You wouldn’t wear a cheap suit that you had sewn yourself.
More specifically, you should be asking what aren’t your options! The beautiful thing about video is that almost anything with a screen is video friendly now – mobile to tablet to computers, and all are mediums that your consumers are using. But for the average business user, it’s important to think about where your target audience is, and what message you want to get across to them.
YouTube for Product/Service Based Videos
TrueView Ads – this option is very budget friendly, because you’re only charged when viewers chose to watch your ads, not by the number of times it pops up. Google tracks when your ad is skipped or watched, which gives you immediate feedback on what’s working and what’s not. The ideal behind this strategy is that you can use Google’s Adwords to target specific viewers.
For example, if your company provides an at-home meal preparation service for busy people, you can target viewers that type in keywords like ‘quick family meals,’ or ‘easy dinner recipes,’ and let your video pre-roll before an eHow video. We try to steer clients away from merely putting up their videos on YouTube and expecting people to stumble upon them. Even if you don’t engage in TrueView or Adwords campaigns, you need, nay, MUST share your videos in front of your audiences.
Social Media – Share Because You Care
Hopefully you’re engaged in social media and you’re sharing your blog posts and tweeting about deals for your clients and sharing other educational content on your Facebook page. Your videos are the most valuable content you have, simply because they are sticky. Including a video in a Facebook post generates about 100% more engagement than the average photo or text post alone. And exclusive releases of video content on various social media sites to your loyal followers will increase sharing not just amongst themselves, but among their friends and followers.
Your video’s message is exponentially more powerful when it comes from another one of your customers. In the words of Gretchen Gaede of A-Train Marketing, “When was the last time you bought something because an ad told you to?” (a few hands go up) “When was the last time you bought something because a friend told you to?” (more hands go up) Your most valuable channels of outreach and getting your brand out to new customers are the customers that you’ve already satisfied.
Specific video distribution strategies work far better for each social media network. For example, if you produce a product or a service that is more B2C-based, you’ll most likely be more successful on Facebook or Twitter. If you’re more B2B-oriented, a network like LinkedIn with sponsored updates featuring your content could be very valuable. And of course, discriminately sharing content amongst your various social networks will curate discriminating audiences.
Broadcast and Advertising Distribution Platforms
We here at V3 work with a number of partners, including Comcast Spotlight, to maximize the number of eyeballs on our customer’s video content. Comcast Spotlight specializes in multi-screen marketing solutions, meaning that they can reach viewers in various geographical areas on both their television and computer screens. A Comcast Spotlight sales representative could fill you in on way more detail involving buying zones and available websites and networks, but just know video distribution on multiple screens has been shown to be highly effective over the past three years.
This is the tip of the iceberg. Your video distribution options, however varied they are, should rely on a few key things that we’ll leave you with:
Know who your audience is, and who you want to see your content.
Your go-to audience is your loyal customer base. Obviously they’re already invested in your product or service because they’ve purchased it. Give them plenty of content to share around. And if you want to reach new frontiers, you need to know where those are in order to get your content out there.
Know what do you want your content to do, and what action you want people engaging with your content to take.
You could have the most amazing online video content in the world, but if it doesn’t have a call to action that gives your viewer something to click on next, it may fall flat.
Know that the content represents your brand well.
Too often shoddy content comes from companies that are producing content for the sake of producing content. If your aim is to get customers sharing your brand enthusiastically by posting a tutorial video or an ‘About Us’ video, make sure it looks good because it’s going in front of new prospects. You wouldn’t wear a cheap suit that you had sewn yourself to a meeting with a new client. Your content, especially video content, is the suit.