Calgary YouTube: Let customers discover your business

If you’re a small business, it’s doubtful any video about your product, service or personnel will be be seen by a billion people… but maybe a hundred thousand targeted customers would be nice. To get a fraction of that, you really ought to be using more video in your marketing, particularly through YouTube.

My law firm uses YouTube to advertise its lawyers and certain boutique practice areas, like franchising, animal law and immigration law, giving potential clients information about the practice area and also about the lawyer, who they might feel comfortable enough to hire…or not hire, simply as a result of the video. Other legal, accounting and services based organizations regularly use online video to market their professionals.

Going cheap can mean you look cheap. So hire a professional web video and social media marketing agency to produce and distribute a YouTube friendly video that can be accessed on your company’s website and circulated on other social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

And if you’ve been featured in a traditional television interview, don’t let it go to waste. Try to get the interview downloaded to YouTube so that you can alert your clients, potential clients and other interested media. Professional public relations consultants can help you with that.

Perhaps the most important reason why you need more video was summed up best in an article by fellow columnist Lisa Ostrikoff of BizBOXTV: Want a higher search ranking overnight? Here’s how to do it. Referring to the need for your company’s web page to rank as high as possible in Google searches, she says “a quality web video hosted on your site makes the page 50 times more likely to be shown on the first page of Google search results”, which is where you want to be, because often, page 2 results might as well be page 6 results.

She goes on to say “Ever since Google purchased YouTube, the likelihood that [Google] will rank these videos favourably in search algorithms has markedly increased. In fact, it is possible to obtain a high ranking on Google practically overnight when web video is effectively used on a page. Google now rates web video even higher than high-quality, keyword-rich articles.”

So the most important reason to use more video is so that you have a better chance of being found higher on Google than your competitors.

via Let customers discover your business on YouTube – The Globe and Mail.