Video Marketing – Reality Check
Back in 2007, when I started my marketing consulting firm, my main focus was video marketing. Using a real video camera, not a cell phone, I would record reality style videos for my clients’ websites. Then I would upload them to every available video platform. I would search for other ways to get visibility for their videos, online and offline.
As time went along, I concentrated more on mobile and text marketing. It was a more affordable way for my clients to stay in touch with their customer lists. Back then, creating a business video could cost 10 times more than a well organized text campaign.
High cost, disappointing results
Recently I’ve been visiting local small businesses, and I was stunned by a very alarming trend. Some of these business owners have paid upwards of $3000 to so called video marketing “experts”. These “marketers” that recorded the videos, uploaded them to YouTube and a year later, the videos had an average of 20 views. Also during that time it haven’t generated any leads or sales.
I’ve owned businesses in the service, retail, internet and professional arenas. One aspect of business I learned early on was that I could be the best at running my business, however if I didn’t learn marketing, it would be for nothing.
So for the past twenty years, I have been constantly learning and updating my marketing knowledge. I have studied proven marketing concepts from the best minds of the past and present. And nowadays anyone with a mobile device can record a video and upload it to YouTube. However, it takes more than that to do video marketing or any type of marketing for that matter.
It takes having a marketing mindset along with some real world business experience to spot great marketing opportunities. We need to keep searching for the best marketing strategies.
This trend reminded of the beginning days of the internet when anyone with a computer and some knowledge of HTML, would call themselves “internet marketers”. Back then it was a common practice to just sell websites without any knowledge on how to make the website produce for the business owner. This is a dis-service to small business owners who put their trust in these “marketers”.
The Power of Video
Video marketing is a powerful marketing strategy for authority positioning, getting leads and sales. Establish your credibility and gain visibility also by doing video marketing. The statistics don’t lie. The number of people watching video everyday, is staggering. Google knows it too. But like I already mentioned, recording a video and uploading to YouTube is not enough.
Publish multi-media news releases since it allows for the embedding of videos which helps to get more juice out your video content.
Convert your video into an effective marketing tool by educating yourself first. Asking the video marketer for suggestions and ideas on how to best market a video, besides the obvious YouTube, is good starting point. It would give the business owner an idea on what to expect, even before the video is created.