Everyone watches the Superbowl, right? Football is huge in America, but every February we also eagerly watch to see another spectacle that has become as popular as the game – the Commercials. To a degree, these crass symbols of free enterprise have become as iconic as the game itself. Commercials are a part of our culture and all around us.
As you consider marketing your business, it seems natural to create a commercial about your product, goods, services. Create a nice flashy piece that loudly exclaims how good you are, how your prices are lowest in the world, how your service is the best in the land. Better yet, make it funny, and you’ll have a viral marketing smash. Business will go through the roof, right?!?
There is no arguing that commercials work. However, as you look to online marketing, there is a better way: tell your story. Online customers – as opposed to those who watch the Superbowl – have a quick and easy choice when faced with your commercial. We can click away and not miss anything. The challenge is for you to make your information compelling to me your visitor. A good relevant story will do just that.

We recently had the chance to create this video promoting Second Presbyterian Church’s Festival of Faith. It runs the weekend of February 26th through 28th, 2010. Please come and enjoy the festival if you can make it. Second Presbyterian Church is located at 7700 North Meridian Street in Indianapolis.

Louder is better, right? How else can you get your message through in this fast pace, media overloaded society? On the Internet, louder does not translate to success. What does translate is relevant information presented in an authentic manner that makes sense to the audience. Ok, so what does that really mean?

First of all, relevant information means having value for the audience. It is crucial to consider the perspective of those seeking the information. To be relevant, you need to make a connection with your audience and deliver content that they are seeking. This is most effectively done by knowing who your audience is. When planning your online marketing campaign, consider ways you can engage your audience to figure out what is important to them and then ask how you are doing in providing that information. These efforts will increase your relevance.

Authenticity is as important relevance when trying to connect with your audience. For video presentations, this is often the most difficult element to achieve. Slick, well produced segments often come off as insincere. Rough, homemade videos can distract from the message. Some of the most authentic videos are customer testimonials. Stories translate well, and unrehearsed yet nicely produced testimonials can make a connection that a high gloss ‘pitch’ segment does not.

Finally, your content needs to make sense. Again, this means understanding your audience. Age, sex, education, and occupation are all critical considerations for how people consider or ‘make sense’ of what they hear and see. To insure success, know your audience and talk to them in terms they understand and appreciate.

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Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year. Thanks for making 2009 terrific, we look forward to an awesome 2010. Have some fun with us and take our Holiday Poll.

The Crystal Ball for Internet Marketing can be fuzzy sometimes because the pace of change in the technology world leaves everything in a blur. However, one entity is emerging as a clear winner going into 2010, YouTube. YouTube has made incredible technology upgrades in the last year, and is available on most every Internet mechanism including: laptops, desktops, mobile phones, you name it.

Paul Colligan predicts on his blog that “In 2010, YouTube will offer a premium streaming television model that, unlike the other options, will work on the desktop, the phone and the television instantly.” and that “Its gonna rock.”

As YouTube continues to explode in terms of availability and content options, it remains the best place to put your content and gain exposure for your business.  If you have any video content about your business, you should make sure it is on YouTube and appropriately tagged and promoted.  If you don’t have content, you should consider how to begin creating it.  Your ability to show up on YouTube is quickly becoming as important as showing up on a traditional web search.

So, the question is simple…  Is your Business on YouTube?

One of the most effective ways to put forth the value of your organization as well as connect with potential clients is to let your current customers do the talking. Unscripted testimonials are effective because they don’t shout ‘hey, look at me’. Instead, they talk about the pain your company helped solve.

So how can you make a truly effective testimonial video. Here are a couple of ideas to consider:

Pick someone who looks and sounds like your key customers. Successful businesses know their demographics. Pick your testimonial subjects so they mirror your ideal customer. It is important that someone talking about your product make a connection with potential buyers. The CEO of a Fortune 100 company may be a great reference, but if the end customer is Joe Six Pack, the connection will not be strong.

Shoot the video in an interview style. Ask open ended questions that let your testimonial provider talk openly. Don’t try to force key words or phrases into the conversation. If you’d like them to focus on a product or service, make sure they have an experience with it. The key is authenticity. Testimonials that look or feel scripted will drive business away.

Keep the final videos concise. Remember, your audience has a limited attention span. If your final video is over three minutes, cut it down. Ideally, 90 seconds is what you are looking for in a testimonial video segment.

In the editing process, focus on comments that create a connection with your potential customer and their perceived pain. Don’t make the segment into an infomercial. Remember, the person watching the video wants to know if you can solve their problem. They’ll make their decision to buy based on how well you connect with their needs, not how much your customer loves you.

Shoot several videos and place them throughout your site. Make sure you don’t have the same person in each video and try to avoid housing all your testimonials on one page. Remember, potential customers aren’t visiting your site to hear how good you are. They come seeking help, and move to action based on what they see and hear. Keep your contents concise, relevant, and focused on the products or services featured on the page they are viewing.

This blog article is a reprint from a previous posting which was recently lost due to technical difficulties.

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I’ve been thinking about levels of business these last few days. I’m sure an argument could be made for more, but it seems most businesses fall into one of three categories:

• Bidder
• Vendor
• Trusted Advisor

A bidder is one who specializes in handing out quotes. In most cases, businesses who thrive as bidders generally work to keep their prices low which is their strategic advantage. Customer service, quality, and marketing are not as important as price and number of opportunities.

