Reel to Real: Why YouTube Is Now Essential for Your Business
Posted by Christian Ramsey at 9:32 am
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley shared some staggering figures last month at the MIPCOM conference in France.
Hundreds of millions of people come to YouTube every month to search, discover and share this content with their friends.
Around 10 billion videos are viewed monthly online in the U.S. alone.
On YouTube 13 hours of content are uploaded every minute.
In France over 120 million hours of video content is watched per month.
The full transcripts are available on TechCrunch. Okay, so there’s a reason Google purchased YouTube for $1.76 billion. In Alexa’s world ranking, YouTube is number three behind Google and Yahoo. The point here is that video is effective, people want more, and the growing expectation for online delivery includes multimedia.
You can increase sales, traffic, loyalty, retention, satisfaction, creativity, innovation, brand awareness—and you can have fun doing it. This is all possible with thoughtfully produced online videos. They are effective across the board for all aspects of your business: for marketing and sales to showcase products or introducing the team, for training and tutorials, for human resources, community development, online tours, and more.
We launched my intro to this blog with a video post and we’ll be adding many video tutorials outlining tips and tricks to use our software. Why did we bother with video? Let’s take a look some basic reasons why video works so well and how you can implement video into your business development and marketing mix.
Your customers want to watch videos
All the figures on YouTube’s popularity notwithstanding, the Pew Internet Survey team shared some interesting figures earlier this year on the increased usage of video sharing sites.
48% of internet users have been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and the daily traffic to such sites on a typical day has doubled in the past year
Use of video sharing sites among women has increased by 120% since 2006
76% of Internet users ages 18-29 watch or download videos online
15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday”– the day before they were contacted for our survey.
What does this mean for us? In short: your customers are hungry for videos. In a world that’s moving at increasing business speeds, videos can help make things easy to view and more memorable than trying to slog through printed pages.
Some of the reasons people love video is obvious. Here are a few:
By and large, most of us live in a video culture, surrounded by TV and movies. Video keeps viewers interested and highly engaged. Videos with interesting or funny spokespeople or ones with higher production value are captivating to watch.
For tutorials and training, people usually learn faster watching video clips. You can see the motions, in action, which increases awareness and the ability to stay engaged.
The viewer can be in control, to stop, pause, start and to watch the video anytime from home or any other computer, 24/7.
With the ease of with sites like YouTube, you don’t have to worry about maintaining huge video files on your server.
And of course, the ease to share with others.
You have an opportunity to be viral
People are sharing videos. And they are doing it en masse. There are hundreds of superb examples. The recent U.S. presidential candidates in their bid for the top seat come to mind. Traditionally portrayed as the stodgiest of marketing campaigns—looked to viral online videos to increase voter turnout. According to one New York Times article: “YouTube videos mentioning either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain have been viewed 2.3 billion times.”
There are so many examples of viral videos that just exploded off the charts. According to some reports, SNL’s Tina Fey’s impression of VP candidate Sarah Palin were viewed more than 50 million times on YouTube. This is especially impressive, to consider that this clip was viewed more online than on TV, and the online version was probably more influential.
Maybe you won’t hit this jackpot. But according to that same PEW survey, “57% of online video viewers share video links with others.” Here are their results for viewers’ actions that can affect the viral status of a video.
There are companies online spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a viral aspect of their brand that will be noticed by millions of potential customers. OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself and CareerBuilder’s Monk-e-Mail are examples of the more successful bids using Flash and other technologies. Now you can make the same bid for viral attention—with some simple videos. Even if you never hit the highly acclaimed and watched YouTube homepage favorites, you can still reach hundreds or even thousands of additional viewers.
Videos are cost effective to produce
Playing around with audio-visual toys and producing high-end videos is not an inexpensive proposition for a person starting out. But for a business it’s really a nominal expense for the value it provides over time. You certainly don’t need a huge broadcast production ad budget to get started. A few grand $U.S. on equipment and knowledge would put you into an elite league on YouTube.
The basics: camera, sound, lighting, someone who knows how to use them, and some software for post-production work. I’m making online videos with a combination of a small handheld video camera, the built in iSight on my Mac, and iMovie. I wing it with lighting and find quiet, less echoey spots for recording. To record screen-shot tutorial videos, to see where my cursor is going, you might consider Camtasia Studio for PCs ($300) or ScreenFlow for a Mac ($100). These are essential if your selling software or other technical products that require a manual and some small training. The videos are useful for the sales team, customer service, and to increase traffic to your site for your products.
Obviously we’re not doing anything that’s going to show up on the Academy Awards. Keep it simple and direct and go for the community development aspects—that is, just be honest and helpful and barring that, find a personality to help out.
There are plenty of considerations, and as with most things, you can fall into the Rabbit Hole of niche expertise, to explore a single microphone that’s many thousands of dollars. So too, YouTube experts have emerged with tips and tricks for uploading videos to improve quality or to determine which screen grab from the clip will become the lead picture.
My goal here is to just recommend the power and effectiveness of video and I hope you take an interest, iron out the learning curve, and get started. Surely not all topics lend themselves to easy videos (like this post about using video). You can break things down into tasks for preproduction (script, location, gear) production (lighting, sound, angles) and post-production (adding music, editing scenes, including titles).
Video in Email
Advertisers and teachers have known for centuries that some people learn best with words, others with pictures. Nowadays of course we can include radio, TV, the Web, and a bevy of technologies and devices to the mix. Leading the charge as we march into the 21st century: video. The technology for emailing video is available and it’s pretty cool, but attaching or embedding videos into your emails doesn’t really work:
• Red flag servers and spam filters
• Email clients don’t play correctly
Instead use multiple links in your email to a video on your landing page. In your HTML email, use a picture snapshot that looks like a video clip, like a screen shot from YouTube. This can improve click-through and conversion rates. And through the video, you’ll appear innovative, accessible, trustworthy, and credible.
Keep the content simple, fun, informative, and about 2 minutes long. Try an interview, a video tour, or a behind-the-scenes look at your new product.
Final Thoughts
Here’s a final thought from Chad Hurley: “You gain unprecedented reach and scope to touch new audiences around the world, anywhere and anytime. If you embrace this opportunity, you will evolve your business model and find new channels and opportunities to deepen engagement, discover new viewers and find new, substantial revenue opportunities.”
