Business videos can be a great, attention-grabbing way to promote your business and its products or services.
To maximise the benefits of your investment, it makes sense to use the video as widely as possible – always remembering your overall business and marketing objectives.
1) Your business website
This is the primary place to put your videos, either as a live stream or a downloadable file – or both.
In-site videos help to increase time spent on websites, and also improve search engine rankings.
2) Social media platforms
These include Facebook Pages, Google+ Business Pages, Twitter posts and blogging sites such as WordPress. All of these can benefit from videos to add interest and make them more ‘sticky’.
3) Video sharing sites
YouTube is the best known video sharing site, but there are several other public websites where you can upload and share your video. These include:
- Flickr
- the Yahoo! photo-sharing site, which now hosts short (up to 90 second) videos
- Vimeo, which has a limit of 500Mb per video for free use
- DailyMotion, where the limits are 100 minutes/2Gb
As well as these, Metacafe and UStream are social video-sharing sites which benefit users who want to create a community and actively encourage feedback and/or interaction.
4) Emails, e-newsletters and electronic press releases
First use of videos in launch promotions can be very useful for creating a ‘buzz’ about new products and services.
It’s possible to embed videos in newsletters, although a lot of email providers will block this content. It’s better to give a text link – or better, an image with a ‘Click to watch’ graphic – which sends readers to your video.
5) Interactive catalogues
Interactive publications are increasingly popular as a low-cost and highly effective way of communicating with customers and potential customers.
Embedding videos into these is a great way to add interest – and to demonstrate your product benefits and features in a real and immediate way.