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Effective Internet Video Marketing for Small Business

By Karl Walinskas in Featured

If you’re like many small business owners, your online brochure you call a website might not be hitting the customer grand slams you want or expect. If people cannot learn something new from your content and you haven’t updated it since 2007, put up an under construction sign and read on. You must have superior content to rule the search engine universe and hold the eyeballs of visitors with attractive, valuable and changing content. Web video marketing is a great way for you to provide that content that web viewers in 2011 are growing to expect. It also puts your SEO on steroids to take on the major search engines. Warning: do your web videos the right way, the better way, to have people watch, relate, and buy.

The key to quality web video is the content more than the technology. Here are some of the best video marketing methods to promote your business online:

PRODUCT, SERVICE OR CAPABILITIES DEMO

Whatever it is that makes your company unique and worth talking about, you can video it and with some simple editing to introduce it, post it on your site, and distribute to your YouTube Video channel (if you don’t have one, get one, it’s free). Many firms will have physical products they can show in action. Think auto manufacturers websites showing videos of the new line. As a small business, yours doesn’t have to be that sophisticated, just show what your widget does and how it provides value to those who would buy it.

Most small businesses out there are service businesses. If you have a dog grooming business, show the pooches getting cleaned up with their happy canine smiles. Cleaning business? Pan in on the crummy before shot of the ___, show the cleanup process, and finish it off with the much improved after view.

Often the unique advantage of a business is a process that means they’re faster or better than the competition. This works really well when showcasing that new MRI machine that doc just bought, or the fully programmable laser cutter at the sheet metal house that shows how it can make parts faster, cleaner, and at better quality than metal shops without one.

HOW-TO VIDEO

This falls into the category of value-add or training for your web viewers. It can be an instructional video on using the topsy-turvy planters you sell at your greenhouse or simply how to do something better around the house. The main purpose of how-to is some way to make life easier or better for your readers, and for you it creates site stickiness, where prospects and customers will want to come back often.

NEW PRODUCT LAUNCH

This can take the form of a product demo with a little extra. New product launches tend to be time sensitive, hyped and require sufficient explanation as to what the product does that sets it apart from prior versions or other current market offerings. Ideas are to show interviews with customers requesting, “I wish we could get…” statements that provided you with the original market pull to create the product or service, your CEO or top Exec enthusiastically explaining the launch (see next section), stats or data cleverly shown that show it’s the next big thing, and of course sufficient product demo components. These same elements might comprise a new product launch press release, simply meaning that this video can double as a video PR. There can be a lot of editing and cost involved if you bring in all of these ideas, but how much are you spending to develop your new product or service?

EXECUTIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW

Here’s one that is not often seen that provides you with a presentation of 3rd party credibility for your small business. The Executive Video Interview is an affordable way to promote small business, both on your site and virally. The return on investment can be disproportionate to the cost.

All you need as a small business owner is a Skype account and a webcam. That’s it! Your webcam quality is more than enough to make quality video. The real magic is in the interview process. Picture Larry King or Matt Lauer interviewing you as CEO of your business about your business as if it’s the national news, asking your probing questions that get at the value your business brings to the marketplace in an informative way. If you’re going to pursue it, look for a provider that has experienced interviewers and a sample portfolio before you pull the trigger.

Look, anybody with a webcam can record herself speaking into the lens in a monologue in an introductory video. Have you ever watched one? For those not trained in speaking before a camera, they can be dry, boring, and all too often comical as the speaker reads from cue cards. Is this how you want your business to come across?

The Executive Video Interview provides more value because you are being asked questions that drive great answers in a relaxed, authentic way that highlight the competitive advantage of your business while providing some take away value for your viewers. There are no cue cards, you can pause when answering and even trip over your words and it is all expected because people are viewing a dialogue. A nice marketing touch is to use your Executive Video Interviews to accompany blog posts and provide a a unique perspective for viewers on your small business area of expertise.

