Beginner's Guide to Online Video Marketing: Making a Video

Video marketing has gone viral. If you haven’t caught the bug yet, there are some very good reasons why you should.

What a Marketing Video Can Do for You

Introduce Yourself

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is priceless. A video allows you to polish your marketing presentation and delivers it flawlessly for you time after time. It informs prospective customers about your services so they understand what you can do for them when they contact you.

Establish Your Expertise

A well-done marketing video establishes you as an expert in your field much more definitively than text content. How-to videos add value to your website or email marketing and establish you as the person in the know.

Get Serious SEO Juice

Videos used to be a liability when it came to SEO. That’s no longer true. In fact, Forrester Research estimates that videos are 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of search engine results as text pages. Marketing videos give you serious SEO juice for a number of reasons.

Videos Face Less Competition – Your text content is competing for top SEO rankings with hundreds of thousands or even millions of other pages. With fewer videos posted, you’ll be competing with thousands of videos instead of millions of web pages.
Videos Get Ranked Quickly – It can take weeks for a new text web page to get indexed and ranked by Google. Videos may be ranked in hours.
Videos Go Viral – People are far more likely to share a video than an article. Links, Likes and +1s quickly add up to serious SEO power and more views.

Make Professional Quality DIY Marketing Videos on a Budget

Using a professional video production company can be a great idea, especially if you want to hone your message and produce a top quality video. However, if you’re like most small business start-ups, the cost of a professional video company is out of the question. Don’t let your budget keep you from using the best marketing strategy that’s come along in decades. Take advantage of free video editing software and low cost equipment to make your own marketing videos for a song.

Make sure to also read: How to Create Your Own Video for Under $100

What You Need to Make Your Own Videos

If you’re going to sink some cash into one thing, make it a good quality microphone. Viewers will overlook choppy video edits and minimal animation. Poor sound quality will make them click away. The Yeti from Blue Microphones and the Samson G-Track USB microphone are both designed with professional quality pod-casting in mind.

Live action recording can be tricky but it’s not impossible, especially if the “action” will consist mostly of you talking into the camera. The Sony Bloggie HD is meant for live streaming and sharing. It won’t deliver professional quality video, but for about $129, it’s a reasonable option for video tutorials or blog updates.

Screencasts capture anything that’s on your computer screen. Combine screencasts with animations, video and sound to put together creative marketing videos that make your audience sit up and take notice. They’re the easiest way to make professional looking videos for next to nothing.

4 Quick Tips for Making Marketing Videos

Decide on your message and stick to it.

Write a script to keep you focused.
Create a storyboard to outline your story.
Use free clipart, music and video resources to keep costs low.
Set up slides in PowerPoint and use screen-casting software to record them.

Now That Your Video is Finished

A marketing video doesn’t do you much good sitting on your hard drive. Choosing the right distribution channels is key to attracting the traffic you want.

If you only care about lots of views, post your video to YouTube. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world and gets about 2 billion views a day.

If your intent is to drive traffic to your website, though, YouTube is probably not your best option (although make sure to post it there anyway, along with a link to your website in the description). Everything about YouTube is designed to drive traffic TO YouTube, not to your website.

YouTube alternatives like Vimeo (high quality video), VideoJug (how-to videos) and Daily Motion (international audience) each have their specific uses, but share the same drawback as YouTube.

Other options include self-hosting your video – which can be technical and difficult – or hosting your video at a website designed specifically with video marketers in mind.

Use Video Analytics Effectively

Most video sites provide statistics and analytics (including Wistia, and now YouTube) to help you fine tune your videos and sharpen your marketing message. The viewing stats and sharing stats help you determine who is watching your video, where they’re watching it and what search terms helped them find it. Video engagement tools let you peek over your viewers’ shoulders and figure out the most – and least – effective parts of your video. Armed with this information, fine-tune your videos to focus attention on the most important parts of your message.