IS VIDEO MARKETING RIGHT FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
Television advertising has generally been reserved for businesses with large budgets staying out of the reach of smaller businesses. Smaller businesses usually buy late night spots on local television but due to the small audience and unfocused demographics it usually does not have a good return on investment.
This has all changed due to YouTube. Now any business large or small can take advantage of YouTubes' exciting targeted marketing opportunities.
COSTS: T.V. ADS V.S. YOUTUBE VIDEO MARKETING
The cost of posting a video on YouTube is free and the cost to hire a company to produce a video can be as low as $300 to $600. You can purchase a pre-packaged ad from the Spotrunner.com library for less than $500. Spot Runner rewrites and records custom voice overs for any of its ads for $249. So, for less than $800 you can make a video commercial! This ad can be posted on YouTube and run on television. The cost of running a local cable ad can be as low as $50.00 per run.
TRACKING T.V. ADS V.S. INTERNET VIDEO MARKETING
The best thing about TV advertising is that it increases brand awareness but not necessarily sales which of course is generally the goal for most advertisers. Another problem with running television ads is that the results are hard to track unless it is a direct response ad which means ie: "Call 1-800-buyme Now" and then you have to hire a call center which is another expense. All in all buying TV ads are really not that cost prohibitive and I would reccommend that if you have the budget you should try both TV spot buys and internet video marketing just to see which one is having a larger impact. Another issue to remember is that a television spot will be about 15 seconds but online you can present a lot more information in your video. A three minute video is a good attention span for the average surfer. Anything longer will probably lose viewers.
WHY VIDEO IS BETTER THAN TEXT ADS
The average consumer would rather watch video than read a text ad. The more entertaining or interesting the video is the larger the audience will be. People like to be entertained and informed and your online video should do both. If you can accomplish this the ad may go viral. Viewers will post and back link to your ad on numerous websites and blogs. They will send it via email. Speaking of email you can capture their email addresses by inserting a pop up email capture some where in the video. Pop up email capture is very important and I will go into this subject in detail in another article. This email list that you get with pop up email capture will prove invaluable to your marketing efforts. They are your opt in customer database.
According to DoubleClicks' 2008 survey:
- Viewers click the play button in video ads twice as often as they click traditional image ads. In addition, click-through rates are four to five times higher than with traditional text or image ads.
- Viewers actually watch video ads. On average, video ads play two thirds of the way through.
More Later Folks
