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How Viral Video Marketing Benefits Your Business
By Marc Vitorillo | December 21, 2007
Online video is changing the way we market, and it requires skill sets they don’t teach in business school
On one hand we have marketers believing their “unique selling proposition” is as interesting as the “Numa Numa” kid. On the other, we have today’s ADHD-prone video viewers demanding short entertainment whether it is promotional or not.
So the rules are fairly simple: Keep your promotion short, interesting, edgy and give us a surprise that makes us want to forward your clip. After all, it’s not a “viral video” if nobody wants to share it.
Lesson One: Tap Video Creators
We online-video creators and watchers are a community that’s not shrinking and not growing slowly. Your customers are among us unless you’re targeting the maybe 10%-20% of people that haven’t watched an online video.
And here’s the best kept secret. Some of us will promote a brand for a modest fee. While some YouTubers are certifiably nuts, others can be your spokesperson and a way to connect with large audiences. And some video creators will make a promotional video for less than your agency bills you for that lunch meeting; others will do it for free product samples.
Although the scalability of these programs is currently limited (unless you create one of the extremely rare viral sensations), the return on investment is often better than paid search.
Lesson Two: Quality Doesn’t Mean Popularity
My most popular videos are far from my best. Almost every day my videos rank in the “highest rated” section of the comedy category, and yet I’m far from the funniest creator on YouTube.
When I featured a 14-year-old using a fart machine in a public library, I never dreamed “Farting in Public” would get nearly 4 million views. Though popular videos tend to be short, funny and shocking, there are other variables that have as much influence on getting the video seen.
Many second and third-tier sites will give entertaining sponsored videos preferred placement for relatively small amounts of media spend. Got $10,000? Use the money to help get a clever sponsored video seen instead of pouring it into a black hole of unseen banner ads.
Lesson Three: Try Product Placement
While some clever advertisements (with surprise endings, humor or sex) do become viral, most ads don’t translate online, and it’s a rare promotional video that gets millions of views. The smarter play is to sponsor popular video creators to create entertainment with product placement.
This requires brands to let go of overt marketing messages and trust the instincts of creators to please their audiences.
Lesson Four: It’s Not Just About Contests
While contests are pervasive tools to engage online video creators and audiences, they’re just one tactic among many. Smarter brands are connecting directly with prominent viral video creators. These folks have huge subscriber bases and fans, and are often delighted to get paid relatively small amounts for a sponsored video.
Lesson Five: ‘Tagging’ Video Is Just a Start
Keywords may get your video to rank in searches, but there are far more effective ways to get your videos seen, such as title and thumbnail.
A short funny video with a surprise ending will be exponentially more viral. That said, well-tagged videos can help brands in search. Do a Google search for “Healies” (a misspelling of the shoe called “Heely’s) and you’ll find my “Poor Man’s Healies” videos near the top of the results page. Meanwhile, Zappos and Dick’s Sporting Goods are bidding against the keyword and paying for each click.
Lesson Six: Video Views Don’t Mean Sales
I learned this the hard way. The conversion rate from viewing a video to visiting your site is not much better than the low-single digits of direct response. That means you either need metrics for the “worth” of a view or hope your video is seen millions of times so the direct-response metrics aren’t embarrassing.
Lesson Seven: The ROI Disconnect
A $250,000 production cost makes a return on investment difficult. Since fewer than 2% of people will visit a Web site after a video, a good ROI requires a low production cost and the highest number of views possible.
Lesson Eight: Not All Portals Are Created Equal
The vast majority of online viewing occurs on YouTube. Putting your videos on a bloated-product.com site is the online equivalent to running television commercials on a kiosk hidden in an abandoned cemetery.
Lesson Nine: Conservatives Welcome
Conservative legal and public-relations policies have prevented many marketers from entering into a dialogue with prominent video creators. Most marketers have seen at least a few videos that mention their own brands or those of competitors, but some brands remain squeamish about something as simple as an online-video contest.
Doritos, Dove, Heinz and Mr. Clean were just a few of the brands that invited consumers to submit to contests to win cash, prizes, fame or a chance to be on TV.
Some brands fear running a contest because they don’t want to be ridiculed. But brands will be bashed by disgruntled consumers via online video whether or not their companies dabble in the space.
Quietly watching from the sidelines is no insurance policy and certainly won’t grow revenue. So refraining from online video in fear is no smarter than those companies that were afraid to market online back in 1998.
Lesson 10: The Medium Will Be Measured
As it matures, video will become as measurable as search. But for the time being, the most controllable variables are cost of production and total views.
Kevin Nalts is a career marketer (formerly with Johnson & Johnson) and now is a consumer-product director at a Fortune 100 company. A self proclaimed ‘Viral Video Genius,’ Nalts writes about the convergence of marketing and online video at WillVideoForFood.com. He is authoring a book titled ‘The Prophet of Online Video’ and creates sponsored videos for such brands as Mentos, GPSManiac, and DoMyStuff.
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Topics: Online Video Advertising, marketing viral video |
