Online Video: Low-Cost Marketing For Your Company

Ed Davis, center, president of Ceilume, a maker of plastic ceiling tiles, discusses a marketing video with his creative team in Graton, Calif.

Have You Tried Marketing With Online Video?

Look for creative ways to use video, such as demonstrating products or improving customer service.

Embed videos in your Web site so customers can find them without going to YouTube.

Use metrics to analyze the effectiveness of your videos.

Look for other platforms beyond YouTube where you can spread your content.

He was shepherding his small California manufacturing company, Ceilume, through a transition from a custom job shop to a maker of vinyl ceiling tiles, and he needed to begin selling directly to consumers. That raised a perception problem: many people associate ceiling tiles with the ugly, dusty and stained mineral-fiber tiles that have loomed over offices for generations. Mr. Davis, Ceilume’s president, wanted to tell consumers his company’s vinyl products were different. He decided to try online video.
Over the last several years, Ceilume has produced dozens of YouTube videos for product demonstrations, advertisements and how-to instruction. These videos are embedded in the company Web site or show up in results when customers search for keywords. As a result, Ceilume has reached tens of thousands of customers at a very low cost.
Online video is becoming a first stop for many customers. It is akin to what the Web page was a decade ago — something that can give early adopters an edge over competitors. It gives them a channel to talk directly to customers in ways previously accessible only to large companies that could afford TV advertisements.
This guide to using online video focuses on YouTube, which is by far the dominant player with two billion views per day — but many of the principles also apply to the other hosting services, including Vimeo, MetaCafe, Facebook, Viddler, Brightcove and Blip.tv.
SHOW YOUR PRODUCTS Short of getting a customer in the door or sending a salesperson on the road, online video may be the best way to demonstrate a product. According to Mr. Davis, more Ceilume customers place orders without requesting samples because video helps them find what they want.
At Ceilume, video helps customers choose among 30 different styles of ceiling tiles. Ceilume, a 40-person company that has about $5 million a year in sales, produces its “Ask the Ceiling Tile Guy” videos for little expense with internal tech staff and Mr. Davis as narrator. The videos have attracted more than 500,000 views, and Mr. Davis says he believes that video has been a crucial factor in increasing sales 15 percent a year.
CREATE A DESTINATION It is easier to win customers if you give them a reason to tune in. For BBQguys.com, the reason is food sizzling on the grill.
BBQguys.com began as a traditional brick-and-mortar store (The Grill Store and More) in Baton Rouge, La. In 2001, the company went online, which allowed it to reach legions of new customers but also reduced its ability to provide personalized service. Online video has helped the company recover its human touch virtually.
In 2006, it started posting informal YouTube videos featuring new grills, narrated by its customer service manager and chief executive. The channel grew so much that the company recruited a local chef, Tony Matassa, to be its on-camera personality.
It now has nearly 400 videos on YouTube, which have collectively been viewed 1.4 million times. Video has become so essential that the company has built a small studio in one of its warehouses. “We see the video almost like a TV commercial,” said Troy Olson, digital advertising manager for ShoppersChoice.com, the parent company of BBQguys.com. “We’re planting our brand name in their minds.”
The company does not just pitch products. Rather, the goal is to establish its people as customer-friendly experts and provide a channel full of useful information about how to fry a turkey, grill a pizza or smoke a beef brisket. The hope is that the information will draw viewers — many of whom will become customers — and increase the site’s conversion rate. According to Mr. Olson, a person who comes to the site and watches a video is twice as likely to make a purchase as a visitor who does not watch a video.
