Video Marketing: It’s fun and easy!

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Niche Internet Marketing

Video marketing is fun and easy. I say it’s fun because rarely does anyone pay $10.50 at the theater to sit and read a magazine for two hours. Nope, people like video.

Did you know that you don’t even need a video camera to start video marketing? I mean you don’t even have to rent one or hire someone or anything like that. You don’t even have to have pictures.

Now, I guarantee you’ll get yourself a video camera after you start doing this, perhaps you’ll even get video editing software. And the only reason that will happen is because video is fun. Once your customers comment that they liked the video you e-mailed them, or saw a video about you on Facebook – there will be no turning back. Video just creates fun positivity.

So how about the easy part? Well, I’ve got some tips for you to make this SUPER easy. If you’re able to be found in Google for your keywords, head over to YouTube’s Search Stories site and make a video of your company. All you need for that is to know which keywords bring up information about you. That’s it. And it’s FREE!

Then, find some marketing photos of your company online, in your camera or elsewhere and load them up to Animoto. Animoto is a service that will turn photos into a video complete with music, a bunch of fun graphics and fancy stuff. Oh yeah, that’s Free, too.

(along that same lines is a service Trip Advisor put together called TripWow. It’s designed for travel videos, but I’ve adapted it to many things. And it’s FREE).

YouTube, of course, is the ultimate video tool. It’s the #2 visited search engine every day. If you don’t have video editing software, that doesn’t mean you’re without options. When you load one of your videos up to YouTube, you get instant access to free tools to edit, add titles, add music, frames, captions and even “Links” to other videos. There’s no cost for that either – and it’s pretty fun at that.

Here’s a great example of a video that links to other videos. What kind of ideas does that put into your mind? You can watch the video from the beginning, but if you just want to see the “magic”, start watching it about 3/4 of the way through.

Now, when you really want to get creative, and I mean creative! – watch these two videos. These are browser based videos and are really going to blow your mind about what is possible. These are “fun”, but not so “easy”.

1. The Tostitos video on Vimeo (a YouTube type site)
2. The Bear Movie on YouTube. There’s a few bad words in this one, so get past that and see what this video can do.
3. Finally, Animal School on RaisingSmallSouls.com. Not only is the video beautiful, but she’s embedded a way for your customers to sign up on your mailing list – right in the video itself. Very creative.


Optimizing marketing videos for small business is not difficult – but we’ll leave that for another lesson. The point is . . . video marketing is fun and easy. Not only can you do it without anything, but with a little time you can create endless opportunity.

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Get your customers to market your small business with video

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: , ,
Posted in Local Small Business Marketing

Video is powerful. Did you know that people watch more internet video these days than they do television? Did you know that Google indexed video as it does everything else and will place it on the first page of results ?Did you also know that 95% of people watch internet videos to the end? They don’t stop in the middle.

That says 1 thing quite clearly – video is powerful!

So, why not use that to your advantage? If you’re a small business, why not have a contest challenging your customers to make great videos about your company and putting them on YouTube.  Tell them what the title needs to be (like Nashville’s Best Pizza) and let them know if you can find it, you’ll judge it and award the winning video a free pizza or Cadillac or something. . . Make it valuable and your customers could very well start marketing your business for you.

To make it even sweeter, if you use WordPress (or could build a site using it), you could display all the videos in the same place using the TubePress plugin.  All it requires is that you log-in to YouTube, add all the videos you’d like to a playlist, then tell TubePress the playlist ID.  That’s it. It will create a page with all the videos on it – no code necessary.

Consider that!  It’s a great way to get some marketing help from your customers.

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Can small businesses use Foursquare?

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Local Small Business Marketing, What is Social Media

I’ve been dabbling with the new “social media” app called Foursquare. It seemed, from the very beginning to be a great app to help small businesses reach new customers.

So I decided I’d not only try it out, I’d jump in and do everything you could do with it so I could really see how small businesses are using it, and perhaps be amongst the first to know of any changes or monetization ideas.

To some degree Foursquare is a game.  For small businesses, that may make it hard to conceptualize as a revenue generator. But the game involves GPS in mobile phones, which means people must find you in order to play.

If you’re small business goal is to increase exposure,  then Foursquare might be a small part of that strategy. From the game perspective, that only works if checking into your business contributes to the player achieving a Foursquare goal like attaining a new Foursquare Badge.

(By the way, it’s really a mobile phone scavenger hunt where “badges” are the prize and “check-ins” are the requirements.)

So far some big companies have been able to get their own badges, like Lucky Mag, Explore Chicago, Mountain Dew and Zagat’s. For the small business, that hasn’t been an option.

But the other side of Foursquare is where small businesses have made some headway.  The person who checks in the most times at an establishment gets labeled as the “Mayor” of that location. Places like Starbucks are honoring Mayors with 15% off at the register.  Get your customers competing to be the Mayor – and perhaps you’ll increase the number of times your regulars show up.

For some businesses (like this one), Foursquare has been a tremendous asset to their bottom line.  But the ease of “check-ins” make me wonder.

In my quest to get all the badges being offered by companies and Foursquare, I’ve noticed a few things.

  1. You can check-in without going inside and sometimes being as far a city block away. Occassionaly I ran into a pop-up that said “Whoa, you’re too far away to check-in”, but it is rare.
  2. You can drive around like in a scavenger hunt and check-in at all the places you need to. (Though there is a pop-up if you check in to several too quickly).
  3. If you’re GPS shows you to be somewhere else, because of a glitch, you can check-in wherever your phone thinks you are. But if your GPS rights itself and you check in again locally, you’ll get a “Whoa, you couldn’t possibly have traveled that fast” pop-up.
  4. Finally, it’s hard to check-in if you’re business is in a building that inhibits your phone GPS from working. That’s the most frustrating part.

There’s little downside to listing your business on Foursquare. Probably the very best thing is knowing that anytime someone checks in within a 1,000 meters, they have a chance to see that you’re a nearby business – which they may have never known before.

If you’re “playing” foursquare and have some ideas for small businesses – leave them here and let’s chat about them!

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