How to use online videos to market your business

It is now more important than ever to give online videos a go. With the advent of YouTube and other video-sharing sites, a business needs to utilise this medium or be left behind. We tell you how to use online videos as an effective marketing tool.
Here are seven (7) reasons why:

1. Search engine traffic: Let me ask you something. Do you know what the biggest search engine in the world is at the moment? No, it isn’t Yahoo. It isn’t Google, either. The answer is YouTube. YouTube gets 124 million unique visitors a day. According to the management, people watch 2 billion videos per day, and users upload hundreds of thousands of videos daily. To put that into perspective, every minute – 24 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube. Now, don’t you think you should get a share of that viewing pie?

2. Free: When you create a video and upload it to YouTube and/or other video platforms, the great thing about it is it is free. If you think about it, you have video content distributed to you for free in front of millions of audiences. That is like having a commercial where people who are interested in your video or content will watch – for FREE!

3. Cheap to produce: It is now so much cheaper to produce a video that only a few years ago would not be possible. If you have a professionally made video, you will have to pay for production, costs, hires, etc. Now, all you need is a simple video camera, and you are ready to go.

4. Make it interesting, funny or informational: If you have a video that viewers find amusing, entertaining, funny, interesting or informational – your video has the potential to be viral in nature. This means that your video could be shared amongst the viewer's friends and their friends and so on. There are many (now famous) celebrities whose fame was founded because of YouTube.

5. Quick: It is so much quicker to produce a video that if you wanted to create one right this second, you could. All you need is to turn on your camera, and you have your video. Apart from having the ability to quickly produce your videos – most video players nowadays also have a storage card or USB connection port where you can just transfer your files immediately to your computer and your video can be uploaded online. There are also some video players that will upload your video file instantly to YouTube.

6. Reality TV: There are many reality TV shows at the moment. However, video creation has also been like a reality TV show – online. You don’t even need to be a professional to create one; in fact, most online viewers prefer to watch homemade videos over professionally created ones. This is backed up by the fact that most viral videos are homemade by nature. Some examples are; ‘Dancing Baby’, ‘Charlie bit my finger’, ‘Baby Dancing with Beyonce Music’, etc.

7. Technologically easier: Video creation is so much easier with the advent of technology. Not only can you create a video with a video camera, but you can also create one using your mobile phone with a camera capability. There is also online software that lets you create videos without being in front of a camera. There are also desktop computers with videos, laptops with videos and iPads with videos.

As the medium for creating videos gets smaller and smaller and as the production cost is almost nil – along with the increase in technology and the speed of distributing your video content gets faster and faster, online videos are going to pave the way forward to communicating with your customers and prospects.

If you are not using videos to market your business online – the time to start is now. It is most likely that your competition is. If not, then it is time to get started and leave your competition in the dust. As the saying goes, ‘you better ride the train before it leaves or you will be left behind’.

If you want someone to do the hard work for you, simply list your business video job on our site, and you’ll hear back from a bunch of inexpensive videographers!