Clicksharp Marketing

Video is often the most engaging form of media; here’s how you can leverage this potential to create a promotional resource for your business with high upside.

Digital marketing is replacing television; is YouTube home to the next million dollar infomercial? Get in while it’s still cheap!

Intellectual property is a valuable commodity in our society; look at the success of the McKinseys and Bains of the world. But looked at a certain way, consulting is merely a fancy word for instruction. If you sell this service directly (e.g. tutoring for test prep, premium technical support for software), offering sample-sized portions of your core product, delivered by video over sites like YouTube or Howcast is an excellent way to build brand equity and engage your target audience. Even Flickr has video now.

But what if you’re selling something a little less overtly… instructional? Actually, the model works here too:

Profession	Promotion
Orthodontist	A few clips of the doc in action, following by some zoomed-in closeups of nice smiles.
Florist	Some dramatic fades and wipes of beautiful floral arrangements, and a reassuring smile from the owner.
Auto Mechanic	Nice sharp-looking cars with engines humming nicely, and a big thumbs-up from the team.

Then you need to think about how you’re going to broadcast this to the world.

Start by uploading through TubeMogul, a mass video submission tool which also gives you nice analytics data over time. If your business is heavy on the education/instructional component, pay special attention to Howcast.

The big push should go into building a massive list for link building outreach. Go to Google Blog Search and Technorati, and plug in at least a half-dozen relevant keywords related to your content. Pull out anything that looks good and build up a list. Don’t bother geotargeting your search to a specific city or state — people rarely filter their blog consumption based on the author’s location.

Once you’ve got a nice healthy list, go to those blogs, and start leaving comments. (It’s important to appreciate the difference between comment spam and useful, insightful and relevant comments.) Eventually, once your name has been showing up regularly, you can contact the bloggers directly and ask to guest post — busy bloggers are always looking for a reason to take the night off.

That’s when you can create the perfect information, promotional message — and the blogger’s entire audience is now YOUR audience.

Write a press release; you can pay a site like Marketwire, but also use the free distribution sites like pr.com and prlog.org.

Finally — it’s essential that you make this promotion a long term commitment. Check out Pole Position Marketing’s excellent resource on link building best practices: the best ideas may come straight from you, but reading it will put you in the right mindset.

Congratulations on building your first viral informercial!

~~~~~

Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 @ 6:02 am on the category Link building, Video, Viral marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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