You may have heard about the viral success of videos from Old Spice, Gillette, Blendtec and IKEA on YouTube, each with millions of views to date. More and more, companies are looking to online video as a way to market their goods and services while also providing entertaining and informative content to consumers that stands apart form their competition. Posting videos to YouTube is ideal for businesses large and small. The service is free and your videos can live online as long as you'd like, so a small initial investment to produce a video can result in long term returns. An additional benefit to posting videos to YouTube - you don't have to worry about bandwidth issues on your own website - you can simply embed the code for your desired YouTube video and it will play on your website!
Some tips to making YouTube videos work for your business:
- Investing in expensive equipment to produce a video is simply not necessary - YouTube videos are just 320 x 400 pixels. We recommend that you invest in a user-friendly video camera for under $500.
- Proper lighting while recording is important and doesn't have to be expensive. (Read Bill Moyer's video lighting secrets for your home studio.)
- Choose a descriptive user name - this will become the name of your YouTube channel and you will not be able to change it.
- Be sure to include your website URL in your video.
- Videos must be under 10 minutes in length - but your video does not have to be that long!
- Give a good deal of thought to your choice of video name, your video description and the keywords you associate with your video, you want search engines to be able to find your video so chose keywords that best fit your business offerings and niche.
- Let your contacts know about your YouTube channel, notify them via email or on a social network such as Facebook or Twitter and be sure to post the URL on all your marketing materials and include the link in your email signature.
- Interact with other YouTube users - comment on relevant videos and subscribe to other channels in order to drive some traffic to your channel.
Let us know if you are using online video to market your business, leave us a comment below with the URL for your videos.
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See for yourself why the videos from Old Spice, Gillette, Blendtec and IKEA went viral!
Old Spice
Gillette
Blendtec
IKEA
Haha! Fun stuff. Thanks for pulling these videos together. Creating a viral video is about like herding cats - not an easy task but when it works it's golden!
ReplyDeleteDavid, thanks for your comment, we're glad you liked the post.
ReplyDelete