Video Killed the Radio Star (But Not Your Marketing)
Today is the 9th annual Innotech Austin Conference & Expo and Apogee’s own Bill Leake and Alan LaFrance had a session on how to embrace and utilize video in order to help marketing efforts, “Video Killed The Radio Star (But Not Your Marketing)”. Here is a recap.
The presentation began with a few impressive statistics as to why it’s a good idea to invest in video marketing:
- People that watch a product video are 60 – 85% more likely to buy (IR et al)
- Over 800 Million unique users visit YouTube monthly (YouTube)
- Over 1 trillion video views in 2011 (YouTube)
- Video improved add-to-cart by 144% for a Retailer (Internet Retailer)
- Videos are the fastest growing ad format in 2012 with 55% growth (eMarketer)
Next Alan talked about how to make an effective video and the example he used was the popular Blendtec YouTube series “Will it Blend?” Here are the main points of the segment:
- Research and identify a topic and purpose – when you’re thinking of video content, do your research. Go into making your video with a relevant topic and purpose.
- Plan out the video content – have a plan before you start video production. Create a storyboard/wireframe of your idea to effectively execute your video.
- Use quality equipment – don’t use subpar equipment (i.e. Smartphone camera) to produce a video. Even on YouTube, people don’t want to see low quality videos.
- Spend equal time publicizing as you do producing – don’t just spend all your time and money producing a video and no effort with promotion. With no promotion no one will be aware of your video and in turn you wont get results.
- Listen – listen to what your viewers are saying about your video. Read the comments, you might be surprised by the insights you can gather. There might be information there that can help you better cater to your audience with your next video. People will tell you what they want to see and what they’re interested in.
- Don’t be afraid to destroy stuff – don’t be afraid to take a risk.
Following these points we saw a great example of a company using video to successfully sale a product, Stacks & Stacks dog door. They might not have the cleanest website but they’ve implemented videos that show just how easy it is to install a pet screen doggie door, sizes available, and many other product insights. According to Internet Retailer, Stacks & Stacks improved their “Add-to-Cart” metric by 144% with this video alone.
Bill presented the next portion of the presentation and he quickly touched on 4 main points:
- How are online videos online found?
- The importance of YouTube
- Posted vs. Hosted
- YouTube Optimization
As far as how users discover videos online, there were some interesting statistics presented:
- 44% – discover videos randomly
- 43% – discover videos via sharing
- 43% – discover videos via video websites
- 39% – discover videos via search engines
- 27% – discover videos via marketing email
- 4% – discover videos via RSS & MRSS feeds
Since the launch of blended search, videos are becoming more prevalent in Google’s universal search,”58% of users who search Google were served video in universal search engine results pages”.
So you know the benefits of developing videos for marketing and where people discover them, but what are the placement options? - Well when thinking about videos, you have 2 basic options. You can post or host the video. Posting means that the video content is uploaded to video sharing sites, social media, etc. Hosting means that the video content is on your website.
The benefits of posted video SEO:
- Existing Traffic – existing video website have a critical mass of traffic and users, which makes it easier to go viral
- There is a better ability to rank on universal search (Google) and other search engines
- Potential to dominate the traditional SERPs with “carpet bombing” by submitting to multiple video sites, which is due to weak duplicate content filtering at present
- You don’t need your own website
- Control – you have control over related on-page text, encoded metadata, user experience, etc.
- You have control over monetization/advertising
- Generate traffic to your website
- Note: While you can currently dominate the SERPs with “carpet bombing” with posted strategies, this may go away with duplicate content filtering in the future.
Following this, we looked at the power of YouTube and how much it’s grown in the past year with some interesting stats:
- YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine
- Third most visited website (800 million uniques, only 50 million less than Facebook)
- 60 hours of video is uploaded EVERY minute (was 48 hours in 2011 and 20 hours in 2009)
- Over 4 BILLION videos are viewed each day (was 3 billion in 2011)
One of the best takeaways from the presentation was how to increase your chances to rank your videos / properly optimize them for SEO:
We were incredibly lucky to have two of our submitted panels chosen for SXSWi 2012, and as the mega conference of all mega conferences draws near, the excitement is definitely building. If you’re going to SXSWi, please feel free to join us in our sessions or at our booth–we would love to see you! 