Quick Series Recap – 2009 Online Marketing Trends for Small Business:

• Part 1 – Series Introduction & Personalized Search
• Part 2 – Bounce Rates Will Affect Your Rankings
• Part 3 – Online Conversations (Social Networking) will Foster Offline Connections
• Part 4 – RSS Feeds Will Go Mainstream

Part 5: Got Video?

Video is the fastest-growing form of marketing on the Web. eMarketer estimates that in the next four years marketers’ spending on online video advertising will reach $4.6 billion, more than seven times the amount spent in 2008. And no wonder. Video lets you demonstrate your idea — with action, with humor, with the credibility of a great presenter. Ask yourself: Which would you rather do? Read 5-6 more paragraphs? Or watch a 90-second video that visually explains the topic?

Just in the last two months, I’ve engaged in six video projects with my clients. When you take a minute to think about your business from a video perspective, there is so much sitting right under your noses. For instance, I encouraged a real estate client to do a quick YouTube search on “olathe real estate”. From the quality of the resulting videos, my client was quickly encouraged to undertake his own video effort.

Video Ideas for Small Business

• Introductions – Introducing yourself and your company via video is much more engaging
• Education – Film your next educational seminar or diagram a concept on a whiteboard
• Sales – Record your next sales presentation
• Product Demos – Give prospects a closer look at your products, their features and benefits
• Video Blogging – Instead of writing about the latest industry happenings, mix it up and talk about them on camera.

Low-Quality, Guerrilla-Style Video is the Norm

As the popularity of web cams, hand-held digital video recorders and video-sharing websites like YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.tv has grown, so has the volume of videos created by people with little-to-no video production expertise. Much in the same way the MP3 file format desensitized us for music audio quality, this wave of online video has lowered our standards for video quality. In fact, great content shot in a lower-quality fashion is often perceived as more genuine vs. the same content with professional polish.

Having said that, you still need to understand the basics of video creation, which can go along way in making your viewer’s experience a pleasurable one…

Other Factors to Consider

Several other factors are also pushing marketers to take a serious look at online video.

• A Massive Audience - Just look at traffic numbers…YouTube – 60 million unique visitors/month, Yahoo Video – 23 m/month, Myspace – 16 m/month…The list goes on. If/when you start putting videos out there and they are optimized properly, people will find it and it’s author.
• Quality Website Traffic – Video makes great bait. Fishing in the video-sharing and social-media ponds can be huge for reeling in quality traffic and links to your main website.
• Universal Search Results – With the advent of univeral search, video is going to start gobbling up real estate within search engine results pages (SERPs). For example, a search for your most important keyword might be returning 10 webpages on page one of the SERPs. And your website is currently in the 8th position (page one). But a month from now, three videos find their way onto the first page of results and you find yourself on page 2 in the 11 spot.

Small Barriers to Entry

I think the only barriers to entry for small businesses lie within the perceptions of video quality and technical requirements associated with getting a video on a website. Both of these barriers are almost non-issues these days since average-quality videos can be created easily with modern hand-held video cameras, uploaded to YouTube and immediately embedded into any website with a little snippet of code.

Want video? Learn more about Something Creative’s online video development services for Kansas City small businesses.