You Tube – should you bother?
Video marketing is an extremely popular marketing strategy right now, but is it good for you?
If it is — when should you or your downline start utilizing it?
Before jumping into this new marketing sensation, let’s talk about the pros and cons.
Pros:
- Currently video marketing is the hottest, most effective marketing media available. Google and other search engines LOVE video and will rank them higher than web sites and will display video submission in a matter of minutes as opposed to weeks with a well crafted web page.
- Video has become substantially easier to use, especially with the user friendly enhancements and software helps that have become available in the past couple of years.
- People love to watch videos! Text will never die, but video is something that really pops, and gets attention. The majority of web viewers will always look at video more than the text around it.
- Cheap, cheap, cheap. Creating videos yourself has become so widespread that in many cases you already have all the technology right now to start making one. Almost all laptops come standard with a built in camera, microphone, and editing software. If you don’t have any of these things, you can spend a few bucks and get a top notch studio. And if you want to go super fancy you can get the new Kodak Zi8 for $150 (full HD quality), a wired lapel mic for $30, and a super easy to use HD video editor like Sony Vegas for $50. This means you can have a full fledged High Def image, with crystal clear audio and edit it all together like the pros for a little over $200 – that’s it!. Of course, you could go more fancy and spend 20 to 30 thousand, but it would be overkill. Your videos aren’t going onto big screen TVs – they just need to look great on a computer screen.
Ah, but there are some drawbacks that you need to be aware of . . .
Cons
- It can be very time consuming: Unless you do a ton of them and develop a system, it will take a long time to start churning out your videos. Expect delays as you start out. Then once you get better at it, you may even take longer because you’ll want to fancy them up. Either way, video takes a long time.
- Not for the beginner: While it’s true that video production has decreased in difficultly, it’s still complicated. And if you tap out at e-mail and web surfing, you may want to skip video marketing altogether.
- Will your videos stand out? I think you’ll agree that with the explosion of internet videos has come an abundant of mediocre to down right horrible marketing videos. These videos are so amateurish and low quality that they do more harm than good. Experience is a great teacher, so bad videos can be put to good use as they help tutor you to become better, but if you want to speed things up, I would encourage getting the training you need so you can STAND OUT from the beginning.
- Is it necessary? In many cases video is not necessary. Videos are great as icing on your marketing cake, which means that there are many other foundational things you need to have in place and once you have them in place, video can vault your marketing to a high level. However, if you do video first, your foundation will be so weak that all the hard work of video production will do very little good to your bottom line.
**There are some mid-range applications that are easy for the beginner, are quick to create, take no equipment, yet look great. Such applications, for a monthly fee will take your text, images (which they provide a library to choose from), and music (with their library) and put together a compelling, interesting video in very little time. A super advantage! But. . . they do have limitations. These videos are designed to be short and will not work as a consistent stream of information. Excellent for a message that you want to punctuate - but not a great platform for regular content (but this could be a matter of opinion – I welcome any comments that think I’m crazy on this point).
My advice to you
Before video, make sure you have a strong foundation:
- Get the Big Picture of marketing
- Set up your blog or web site
- Get your marketing tools in place
- Develop your copy writing skills
- Create a marketing plan
- Build a following
- Have a sales process in place
- Have a retention strategy ironed out
When it comes time to hit video hard – you will want to make the most of it. And with a solid marketing foundation, you’re sure to come out a winner!
Your friend in the internet / network marketing world,
McKay Earl
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