When to Use Video

Marketing videos can be used when a company decides to promote, a bit more aggressively (in the good way), one or more of its products/services. They can help reach the prospects better, on a well-trodden path, that of visual advertising, laid before them by television. Given that more and more people nowadays turn to Internet in search of information, Internet marketing videos come naturally to supplement the Web user’s need for new, for useful, for sensational.

Advantages of Video Advertising

If you decide to use video in your marketing campaigns, it’s a very good option. It is catchier than other types of advertising. It captures the Web user’s attention easier and transports your message to prospects much faster than simple text.

A video ad can contain a demonstration of a product’s use and usability. Add to that a human face and a very pleasant voice (or even a well harmonized combination of a woman’s voice with a man’s), and you can have your prospects wrapper around your finger. By using these techniques, the prospective customer can relate more to your company and to what you’re promoting.

Video marketing is an efficient means of reaching prospective customers, of promoting the presentation of your products or services. The use of videos on the Internet brings numerous advantages. It is a great solution with great impact on the visitor. It combines the advantages of "classic" TV advertising with the Internet’s most important characteristic, interactivity.

The ad becomes thus more attractive to the Web surfer, who becomes more receptive to what you have to offer. Online marketing is therefore more cost effective than regular TV ads because it’s less expensive to produce and disseminate and it makes customer targeting a lot easier too.

Online video marketing, in my opinion, is a marketing strategy used by companies in order to promote products and services, by making use of short, catchy, informative videos, with the purpose of inducing awareness to the prospective customers about the promoted products/services and enticing them into purchasing the products/services.

Common Characteristics of Online Video Marketing

It is obvious that people enjoy more to watch TV or view something on their computer than reading. Information is delivered at a higher rate via images than through text.

The main advantage that Internet marketing videos have over the traditional, text format approach is that videos can get to the point much faster and waste less of the precious time of prospective customers. Instead of having the Web users go over some pages of text, trying to figure out the message that you’re actually trying to convey, you can deliver the same message in a small percentage of that time in a more attractive and inciting manner.

What’s To Come

This article is part 1 of 5 tips to video marketing. Please leave feedback on what you think about these tips and what changes should/should not be made. Hope to here from you soon.

Video article marketing is using information that was originally used for written articles and then having that information be presented in video format. Submitting your video to the social video sites, social networks, or on your own blog could bring in more traffic, just like if you were to submit your articles to article submission sites.

The goal of video article marketing is to get as many references your website(s) from as many high page rank sources as possible. Without the creation of a video you cannot get your content on social video sites such as Youtube. Creating video articles is a fast way to create the type of video content that can be submitted to these popular sites.

Here is a small list of tips to using video article marketing:

1. Take an existing article and read it first as audio only. A microphone and recording software will be needed.
2. If you have a PC you already have Windows Movie Maker where you can sync your bullet points of text to your narration. You then save this as an .avi video file and upload to a social video sharing site.
3. Another more advanced option is to create your bullets and images in Power Point, and then use screen capture video software. Then you simultaneously in real time read your article and sync your slides and your video is done in one take.
4. Another simple way to build relationships is to use a camcorder or a webcam and read the article to the camera.

These quick and simple steps can help you get started with video article marketing.

Andreas Roell of The ClickZ Network wrote a great article about brand management. According to Andreas, oftentimes branding is overlooked until there’s a crisis, but when a fiasco is looming, it’s overtly evident exactly how important a brand reputation can be. When publicity hits a brand negatively, marketers are suddenly in panic mode abou brand’s reputation.

Brand problems can range from information leaks to incidents that result in stock market meltdowns. Product launches, acquisitions, and other events all require the same marketing know in order to offset negative events through reputation management. While no one wants to think about a brand’s decline, there there are ways to deal with it.

According to Clickz, here are the reasons why using online video can work:

1. Video content drives news
2. Search engines can pick up video
3. It’s what people are watching
4. Videos go viral

If you are proactive and reach out to bloggers with videos posted on video sites, when you need to communicate with your key publics, you’ll have outlets to reach out to. “The best defense is a strong offense” is a perfect quote to signify the worked needed for this effect.

All those names – competing for attention and brain share – keep piling up into a considerable number. Some authors claim that about 10,000 new brands are created every day. Whatever the right number is, it’s a disproportionately high population compared with the tiny number of great brands. The management of most companies tends to believe that their brand is great.

The ultimate metrics to define a great brand can be seen on the skin of its audience. There are cool brands such as Nike, Sony, Nintendo and Xbox that epitomize greatness without burning the skin of their fans. How can we then define the essence of such greatness?

The essence of greatness is in the capacity of a brand to foster the sales of a product/service by creating an emotional link with its audience. As such, a great brand balances the delivery of functional benefits with emotional ones.

In practice, you could ask yourself the following questions: Does my brand have any substantial positive impact on sales and market share (If market share is difficult to assess, consider your sales level against industry averages or against the estimated sales of your main competitors)? Does my brand hook our customer-base and make them loyal to the company?

Building a great brand is therefore serious business, albeit a blend of art and science. Whatever your brand and its specific situation, the path to greatness remains the same and is almost entirely based on the way the brain stores, recalls, and processes memories. Considerable progress has been made in the last 15 years in this research field, to the great benefit of marketing and branding.

In a nutshell, great branding starts with a rigorous assessment of your audience and of the brand positioning in the minds of those people. What beliefs pop up in their mind when they think about your brand and its category? What are the good and bad memories coming back to mind? In the case of a car make, for instance, people may remember that this was the automobile of their first kiss, but they may as well remember a tire recall. In the case of a law firm, memory may associate with a painful divorce and broken family, for example. As it transpires, a brand interferes with a considerable level of noise in the collective memory of its audience.