Friday, November 27, 2009

Can Video / Podcasting Help Market Your Small Business?

This is an easy one … the short answer is yes.

Video is great for marketing and driving traffic to your business website.

Video, only if done right, can help with:

1 - Raising awareness about your business/product
2 - Getting your website on the first page of Google (based on keywords selected)
3 - Increasing customer retention

Video offers a more personal strategy for prospective clients to feel familiar with you. It also helps your website get a better search engine ranking.

Video Podcasting is an underused and powerful tool that can pay for itself and market products at the same time. The revenue from podcasting is doubling every year while the costs are staying the same. 100 million people are d27nloading podcasts from iTunes every year.

Perhaps most interestingly, advertisers are starting to fall over themselves to sponsor podcasts. Although they realize podcasts’ audiences are small, they also realize they are niche and very loyal.

If someone has bothered to go to iTunes, download the podcast, transferred it to their iPhone, and then watch it …. they are pretty likely to be interested in whatever the podcast is about, and therefore also interested in related products.

In one very successful podcaster’s words …. why spend a fortune on advertising on a TV show with an audience of 5million when you really only want to reach the 100,000 people interested in your product? With podcasting you are spending a fraction of the money on a show that reaches your targeted 100,000 people in a much more measurable way.

If businesses create a regular show around their brand that isn’t the traditional business podcast (i.e. what has our company been doing this year) ….. but is a piece of entertainment based around their brand …. they will get a wider audience riveted. Once you get them drawn in … you can strengthen the relationship via a mailing list (have a way for them to opt-in). You can also link directly to some specific product or service related to the podcast. They’re interested in the “subject” after watching your “show” … and are now primed to take the action you want. Buy.