USE ANALYTICS AND TOOLS YouTube offers tools that allow you to measure the effect of your videos. BBQguys has used this data to make its videos more compelling — shortening them, for example, to two or three minutes after discovering that customers tend to stop watching the longer ones. The company also discovered “hot spots” that viewers rewind to and rewatch — particularly images of food sizzling on the grill — and it now makes sure to include more such scenes.
“Video has to be evolving,” Mr. Olson said. “You have to always be willing to change everything you’re doing.”
BUILD A BRAND CHANNEL One way to get the attention of customers is invite them to become your video producers — especially if they jump off cliffs, ski down steep powder ridges or do somersaults on BMX bikes.
GoPro.com, a maker of small high-definition cameras that can be worn during adventure sports, has built a thriving YouTube presence with customer videos. YouTube allows businesses to establish channels, or a home page that lists videos, playlists and contact information. The GoPro channel features more than 100 videos — including surfing, skiing, motocross, auto sports and flight — which have been viewed more than 24 million times.
“It is the No. 1 most convenient way for us to validate our product to customers,” said Nick Woodman, founder and chief executive. He said business was growing 300 percent a year. “Viral word-of-mouth marketing for GoPro is massive. Video is really the conduit.”
ADVERTISE WITH VIDEO YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google (which owns YouTube) and represents a huge audience of potential customers. It offers a dozen advertising options, including banner ads, promoted videos that appear on top and beside search results, and “preroll ads” that appear during other YouTube videos much like a conventional TV commercial. YouTube recently announced that it was displaying more than three billion ads per week.
Like Google, YouTube generally follows a cost-per-click or cost-per-view model so advertisers pay only when users click on ads or watch ad videos. Advertisers can view metrics such as number of impressions, conversions and viewer demographics via their Google AdWords or YouTube Insights accounts.
Ads can be aimed at customers based on demographics, keywords or interests. For example, a person who searches for “ceiling tiles” might see a Ceilume video titled “make an ugly ceiling elegant” highlighted as a promoted video atop the YouTube page. Ceilume devotes about 10 percent of its advertising budget to YouTube.
OFFER INSTRUCTION Online video makes it easy to follow the adage “Show, don’t tell.” Many businesses have turned to video for instruction manuals and how-to guides.
Directfix.com sells replacement parts and accessories for smartphones and other electronics. The business faces a constant customer service challenge: showing lay people how to take apart electronic gadgets and install fragile components.
In the early days, the company used pictures and text, said Robert Stanley, founder and chief executive. Inevitably, those instructions left customers with questions that placed a burden on the company’s customer service department. In 2007, the company began posting how-to videos on YouTube. That summer, it released one of the first videos showing how to take apart an iPhone, a video that has been viewed more than two million times.
The company has compiled a library of instructional videos that have reduced customer questions by half, allowed the company to eliminate phone support and cut its customer service budget about 40 percent. Without video, Mr. Stanley said, he would have to hire four or five additional employees.
“You can tell somebody over the phone to turn the screw in the top right corner,” he said, “and they might understand what you mean and they might not. If you show them on a video, they get the point.”