A vendor is one who has earned the business and works to maintain it. The vendor may not be price focused, but their efforts coalesce around product delivery and service. The vendor is the ‘tried and true’ provider. Unfortunately, vendors can be overlooked when an innovative solution is required. In fact, when the customer gets pressured to change or grow, the vendor is often discounted because they are a ‘known entity’.

Enter the trusted adviser. This person or company is known for their cutting edge knowledge. They are respected for their reputation and sought after when innovation is needed. The trusted adviser gets an audience with the top management while the vendor works with the staff, and the bidder is being screened by purchasing.

How does one become a trusted adviser? First of all, you must have expertise. Expertise is acquired through hard work, study, and life experience. The good news is most of us have some level of expertise. With your expertise defined, the next step is finding a way to share what you know. Internet video offers a fantastic mechanism for sharing expertise.

To begin, you’ll want to consider your value to potential customers and others in your field. Jot down your thoughts and arrange them into categories, then into segments you can talk about for 2 to 3 minutes. Now you are ready to go on the air. Get your content produced (your audience will dictate the level of production needed) and start sending your thoughts out. Encourage those who watch to pass your information on, and make sure to capture the email address of anyone who shows an interest. Hone your message based on the feedback you receive. Then watch as your audience grows.

This, like blogging, requires patience, persistence, and the willingness to experiment with content and delivery. But once you find your voice, you’ll quickly become a trusted adviser and reach an audience much larger than you can imagine.

This blog article is a reprint from a previous posting which was recently lost due to technical difficulties.

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YouTube is a terrific service. It has transformed media throughout the world. But, like many of today’s social media, business is still looking for effective ways to leverage it and drive profitability. In the meantime, ambitious, well meaning, souls can easily fall prey to simple pitfalls that threaten to short circuit their forward thinking efforts. I saw one such example recently.

I get lots of email, and much would be considered ‘bulk’ (a nice word for spam from friends – you know the endless newsletters and business offers that fill our inbox). Last week, one such email caught my eye. It was an offer introducing a new CRM software. The email said the software was power packed and reasonably priced. Towards the bottom was a link to a video demo. How could I resist? I clicked and was whisked away to YouTube.

The video was decent and represented the product well. The person who posted it had tagged it to emphasize the software’s ability to grow your network of contacts. Suddenly, without warning, the train began to jump the tracks.

As most bloggers or social media users know, tags are keywords that help people find your content. By adding the keyword tag such as ‘network’ to a video listing, when someone searches for that term, the tagged video will show up. In fact, for most Web 2.0 applications, not only will your content show up, but so will other segments that have been similarly tagged. YouTube accomplishes this by displaying a series of thumbnail links right next to the video you are watching.

Now our marketer was smart to add ‘network’ to his tags. His software is an important tool for growing and managing business networks and contacts. Unfortunately (for our hero), ‘network’ was also the name of a terrific movie made in the 1970’s that looks at the outrageous behind the scenes workings of television news. You’ve probably guessed by now that right next to the CRM video was a series of thumbnails linking to scenes from that movie. Indeed, the most prominent link (at least to my eye) led to a scene where Ned Beaty goes off on an outrageous and (by today’s standards) politically incorrect rant attacking just about every religious, ethnic, and social group in America. It was hilarious, insulting, and distracted me for 30 minutes while I looked for other clips from the movie.

So our marketer’s efforts to introduce me to his great product resulted an A.D.D. moment rather than delivering me as a client. I couldn’t help wondering if any similarly distracted prospects were actually offended as they clicked on the link. And if so, how the ‘related’ video impacted their perception of his product. Regardless, our guy’s noble efforts were lost to an ineffective strategy.

The real tragedy is that YouTube is a dynamic platform with tools available that could have improved the odds of success. For example, using embed code to post the video on his website would have eliminated distraction (or offense) and enhanced the product’s site. This simple change would have cost nothing and might have delivered a sale instead of this blog post.

In addition to that simple solution, I have to wonder about his overall strategy to distribute and promote this video and the product. Having a plan for promoting your video can mean the difference between little or no response and a landslide of new business. I hope our friend got lucky and succeeds. For anyone else reading this blog, if you’re considering a video marketing campaign, give us a call first. Let us show you how a strategy can really launch your campaign.

It sounds like the ultimate ‘duh’, but if you are a web developer or manage a website, make sure you perform regular backups of your site at the host. It is usually pretty easy to do, but also very easy to overlook. Don’t assume your hosting company has a back up of your account – most likely they don’t unless that is a part of your service.

We learned the tough way this weekend when our website became corrupted. I still don’t know if it was due to maintenance done on the host, a WordPress plugin that went rogue, or a hacker, but our SQL database became corrupt beyond repair and our site was lost.

In some ways it is fun to start new and fresh, and we did get the site back up (although with limited content) quickly. But lost in the process is a years worth of blog entries that will all now show up as dead links.

So take a minute and check with your hosting service or web management team. Set up a back up plan that backs your site up on a regular basis. Have some peace of mind that if the worst case happens you’ll be ok.

It was late Sunday evening and I was thinking about how I should blog something.  Na, too lazy; maybe in the morning.  I did a quick check to see our traffic numbers and to my surprise the site was gone.  Somehow our WordPress database became corrupt.  Long story short, we’ve got to rebuild.  If you’re a new visitor, it means that over a years worth of blogging on interactive video marketing was lost.

But fear not, we’ll regroup.  Check back soon for more.