Many ways exist to effectively web video market your business. I’ve listed a few here, some you may have known and some maybe not. Whatever you do, consider adding video to your site in some fashion to keep readers interested, provide more takeaway value, and keep the site dynamic.

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Stand apart from the more than 10.5 million hours of video uploaded on YouTube annually by reading http://bit.ly/hC6NHs. Use of Executive Video Interviews at http://bit.ly/e8MY3I is an economical alternative for small business.

Basic Techniques For Creating Quality Video For Your Website

By admin in Featured

Video has immediate impact and you don’t need to be an expert to create your own mini-movies. It is a very simple way to connect with, and market to, your customers and prospects.

There are a number of factors that affect how you are going to encode your video so you can publish it on the web. These include the efficiency of the encoder and, ultimately, how it looks to the end user. Two key factors play a significant role in the encoding process: source quality and frame motion, so let’s take a closer look at them.

1 Source Quality

Once you have pressed record on your camera, you have determined the source quality of your video. What you want to achieve is the best quality video possible so here are some basic guidelines to help you get great source video quality and achieve maximum quality in your final compressed video. Use a tripod to reduce camera movement.

You must get this right, because any camera movement means that the picture moves as well. This means that a high percentage of pixels in the video are changing from frame to frame. This results in worse quality at lower compression rates and although camcorders are fitted with an anti-shake device, the more you can do to keep your camera steady the better will be the result.

2 Use good lighting techniques.

Even with a tripod and a high-end camera you can still produce a low-quality image if there is not enough light. Low-light or light-gain filters produce video noise on the image; this is different for each frame of video and so it is more difficult for the codec (compressor/decompressor) to compress the file and give a good quality result.

Use the best camera possible. If you have a secure, steady, camera – and the lighting is right – you will get a reasonable result from even an inexpensive camera. BUT, it is best to have one that can capture your footage in digital format, and personally my business partner Neil Travers and I prefer using miniDV to capture our footage.

3 Starting out

When you start out you don’t always have access to professional equipment, like high end consumer camcorders, a tripod, and excellent lighting conditions. Do the best you can with what’s available and always remember: the higher the quality of your video source, and the less noise in that source, the lower the data rate required to render a good playback file. Whenever possible, always encode a file from its uncompressed form.

If you convert a pre-compressed digital video format into the FLV format, the previous encoder can introduce video noise. This can occur because the first compressor has already performed its encoding algorithm on the video and has already reduced its quality, frame size, and rate. Digital “effects” or noise can be added. This additional noise affects the FLV encoding process and may require a higher data rate to play back a good quality file.

4 Frame Motion

This is another important factor to consider in your encoding formula and refers to the percentage of the pixels that change from one frame to another. There are a variety of things that can affect this, from people or objects moving, camera effects or even post-production effects.

So watch out for the following points as they can all have an impact on frame motion:

• Moving objects includs people and things you may not consider like traffic or the wind moving he leaves of a tree.
• You can get nearly 100% pixel change from frame to frame from camera effects like panning, zooming, and having a hand-held result in almost There is also a high percentage of pixel changes from frame to frame when you use postproduction effects like dissolves, fades, wipes, or complex video effects. Clips with a lot of motion in them mean the encoder has more information to compress than with static clips like one person talking to camera.
• An interview or conversation with two people works best if it is fairly static, like our own ‘kitchencasts’ where we are seated at a table while talking.
• Encoding works by the video codec using a method of dropping frames and then encoding a series of fully uncompressed frames. These are called key frames and are used to calculate and “rebuild” the missing frames during playback.

So I hope you can see that video is a great tool to use in your marketing, and it can be simple and cost effective. Just take your time, experiment, and enjoy yourself.

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Neil Stafford – The Internet Marketing Reviewi s is the UK’s longest running PRINTED Internet Marketing Newsletter. ‘Test drive’ it for FREE – Visit this special web page for more information: Internet Marketing Review Newsletter

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