been successfully done before? Sure, but it’s rare and usually because the personalities in the videos are bigger than the distraction that bad video is. Consider your video your first point of contact with your prospective client. Would you want that to be anything less than the quality and professionalism your business represents?
5. Share-ability and engagement. Videos shared via social media are consumed more than text-based updates, which means there is more potential for a company’s message to be shared and seen via these platforms. “Consumers are more likely to enjoy a brand video and remember the brand involved if they come across it because of a social media recommendation,” according to a recent report . So when you make the move into video for your business, make sure you keep your potential ‘social’ audience in mind.
A number of studies have come to the same conclusion: online videos help businesses sell to affluent consumers. Internet Retailer states, “those who view a video are 144 per cent more likely to place that item in a shopping cart. 52 per cent say watching video makes them more confident about their purchasing decisions.” One more stat if you still need to be convinced: comScore reports, “consumers who watch a video are 64 per cent more likely to make a purchase than those who don’t.”
What are you waiting for? Consumers are ready and waiting to click play on your business’s video content.
Lisa Ostrikoff is a TV journalist and anchor-turned-creator of BizBOXTV, a Canadian online video production, advertising and social media marketing agency.
via 5 ways to create video ads that translate into cash.
Want customers to remember you? Social video is the key
The explosion of the ‘social’ Internet has provided content creators, marketers and advertisers with a cost effective way to distribute and share online video. And unlike traditional advertising, online video lets them target their audience and measure its impact through analytics
Social video is content that is influenced by social media and intended to be shared from person to person. If we find something relevant, informative or entertaining, we pass it on, and the cycle continues. This is essentially how content goes viral.
Content and news discovery is becoming less and less about searching out the information you are looking for. Instead, it’s being shared via social network recommendations – likes, shares, Retweets, Pins, +1, etc.
If you’re already knee-deep in social media, you’re exposed to this type of sharing behaviour on a daily, or minute by minute basis, depending on how often you frequent such platforms.
BI Intelligence recently examined the social video landscape, taking a closer look at how advertisers specifically.
Some of the main takeaways include:
• Online & social video audiences are expected to double by 2016, reaching 1.5-billion worldwide ( Cisco)
• Social media video has trumped non-social video as far as views/audience size.
• The majority of people now, and an increasingly significant number in the future, will discover and watch video content on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
• Video length is shrinking. Social media audiences seem to prefer to “snack” on social video.
• In the U.S., Facebook had the fastest-growing online video audience of major web properties over the last 10 months, and is just second to Google in terms of video audience size. In April 2013 alone, 63-million people watched video on Facebook.
The phenomenon isn’t showing signs of slowing anytime soon. So if you’re a business owner, now is the time to start thinking about integrating social video into your marketing and advertising budgets, before your competitors do.
Need another reason? According to the study mentioned above, “consumers are more likely to enjoy a brand video and remember the brand involved if they come across it because of a social media recommendation.”
It may still be early in the game, but it’s better to stay ahead of the curve than work to catch up when it might be too late.
Lisa Ostrikoff is a TV journalist and anchor-turned-creator of BizBOXTV, a Canadian online video production, advertising and social media marketing agency. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook .
Want customers to remember your brand? Social video’s the key – The Globe and Mail.
4 reasons to consider branded video content
It’s being called native advertising, brand journalism, branded content, sponsored content, content marketing and custom content, often interchangeably. So, what exactly is it?
Native advertising is when an advertiser’s message is integrated – often seamlessly – into the rest of a platform’s content. The approach is designed to provide audiences with relevant content, rather than simply another ad. It’s part of the shift away from interruption marketing; its goal being instead to deliver value via education or entertainment, or a seamless combination of both.
It’s nothing new
The overall approach isn’t new. I’ve worked at news media organizations for more than a decade and the concept has taken various forms over the years. From the full-page spread in the newspaper about an investment opportunity written in a journalistic style, to the latest real estate or fashion report on television guest-hosted by a local ‘expert.’ Sometimes it’s made clear that it’s paid content, but other times it just seems to flow within the rest of the content – which, is essentially the point. The advertiser gets to deliver it’s content in a way familiar and comfortable to the existing audience.
Native advertising, today
The concept seems to be gaining steam as publishers hustle to remain profitable in the digital space. Certain media brands have, for a while now, been integrating sponsored branded video content into their websites, while treating it in much the same way as the journalism pieces they produce. The only difference is that these stories add a disclaimer that they are sponsored by said brand, but very often, they are written by journalists. Other examples include ‘sponsored by’ articles, promoted online videos or films, promoted tweets on Twitter and sponsored stories on Facebook. All of these represent the tip of the iceberg, digitally.
Critic concerns
Some critics are concerned that running advertorials compromises journalistic integrity. But the reality is, in my experience at least, advertisers often have an indirect effect on a publisher’s content regardless. From my very first week in a small market TV station, to nearly 10 years in a major media market, it happened more times than I could count; if I was doing a real estate or a seasonal story, for example, I was told to ‘contact our advertisers for an interview, first.’
Consumers have been absorbing advertiser messaging alongside journalistic content forever. If advertisers are able to provide interesting, relevant and meaningful content to an audience and present it in a ‘news you can use’ way, it should be seen as a win-win. The trick and the key, as always, is to offer value to an audience. Bottom line: those who don’t, won’t be successful with a branded video content approach.