-By Kermit Patterson, New York Times

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Google to Help Broker Video Ads

Google Inc., trying to become a middleman for selling video ads on the Internet, will soon test a service that matches advertisers with website publishers, including Google's own YouTube video site.

The Silicon Valley company is creating the video marketplace within its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, Neal Mohan, a Google vice president for product management, said in an interview. It resembles existing exchanges used to sell graphical and interactive ads, a category known as display.

Such exchanges allow companies to bid to place ads across different websites in real time, or right at the moment a user has called up a particular Web page.

If the experience in display ads "is any indication, the promise of video for publishers is pretty tremendous," Mr. Mohan said.

Many ads are still purchased ahead of time through negotiations between individual websites and advertisers. But the real-time exchanges, which are growing in prominence, help publishers avoid having unsold space, particularly for the less-valuable areas of their sites.

The move by Google, which was widely anticipated, comes amid activity by several smaller companies, including Adap.tv Inc. and Brightroll Inc., to establish similar real-time-bidding marketplaces for video ads and take a cut from each transaction.

Online video advertising, which includes commercials that run before a video is played as well as text ads that appear on the video while it is playing, is a nascent but growing market, reaching nearly $1.5 billion in the U.S. last year, said research firm eMarketer. This year video ad spending in the U.S. will be about $2 billion, the firm said, while the overall U.S. display-advertising market—which includes graphical, interactive and video ads—will be $10 billion.

The growth of the online video-ad market is constrained by the fact that there aren't enough high-quality online videos to satisfy advertiser demands, said Terence Kawaja of LUMA Partners, a boutique investment bank.

Google's YouTube and online video site Hulu LLC are among the leaders in terms generating revenue from video ads in the U.S., industry experts say.

Google's exchange for graphical ads is used by companies such as Demand Media Inc. and Time Inc. Demand Media, which produces video content, currently sells video ads directly to advertisers as well as through exchanges run by Adap.tv and Adconion. Steven Kydd, a Demand Media executive vice president, said he was enthusiastic about trying the forthcoming Google video-ad marketplace.

At Cadreon, a unit of InterPublic Group of Cos. that helps advertisers such as Microsoft Corp. and MasterCard Inc. buy ads on the Web, less than 10% of clients' current spending involves video ads, said Cadreon Chief Executive Brendan Moorcroft. But that slice is expected to grow to around 25% within the next couple of years, he said.

Cadreon is currently using technology from Adap.tv to buy online video ads on that company's marketplace and other exchanges. Advertisers can target the ads to specific groups of viewers on sites such as USAToday.com, based on data about the viewers' demographics and interests.

"In the future most of the $70 billion spent on television advertising today will be traded on exchanges like ours," said Amir Ashkenazi, Adap.tv's chief executive.

David Karnstedt, chief executive of online marketing firm Efficient Frontier, is a strong proponent of Google's ad exchange, which he uses to help advertisers buy display ads. But Mr. Karnstedt added that Adap.tv "is in a good spot" as a "strong alternative for publishers who might not want to work with Google and share data" about their users.

Google's Mr. Mohan said the company has "incredibly strong relationships with publishers" and already helps them generate billions of dollars in revenue through the sale of display ads.
-Amir Efrati, Wall Street Journal 

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YouTube to Boost Short-Form Video

If YouTube is to thrive, it has to help a micro-industry of professional web producers, the kind who create two- and three-minute webisodes like Barely Political's "Auto-Tune the News" have to thrive, too.

YouTube has known this for years, but is now taking a bigger role in cultivating that industry, acquiring Next New Networks, which has built a track record of building and promoting web series since it was founded in 2007. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase price was less than $50 million, according to a person familiar with the terms.

YouTube execs stressed this doesn't mean the video-sharing site is becoming a media company; indeed Next New Networks hasn't produced or owned content in several years. Rather, it promotes, distributes and sells ads against web shows that are part of their "networks" like Barely Political, Indy Mogul and Hungry Nation.

"We are not good at creating content," said Tom Pickett, director of content at YouTube. "If we wanted to create content, we wouldn't buy Next New Networks. Over the past few years they've transformed their business model to help others create content."

Next New Networks has become very good at building audiences for web series and cross-promoting them. Its entire full-time staff of 17 will join YouTube as part of the deal, except for co-founder Fred Siebert, who will consult on a temporary basis. The startup will operate within YouTube as two separate units: YouTube Next Lab and Audience Development Group. Chairman Lance Podell will join YouTube Next Lab global director.

YouTube is focused on this segment of content because it does not involve paying rights fees to Hollywood studios, but it does have loyal audiences and is attractive to advertisers. It's a niche between studio-produced content, the domain of Hulu, Netflix and Apple TV, but above random user-generated video, which doesn't command premium ad rates. YouTube's biggest problem is that there simply isn't enough professional content to scale the business in the way Google hopes.

YouTube has been giving grants to content creators since last summer, in one case giving producers coupons to buy new video cameras. Mr. Pickett said YouTube would continue or even accelerate that program, offering advances against future ad sales for cash-strapped filmmakers.

