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Video Insider: Marketers Are From Mars, Viewers Are From Venus: Three Keys To a Satisfying (Online Video Advertising) Relationship

08 2008 Tuesday

By Mike in Featured

DURING A COCKTAIL PARTY A few weeks ago, a newly single friend of mine gulped down his third Scotch, slammed down his glass and announced, “Okay, I give up. What the heck do women want? I used to think I understood them, but these days, I’m completely stumped.”

Being the supportive friend that I am, I offered him a few words of wisdom (”Beats me, but let me know when you find out”) handed him another drink and promptly changed the subject. But later that night as my thoughts turned to work, I remembered his words and realized that the business of marketing in an online video environment is going through a similar life stage. As marketers, we are starting to get to know online video viewers — what they want and how they want to be treated. Sometimes we connect well and other times we find ourselves, well, stumped.

Here are three rules of the relationship I think marketers should keep in mind to ensure that their video advertising efforts win the hearts of consumers:

1) Length matters. It’s no secret that the 30-second pre-roll is both reviled and at the same time delivers more in-video weight than any other ad unit. But just how much do viewers dislike their length? At Veoh, we’ve found that viewers are 40% more likely to abandon the video experience during a 30-second pre-roll ad than a 15-second pre-roll ad. And contrary to popular opinion, we’ve found that viewers are just as turned off by 30-second pre-rolls before long-form video as they are by pre-rolls before short clips. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a 3-minute clip or a 30-minute episode: viewers have narrowed their windows of ad acceptance.

As a marketer, it’s best not to let your viewers walk out the door before you’ve finished your best pick-up line. Make the extra creative investment and showcase your charm in a 15-second (or shorter) introduction.

2) Your best prospects are already engaged. When choosing video sites for your media buy, it’s important to make sure the site partners have highly loyal and engaged audiences. Why? Because viewers who are not yet familiar with or engaged in a site are much less accepting of ads during their viewing experience. We found that heavy video viewers (viewers who visit the site and watch a video at least six times per month) are 50% more likely to continue watching a video after a pre-roll than are light and new viewers. In addition, heavy viewers are more than 10 times more likely than light or new viewers to accept a pre-roll ad within the first video they watch in a session without abandoning the experience.

So in an online video environment, if the majority of the viewers are already “taken,” you’ll actually have a much better chance of making a strong connection.

3) It’s always better with an audience. Yes, network TV shows are great, but the only way to take full advantage of Web video is by targeting audiences rather than following a traditional TV model of buying around content. The same valuable viewers who watch full-length network sitcoms are also watching independent studio productions and popular video clips - so why not reach them throughout their entire viewing experience? In addition to increasing the number of opportunities for marketers to reach consumers, ads that target audiences based on their behaviors and interests are much more relevant to and therefore well-received by online video viewers.

For example, during a recent national family restaurant campaign, we saw that ads that were behaviorally targeted to the family-focused audience performed 20 times better than basic contextually targeted companion ads - and yielded a higher number of impressions than they would have received if targeting a single show. Make sure to work with your video site partners to identify viewer behavior segments that fit with your brand’s target audience - it’s the best way to start a positive conversation with a video viewer (and much cheaper than buying them a cocktail).

In any budding relationship, it’s very easy to overlook the basics when you’re trying to make a good impression. As marketers, if we listen to what our viewers want and pay more attention to their unique interests, we can build more exciting and lasting relationships in online video environments.

Mike Henry is senior vice president of advertising sales at Veoh Networks, a leading Internet television company with more than 28 million unique monthly viewers worldwide and over 100,000 content publishers including CBS, ViacomÂ’s MTV Networks, ABC, Warner Bros. Television Group, ESPN and Lions Gate, as well as thousands of independent filmmakers and content producers.

Ghostwriting Blogs for Clients as an SEO Link Building Strategy

08 2008 Tuesday

By Kristin Gabriel in Featured

Blogs are a great link building tool and they are also great for customer relationship building, reputation management, and a good survey tool to get a feel for what people think about new products. To develop a blog so that it is a good search engine optimization (SEO) link building tool it’s important to use linking strategies that are effective with the search engines including Google or Yahoo.

Ideal for customer relations if done properly, a blog is an excellent way to get customer reactions to new products or services, and also as a tool to combat negative press. Just remember that anything you post on the Internet can come back and bite you later on because even a blog post will stay up for a long time. So be very careful what you say.

Starting conversations with your readers online is what works today, and in fact, it is the shift in marketing all together. Another aspect of blogging involves reputation management. For example, you can create a blog for an individual who has negative mentions on Google, and actually “push” the negative posts down to page two on the Internet. You could talk about this person’s activities on the Boards of charities, and post research or trends articles on their blog two to there times a week. The same content can also be written into articles, and posted on the Internet. But you cannot submit duplicate copy or the search engines will not count it. The content of each article must be at least 30 percent different.

Another aspect of blog writing that people often do not understand is the search engine optimization and PR value. Inside each blog post it’s a good idea to use a key word or phrase, and link that phrase back to a website. The linking strategy might be to link to specific pages in his website that are related to that topic or key phrase - not just to the home page. There are times when we have seen blog posts get picked up by other bloggers, who link to your post.

A goal is required in blogging, and writing and monitoring a blog can be a lot of work. The beauty of blogging is that it provides a marketing vehicle that does NOT rely on a third party, such as an editor writing an article about you. What’s more, corporate blogs provide you with an opportunity to tell your company’s story. Various executives in your company, large or small, can post to a corporate blog, so you can create a strategy ahead of time, then assign folks to write about specific topics.

Blogs are a great crisis management tool as well. Just look at how popular Martha Stewart’s blog was during her court battle. Blogs are a great way to build a database of interested people for later use in opt in email blasts. You can send people over to a sign up form on a blog, and you are certain to get an opt in database.

Insofar as a return on investment (ROI) for blog writing, it costs very little. You can set up a blog at blogger.com, for free. So it costs you in time - your time, the time of your employees, or the writing fees to hire someone to ghostwrite and monitor your blogs.

There are tracking programs to check and see if your blog is building traffic to your website, because of course, the better your blog’s linking strategies are, the more folks will visit your website. You can get details including what happens once a visitor comes in to your website from your blog, including what path they go down? Do they ultimately get funneled to a sale? These things must be tracked on your website by programs like Google Analytics, which is free, or HitsLink. And of course, you need the experience to be able to read and analyze the reports once they are generated on HitsLink, to track your successes.

Kristin Gabriel is writer and social media marketing professional with a Los Angeles SEO firm. Her company also handles marketing, public relations, and online advertising. Visit MarComNewMedia.com

How To Recruit 500 New Affiliates With Very Little Work

08 2008 Tuesday

By Willie Crawford in Featured

If you run an affiliate program, but are struggling to get it off the ground, you can change that. You only really need a few dedicated affiliates to start making sales, and after that the affiliate program can actually grow itself automatically.

A little-acknowledged fact is that with many affiliate programs, the top 5% of affiliates make 95% of the affiliate sales. Indeed, with many affiliate programs that I’ve studied, the top 1% of affiliates make 95% of affiliate sales.