The Wall Street Journal’s Raymund Flandez delves into marketing with online video today in a piece called “Lights! Camera! Sales!: How to Use Video to Expand your Business in a YouTube World“. He highlights a number of successful video series that help market small businesses of all shapes and sizes. A bunch of our favorites made the article (MAKE’s Weekend Projects and Will it Blend?), but it introduced us to some new ones as well (Val’s Art Diary and Free Range Root Beer).
For all the hype this article lends to the viral video trend, Nalts points out that it’s not perfect. He’s up in arms about a few of the specifics they mention, and he’s right on the money in his critique. Make sure to read it. He went ahead and wrote up his own excellent list of pointers to using web video to grow your business. For example:
To get a decent ROI, you need to keep your costs down. Otherwise you’re going to have a tough time capturing measurable value that offsets a $50-$500K pilot. You can dip your toe in the water for just thousands simply by partnering with known “weblebrities” who often promote products and services for a small fee, and already have an established audience. A few grand with a weblebrity gets you a video, their halo effect, and nearly guaranteed views of 10-100K. That same amount will get you an afternoon of a large agency fees.
Nalts is always the great resource for all things viral. Check out his blog for more tips like these:
‘Course, in this day in age, you could always just cheat.
Tags: video, advertising, business, promotion, marketing, guerilla, nalts, wsj