"I would look at this again as helping our partners get the tools they need to build bigger audiences and more successful programming," Mr. Pickett said.

Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated YouTube revenue just shy of $1 billion in 2010, but a big percentage of that comes from big display campaigns on YouTube's home page. But video will be advertising's biggest category over at least the next few years. EMarketer estimates the market -- including in-video ads, prerolls and text overlays -- will be a little under $2 billion in 2011, up from $1.42 billion in 2010.

Founded in 2007, Next New Networks has raised $26 million from Spark Capital, Fuse Capital and Goldman Sachs. While it didn't scale the way its investors hoped, YouTube became dependent on the genre of content that it produced and later distributed, rather than high-priced TV and films.
-Michael Learmonth, AdAge Digital
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How To Optimize Videos For Search Engines

Based on a study released at OMMA Global in San Francisco Monday, looking at 978 keywords across 24 categories in Google, Bing, Yahoo Video, YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, and Blip.tv, among other channels.

Getting videos to serve up on the first page of Google and Bing isn't easy, but Weintraub believes he has found the secret. For starters, he had to determine where the videos that serve up on Bing and Google originated. On Google, videos from YouTube comprised 82%, followed by DailyMotion, 3%; MetaCafe, 2%; Google Video, 1%; and other, 10%. About 100 sites contribute to the "other" category, many of which support self-hosted videos. On Bing, YouTube contributed 38%; Bing, 37%; Vevo, 9%; Fox News, 4%; CNN, 3%; Blastro, 2%; Reuters, 2%; and other, 5%.

The study determines that transactional keywords only work in rare cases such as "buy snowboards" or "cheap skis." When it comes to optimizing videos, Weintraub suggests relying on keywords that provide information. "Tell your customers how to solve their problems," he says. "Take your FAQs and put them online with a talking head because that's what the search engines emphasize for users."

For instance, informational keywords that convert well include "congenital disorder," "snowboard comparison," diy oil change," "history of beer," and "how to ride a horse." That's because Google looks for content that informs. The universal SERPs' intent query results shook out as follows: Informational, 74 keywords, 62 videos, 84% with videos; Navigational, 73 keywords, 13 videos, 18% with videos; and transactional, 74 keywords, nine videos, and 12% with videos. One hundred percent of the videos returned in universal SERPs ranked on page one of a monitored platform if they weren't self-hosted.

Aside from publishing a site map and optimizing videos, Manny Rivas, online marketing account manager at aimClear, suggests doing keyword research in the YouTube Ajax search box. He says marketers should put in core keywords and look at the suggestions. It won't show volume of search frequency, but will reveal the popularity of a search against another. Put in a core keyword and run an alpha pattern with it, he says.

Getting on the first page of YouTube requires marketers to begin with keyword research and then use the Ajax suggest box. Start with informational searches -- the ones that work -- and then fill them in with product names to see what people look for on YouTube. Marketers also can use Scrape Box to mine the Ajax suggest box to see what works. Use it to optimize the title tag. Put a link in the description of the title tag, as well as in the tags and separate phrases with commas.

The goal to get specific keywords to serve up related videos on the first page of YouTube required Weintraub and company to conduct demographic research in the Ajax suggest box. It helped to find the keywords and optimize the tagging. The test consisted of 33 videos and 105 keywords that ended up returning 192 videos serving up on the first page of YouTube. Getting the videos to serve up on Bing or Google means they must also show up on the first page of YouTube.

Believe it or not, the study also reveals a need for engagement, finding users that actively post to the community page. Subscribers count. Similar to comments and reviews on product pages, YouTube looks favorably on a high number of comments, favorites and likes. It's about building the community.
Engagement matters. "If you want to maximize your chances for getting on the first page of Google and universal search engine page results, you have to actively participate," Weintraub says.
—Laurie Sullivan, MediaPost 



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