Great ideas for online video content

If you’re website was not seen by the second largest search engine, you might be concerned to say the least, and yet it’s true of most websites.

YouTube and Google Marketing

YouTube is now considered by many as the second largest search engine – with over 2 billion views a day. It’s free, SEO friendly and still growing. If your website hasn’t got video content, then you will be missing out on an invaluable way to promote your business and gain more brand exposure. Google’s latest shake up of its algorithm, from which YouTube emerged as one of the ‘winners’, also appears to increase the SEO value given to web video. Even without these changes web video has long been recognised as a great way to attract visitors and engage with them. We need to move away from seeing websites as solely – or even largely – text driven. However, even more so than with text, many small businesses find web video a difficult concept both in terms of physically creating the video [and the costs involved] and what the content should be. I’ll come back to the former at some other date but want to offer some basic ideas to generate great video content.

1. Meet the Team

‘People buy people’ is as true for the World Wide Web as for old school face-to-face sales, perhaps even more so when you want your local, small business to compete against ‘the big boys’ and video is a good way of getting some of the personality of the company seen by potential customers. A straight piece to camera ‘Hi I am xxxxx’ is unlikely to come over too well, and it’s not actually something you would do face-to-face with clients. Try something a little different – perhaps film a planning or project meeting, or getting one of the newer team members to film a ‘Day In the Life Of..’

2. How Things Work or How-To Guides

This is perhaps the most obvious but still essential uses for online video. Consumers don’t want – and don’t need – to read through either printed manuals or online instructions when a video can show them everything they need to know. From setting up new equipment to baking bread, I don’t think there is a single business that would not benefit from having such videos about their products and services.

3…and now ‘The News’

There is no better way of keeping your customers up-to-date, and continuing to show your company’s ‘personality’ than with a short video of your latest news and activities. Every business has news – new products, offers or discounts, new staff, premises or forthcoming events – so you should never be short of content for a weekly or monthly update. They offer great marketing opportunities – customer’s can subscribe via the website or your YouTube channel, you can use it as part of your email marketing or direct to their mobile. You’ll be able to track all this so you’ll be able to measure your ROI on your investment in web video.

4. Ask the Expert

Whatever your line of business, you are a professional and online video allows you to make sure others see you as a source of expertise and authority, hopefully delivered in a friendly and approachable way. Forget about selling anything in these videos except your knowledge and experience; once you have established that you know what you are talking about the sales are likely to follow. Can’t think what to talk about? One of the most obvious is to talk about the basics of your profession – what is APR? How does bread rise? How do you measure an inside leg? Think about the questions you’re most often asked by customers, or perhaps try to link your products and services to something topical or a forthcoming event.

5. Read the Reviews

Reviews and feedback are another growing area of the internet and its unlikely your customers will buy any product or service without checking out the online customer reviews. Therefore make reviews part of your website. It’s a difficult concept – criticising what you sell – but you are professional enough to know all products/services have pros/cons not rights/wrongs, and in fact you can use the review to address some of the areas of concern expressed in the online reviews, and point viewers to other/additional services and products at the same time. Why not go one step further and get your customers to post online reviews of both the company and the products/services? Testimonials are an important way to win business, so what could be better than seeing ‘real people’ giving their honest opinions about the things they bought and the services they received? These are just a few ideas for getting starting with web video. Whichever approach you take, the important thing is to do it – the growth of internet marketing and online video marketing as both a search mechanism and part of the ‘web experience’ is going to continue for a long time yet.