Are video marketing services that big a deal? Yes, because in many cases, marketing with video can leave your competition in the dirt while you go off to enjoy more traffic and bigger profits than you ever did before when you didn’t use online video to market your business.
Web video marketing is a superb way to get your product or company out there, and there are huge numbers of benefits to using video as part of your online advertising arsenal.
Videos are easy to make! They might seem like a big hassle to produce – but the truth is video is one of the easiest, simplest and fastest ways to make a massive impact on your business because of all the new-customer-traffic and sales conversions it can be responsible for.
All you need to have are the right tools:
A cheap flip camera for under $50 (by the way, the web cam that comes with your computer will do just fine).
Free online software like Open Office to create slides that you can insert in your videos. Believe it or not, you don’t even need a camera to do create videos because you can create simple slide shows and simply narrate over them.
An affordable microphone to record your voice. Many good ones can be purchased for $35 to $100.
An inexpensive video editing software. There are plenty to choose from for under $100. They have a tiny learning curve, but with this software you can record your desktop, you can record power point slides, and you can record yourself too if your video camera or web cam is connected to your computer.
Finally, you require a free video account at YouTube and you are set!
The more videos you make, the easier it becomes. More important, those online videos you create will be hugely helpful in bringing in traffic and sales to your business. The fact is it’s actually easier & faster to make a short, compelling 2 minute video than it is to write good, compelling sales copy for an article or a page on your website.
Let’s take a look at some of the main benefits of video marketing:
Videos tend to have much higher conversion rates when it comes to making sales. This means that people who watch your videos are more likely to buy your product than if they’d just read about it on the internet.
Websites that have video on them are about twice as likely to have customers that make a purchase. Are you hearing this? Just by using video you can potentially double your sales process! That’s profit in your pocket! This is partly because people are far more likely to sit through the entirety of a video (about half of your visitors will do this) than they are to sit down and read through the entirety of your sales copy (one out of ten people will do that). This means you will get more information across and your entire sales message will be heard.
Videos also tend to get more traffic, and this is because they’re generally ranked higher than other kinds of content by Google. This means you can get thousands of visitors to your video, and if you host your video somewhere like YouTube, then you don’t have to worry about that kind of traffic crashing your server.
Here’s something else that’s really valuable too:
YouTube and the other video hosting sites pay all of the bandwidth costs while you pay nothing at all.
Best of all, people can very easily share your videos online and around the social media sites and the effect can be viral.
If you use video marketing, try to make a personal appearance in it. Even if you only film yourself for the first few seconds in order to introduce yourself and smile in the camera and then go on to use slides & a voice narrative for the balance of the video – that can make a huge impact for you. If people can see you, that will build trust. You can connect to your audience and they can learn who you are, and this will help them to feel better about buying your product. Not only that, but it will make you seem like an expert and give you an edge over any of your few competitors who have video themselves, but don’t bother to appear in it personally. We say “only a few competitors” because video is the most powerful under-utilized marketing weapon that any business has access to.
This might surprise you – but you need to get a grip of this very important marketing factoid:
A homegrown video that you create yourself, where you appear in at least part of it (for a few seconds), and where you are acting normally like yourself can blow the doors off of most overly expensive, professionally produced videos with special effects.
Why?
That’s simple! It’s because those kinds of videos don’t build the same level of goodwill from your prospective customer compared to the video that you can do where you can actually talk to your viewer “face-to-face”.
In addition to pushing your product or service or business, videos can also help you drive traffic back to your website.
You can use a strong call-to-action to encourage people to visit your site, and if you include a link back to your website in the video description, then when people click on it they will be catapulted back to your website or your blog or your landing page.
If you use a special video syndication tool that mass distributes your videos across the World Wide Web, you can use that tool to push your video to all the major video sites on the internet with a single push of a button.
It’s like having your very own chain of TV stations. As mentioned earlier, video marketing can bring your website tons of extra traffic, and the more videos you have, the better.
All these benefits really add up, and in the long run how can you afford not to market with video? It will boost your traffic. It will more effectively get your message out to the marketplace. Video will build trust with prospective customers. Video will also lead to more sales. It’s a powerful tool and anyone who is serious about marketing on the internet needs to make use of it because it can really kick-start your SEO campaigns, get your traffic up there, and help out with your page rank.
There are tons of companies out there who will do your video marketing for you, but you can also learn how to do video marketing yourself if you find a great mentor and coach. It’s easy, inexpensive, and the rewards will be absolutely huge. Oh, and did I say it is fun too? The reality is that most things that make you money often to become fun!