Written by Tim Aldiss, Head of Digital for Fat Sand Productions as part of the Wired Sussex guest blog month
As is the case with any asset today (an article, an infographic, a video), pressing publish just isn’t enough to generate a response and get you noticed by your target audience. Nor is simply optimising; or paying to be seen, enough.
Video has had a meteoric rise and now sits at the top table, and not just from a branding or marketing point of view. These days video is seen as an essential communications asset. However as a result there’s a lot more competition out there.
Here are some statistics from Youtube (and don’t forget that it’s the worlds’ second biggest search engine)(1):
- YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month.
- Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
- If YouTube were a country, It would be the third largest in the world after China and India.
- Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
- 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
- 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
Getting noticed in all this noise is hard but not impossible. The great thing about online is that it’s easy to research the paths that your prospective viewers and customers tread, and then build a plan to provide useful content to help drive them to your video on your website.
Once you know who your target market are online, where they spend time browsing, what they search for, and who influences them you can use the many online marketing tools at your disposal today to attract their attention, in the right way.
Of course the earlier you can have either your target audience or the network that influences them involved in the planning and creation of the video the better. This is not a new idea - it’s one that has been proven since the days of Sony’s ‘bouncing balls’ Bravia advert when Sony embraced the masses of user generated content that came out of the shooting of the advert in the streets of San Francisco.
Along with the ability to map your audience and their influencers you can combine the maybe slightly more traditional channels of organic and paid search. Facebook, Google, Youtube and Bing all have excellent targeting abilities that allow you to very tightly manage your cost per click. One of Youtube’s great new features is that you don’t actually pay unless the whole of your pre-roll video has been watched - a great bonus.
Drawing attention to the video through network outreach is actually a key component of your video SEO strategy too. You want people to blog about the page that your video is embedded in on your site – whether they embed it themselves or not. This is where involvement of your influencers can really help.
Finally ensure that you know your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from your metrics and are able to benchmark and then measure against your goals. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors out there when it comes to things like Youtube views, and it’s important to remember to look beyond the view to how this form of branding has impacted on your website and call centre.
Unified messaging across paid, owned and earned media really works, and although there’s no way to guarantee legitimate results there is a data backed method to reach your target audience in the social web.