YouTube & Video Marketing

Your personal brand isn’t just something you should think about when you need to find a new job. Personal branding is all about your reputation and staying at the top of people’s minds throughout your career. With social media, we can now market ourselves online in a way that was once only available for celebrities…

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What is a snack? Snack is a small serving of food eaten between meals. People follow routines everywhere. Some routines are professional and some are personal. A snack is usually consumed during a break from these routines. It is not meant to be or taste like a regular meal. As it is consumed during a…

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If you call LinkedIn advertising the greatest gift to B2B businesses since direct mail, you wouldn’t be far off. The ability to advertise to people based on their job title is a great marketing and sales opportunity. The addition of a built-in video player in 2017 made LinkedIn even more powerful and it provides a…

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Small businesses are generally hesitant about trying new ideas for their business. Especially lifestyle businesses who don’t look for very high growth rates and are happy with a consistent revenue stream. These businesses have standard operating procedures (SOP) for every process and they don’t like to deviate from these practices. If it ain’t broke, why fix…

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Creating and publishing videos for social media is a great way to reach a much wider audience, and you will be able to engage them in social media more effectively with video as well. However if you want to come up with the kind of videos that are able to really attract lots of viewers…

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If you’ve popped into Facebook Land lately, you’ve probably noticed an influx of videos in your feed, with good reason. This global social media platform is making a massive push to become THE leader in video content, not just to broaden its usefulness to users, but also to directly compete with the likes of YouTube,…

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I love to help brands be successful on YouTube. YouTube is the hardest of all the social media platforms to win at. Most brands are just throwing videos at YouTube hoping it will work. There are experts out there who say you just need content. How many times have you heard someone say content is…

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Facebook has close to 2.2 billion users worldwide. Youtube has 1.8 billion, which is more than Gmail’s 1 billion user base. A third of the global population is using each of these platforms. This makes social media the right platform to reach your target audience. But how do we know which type of content to…

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It is hard to deny that Instagram is on a roll. They just hit 1 billion monthly users. The announcement of IGTV shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Facebook said a few years ago that all their properties were making the move to be video first it looks like IGTV is the next…

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Video, video, video. We all know that we need to create more videos and that videos for social media can also help us build a large YouTube community. The question is how to come up with video ideas to consistently create engaging videos that also help us meet your marketing objectives on a consistent basis. Like…

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Let me give you a set of images. What comes to mind when you look at them. Did any of these words come to your mind – Peace, non-violence, revolutionary. Now, look at another image. Let’s see what you get. Master chef, aggressive, successful. I hope I got at least one of them right. So…

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Content marketing has been around for hundreds of years.  Content includes things like white papers, books, demos, literature, just to name a few.  Think about it. When you were a kid, how many cartoons where just content marketing aimed at getting you to ask your parents to buy toys?  Thanks to the internet, we have…

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With huge advancements in technology, business owners have found several new ways to promote their business online. Social media is the top target of every brand as it provides easy connectivity to millions of people from different corners of the world. And the best way to gain the attention of the audience on social media…

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10 Ways to Grow Your YouTube Channel Today Businesses need to decide how they want to use YouTube. Is it a video storage site or a social media site? Most companies treat it like it’s for video storage. It is ok if this is how you are going to use YouTube, but you can’t grow…

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I remember a conversation I had with Amazon in 2010 for a client and how important Amazon thought video was, even back then for product sales. Fast forward to today and product video is an even more important part of your conversation optimization strategy for every eCommerce site and with social media. As retailers, we…

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While most companies have finally caught on to the idea that a video is a great tool for sales, marketing, and communicating with your internal audiences, many have not implemented a video plan for their company. This is usually due to cost or the fact that they just don’t fully understand what needs to go into…

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Over the years videos have become ubiquitous with social media as they have grown to dominate almost all popular social media platforms. The reason for that growth is simple: Videos are by far the most effective form of social media content in terms of being able to attract and engage viewers. Social media videos are…

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When selling an eCommerce product online, having a video makes viewers are more likely to purchase your product.  Customers who watch 2 – 4 videos before purchasing spend 11.2% more than those that only watch one video.  Those that watch more than 4 videos spend 61.4% more than those who watched 2-4, according to research…

