Distribution Resources that’ll get your Video Advertisements viewed.
Video Advertising Distribution: The Basics
So, you’ve taken the plunge and produced an awesome advertising video for your business. Now what?
Your friends and family love it, but that wasn’t the reason you expended the time and energy to have it produced. Its purpose is to introduce new customers to your products or services and to drive new sales. The only way to do that is to get the video viewed by potential customers that you haven’t even met yet.
Don’t get discouraged, but this process takes imagination, a detailed understanding of your specific market and a fundamental understanding the resources and platforms
that your customer base is currently using to seek out this information. There is no one specific distribution pipeline that will work for everyone. There are a lot of businesses on the web, all trying to capture the attention of potential clients. It is a very competitive business environment, to say the least. Video helps to give you a leg up, but you still have to think of creative ways to carve out your own niche to be as effective as possible.
Let’s begin by examining some of today’s most popular platforms businesses use for disseminating video advertising.
#1 YouTube
First and foremost is YouTube. YouTube is a powerful video distribution platform with a huge audience. It is so popular that it’s actually the second largest search engine in the world! The largest, of course, is its parent company Google.
It is an absolute necessity for any company looking to gain viewership for their advertising, to have a presence here. The competition, however, is fierce. Thousands of companies just like yours are all jockeying for position in this highly lucrative space. Negotiating the many pitfalls of this platform can be challenging, but the rewards if you’re successful in overcoming them can be immense.
Generally speaking, they’re two paths you can take when trying to carve out an audience on YouTube.
The first and easiest, of course, being paid placement. This can be done in a couple of different ways.
First are pre-roll advertisements, which are the advertisements that run prior to entertainment or informational videos that viewers are seeking out.
The second is paid inclusion in search results. In the same manner, in which you can pay Google to enhance your listing for your website you can also enhance the listings of your videos for specific search phrases. This can be a terrific way of targeting your video exposure to users they are actively seeking your services.
The second path you can take doesn’t require any financial resources but does require a bit more effort and skill. This, of course, is the SEO method.
This method requires that you have predetermined search phrases in mind before uploading and optimizing your video. It’s always a good idea to do a bit of research on the popularity of specific search phrases prior to committing your time and energy towards optimizing your video for it.
The more you delve into video SEO for search engines it will quickly become apparent to you that the more video you have (quantity) the more search phrases you can cover.
To give you an idea of how this works, we were once contracted by a business that was very clever about video marketing and had a very precise understanding of the market that they were trying to attract. They had already predetermined a large segment of their market was Spanish-speaking, so they developed 40 different popular and unique Spanish search phrases that consumers actively seeking their services generally used.
We then produced 40 short video commercials that answered very specific questions (In Spanish) pertaining to these specific search phrases and then referred them to the businesses website for more information. The targeted effectiveness of this campaign was astounding and once published relied exclusively upon the SEO properties of the optimized video. Years later it still creates a steady supply of new clients to this business with zero budget or maintenance.
This is just one example of many that can be employed by creative business owners that have a fundamental understanding of their market and the technology their customers are using to seek out products or services.
#2 Vimeo
The next great platform for video marketing distribution is Vimeo. While Vimeo doesn’t have the same audience size as YouTube it does have significant features that many business owners find more palatable.
The major difference between Vimeo and YouTube is that Vimeo, to a large extent, is only available to paying subscribers of the service. Whereas on YouTube the service is paid for by advertisers and many times can conflict with the advertising your company is trying to promote. Vimeo alternatively gives you complete control over
what happens at the end of your advertisement. You can show your potential customer another one of your videos, or create custom links and calls to action that can guide the viewer to your website or anywhere else for more information. Many marketers find this preferable to YouTube which will routinely follow up your commercial with the commercial of one of your competitors, which naturally can be self-defeating.
Vimeo videos possess the same SEO weight as YouTube videos and index equally well in all of the search engines as YouTube videos. Many marketers choose to adopt a system that leverages the audiences of both of these platforms to great advantage.
#3 Social Media
Social media platforms are also a great distribution mechanism for business advertising. The daily browsing audiences of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SnapChat make them a lucrative audience of would-be customers. Needless to say, if you are running a business in 2018 that does not have a significant presence and following on these goliath platforms you are missing out on capturing the attention and business of these faithful daily users.
One of the advertising aspects of Social Media that many marketers really like, and have been able to use to great effect, is the ability to target very specific segments of the platform’s users based on your own predefined criteria. This allows you to target your advertising in very specific ways to a very specific audience maximizing the effectiveness of your campaign and your return on investment.
These are just a few of thousands of possibilities. The landscape of video advertising on the Internet is as limitless as your imagination. We are constantly being introduced to new and creative ways of getting video advertising in front of potential new customers. Do you have some ideas of your own?
Are you ready to create some truly effective video advertising?
Let’s get started