Benefits for business
Done properly, native advertising can be beneficial to a business or brand, as it offers a channel to ‘tell your story’ in a way that is of specific interest to a reader or viewer, in a comfortable format. Gone are the days where advertising is a one-way broadcast. With the rise of the social space, brands have an opportunity to be part of the conversations and interact with potential customers. That interaction often starts with relevant content pieces, whether it be in the form of written articles, blogs or branded online videos, that spark the conversation and encourage sharing in the first place.
So, if your business wants to explore integrating content into the organic experience of any given online platform, this is your chance.
Lisa Ostrikoff is a TV journalist and anchor-turned-creator of BizBOXTV, a Canadian online video production, advertising and social media marketing agency. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook .
Four reasons to re-consider sponsored content – The Globe and Mail.
Facebook video ads coming, will autoplay in your feed
Facebook is reportedly plotting a way to squeeze even more adverts into your News Feed — and this time they’ll be moving pictures!
Zuckerberg and pals are going to debut the new video ads in July, the Financial Times reports, in a bid to wring more cash out of the 750 million-strong social network.
Adverts will pop up in your News Feed, along with your pals’ status updates, baby photos, cats, food, engagement rings and more babies. Videos will apparently play automatically when the page loads, but will be muted by default.
If you choose to unmute, the video will start afresh. Each advert will be limited to a mere 15 seconds in duration, and Facebook will reportedly ensure you only see videos from a single brand in any given day.
via Facebook video ads incoming, will autoplay in your feed | CNET UK.
- Published in Facebook, Social Media Video
Facebook Video Production: Views Hitting All-Time Highs
Facebook reached a new high last month with almost 558 million video views, according to comScore’s February 2013 US Online Video Rankings.
For the month, Facebook was second with 61.2 million unique video viewers — well behind Google/YouTube’s 150.6 million uniques. Facebook’s 558 million video views was third overall, way behind Google/YouTube’s 11.3 billion and AOL with 570 million video views. Facebook is near the bottom when it comes to engagement, with an average of 19.9 minutes per viewer (MPV) during February. The only Top 10 video site with lower engagement is Amazon at 12.6 MPV.
Facebook video production views wasn’t the only online video record last month. ComScore says Google/YouTube set a new high with more than 2.2 billion video ads delivered in February — almost a quarter of the overall 9.9 billion video ads that were shown during the month.
via Facebook’s 558 Million Video Views In February Is Its All-Time High [comScore].
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A Facebook Video Production Company – Serving: Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto + more!
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- Published in Facebook, Video Production
Time Spent On Facebook Increases 700%
The total time spent on Facebook has increased nearly 700% year over year, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen reported Tuesday that total time spent on the social networking site rose from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion minutes in April 2009, making it the top social network in terms of the amount of time users spend on the site.
“We have seen some very exciting growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace,” Jon Gibs, VP of media and agency insights for Nielsen Online, said in a prepared statement. “Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way, perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space.”
However, he warned that social networking sites can fall out of favor quickly with consumers, regardless of how fast they are growing or how big they are. As proof, Gibs pointed out that Friendster and MySpace were rising stars and appeared to be unbeatable.
“Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune,” he said. “Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment’s notice.”
Nevertheless, April marked the fourth consecutive month that Facebook ranked first for its number of unique visitors and time spent.
MySpace, however, retains the lead in one respect: online video. The site has 120.8 million video streams, and its visitors spent 384 million minutes watching video on the site, according to Nielsen. That’s about 38.8 minutes for each viewer. Facebook visitors spend just 113.5 million minutes viewing video on the site in April, with just 11.2 minutes per viewer. Those figures draw attention to the importance of who visits the sites and what engenders their loyalty, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen found that Facebook seems to hold more appeal to people between the ages of 25 and 34 and 35 to 49, respectively, while MySpace draws users from ages 18 to 24 and 12 to 17.
- Published in Facebook, Social Media Video
Nielsen Knows How Much Time You Waste On Facebook, Twitter
According to a study by Nielsen Online, users spent 13.9 billion minutes overall on Facebook alone in April 2009, a statistic that’s up a whopping 700 percent from the 1.7 billion minutes calculated at the same time a year earlier.
It’s another sign of Facebook’s exploding popularity, and not a bad statistic for a social networking behemoth that now boasts more than 200 million members.
But it’s hardly the only growing platform. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter users clocked 300 million overall minutes on Twitter for April, an increase of 3,712 percent from Twitter’s April 2008 numbers. And that still only makes Twitter the fifth most popular social networking service, behind MySpace, Blogger and Tagged.com—although it is by a wide margin the fastest growing, according to Nielsen.
“We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace,” said Jon Gibs, Nielsen’s vice president for online media and agency insights, in a statement. “Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way, perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space.”
via Nielsen Knows How Much Time You Waste On Facebook, Twitter.
- Published in Facebook, Social Media Video, Video, YouTube
All About Facebook – Social Media
More and more every day, the social networking giant Facebook is becoming a large part of the overall Internet experience. Company estimates state that over 175 million people have joined since its founding in 2005, and the users themselves contribute millions of pieces of content daily.
The February 2009 Facebook numbers are striking. Each day during the month, Facebook users averaged over 3 billion minutes on the site. They updated their status 15 million times and became “fans” of a particular company, brand, product or person 3.5 million times daily.
via eMarketer
- Published in Facebook, Social Media Video