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Recently, YouTube announced that the site has 1.5 billion logged in viewers each month. This doesn’t include those who are not logged in; which means the site has even more viewers per month than this number shows. The average viewer watches over an hour of video on YouTube every day. This is a big opportunity…

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As if creating video wasn’t hard enough, you also need to figure out how to get people to watch your video; which is an art form all on its own. Part of doing this is to make your video is discoverable. The first step to creating videos that get views is creating content people are looking…

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Maybe it is just the company I keep but there has been a lot of talk about using video in social media. While Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube may be dominating the conversation, video on LinkedIn is a great way to get your profile or posts to stand out. There are three places that you can…

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Advertisers are boycotting YouTube to make a statement. It’s not just a couple of them, either. It’s more than 250 brands. Brands like PepsiCo, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and McDonald’s have pulled their advertising from YouTube. It has been estimated that it could be costing Google, who owns YouTube, $750 million. Others have said this controversy won’t…

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The first challenge, once your video has been completed, is getting people to watch it. The second challenge is getting the viewer to take the action in the video. Often, when I think about calls to action in a video, my mind instantly runs to all the annoying TV commercials that I have seen. “2…

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Social media has made getting your video out to an audience more attainable than ever before.  Smartphone cameras have made video recording easier than ever.  However, that being said, smartphone video isn’t right for every company.  The more professional your brand, the more professional your video needs to look.  If you are a YouTuber, a…

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The hardest part of creating a video is figuring out what to create.  The next hardest part is bringing that idea back down to reality and making it something you can afford.  I have recently launched a new YouTube reality show called “Shoot For Broke.”  It is a behind the scenes look at what a…

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A little over 10 years ago, video marketing for small business wasn’t really an option.  YouTube wasn’t the thing it is now and TV ads were expensive to buy and create.  Fast forward and now small businesses with local customers or clients have a great opportunity when it comes to using video because of the…

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Videos for your product are a great tool for B2B and B2C companies. Product videos are useful for increasing product sales and educating people about your product. A report by the company, Animoto, said that 75% of those surveyed found video to be helpful during the research phase of the buying process. 84% of those…

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There is a lot of talk about how effective video is as a part of a company’s marketing toolkit.  That being said, it can be hard to know what type of video you should start with.  Many companies spend a lot of money on the wrong things. Here are the three videos your company should…

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Facebook is making the bet that, in the future, most of the content on the site will be video.  You have probably seen videos playing automatically in your Facebook feed.  Some of these videos, as you may have noticed, are actually ads.  You will find videos about everything, from how to make a pie to…

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Note: Blab officially closed down on August 12, 2016 and thus its contents have been removed from this blog post. I previously blogged about leveraging live streaming for content marketing, something that has only become more popular since then with the ever-increasing buzz around Periscope and more recently Blab. Now it’s time to take a…

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One of the best ways to learn how to succeed on YouTube is by looking at what others are doing.  One of the most popular types of content on YouTube is “how-to” content.  I don’t know about you, but I type a lot of questions into the YouTube search box to learn new things.  This…

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Videos are useful for explaining a product, service or idea, and there are many different ways to create a video. One of the common questions companies ask about video is regarding using real people or some type of animation. Can I put my own executives on camera if they don’t have any “acting” experience? Are…

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YouTube recently announced a host of new features, additions and improvements that will be rolled out through the rest of the year. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made these new, exciting changes the focus of her keynote speech at last month’s Vidcon event in Anaheim California. At Vidcon, a large video conference attracting thousands of video…

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YouTube gave marketers a great gift with the annotations feature. However, the challenge with this feature is that it does not work on mobile devices. This is a problem because half of YouTube views are on mobile devices, and this percentage grows daily. YouTube cards are a new way to make your videos more interactive…

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The majority of companies are not using video in any way that provides any real ROI.  Just to clarify, simply knowing the number of people that clicked on your video is not a measurement of ROI.  It’s just a measurement of the number of people who clicked the button to watch video.  From that data,…

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Getting people to watch your video is only half the battle.  Once you get them to watch, you need to have engaging content to keep them there. Usually, companies want to know how many people are watching their videos, which is important, but not as important as who is watching your video.  Something else to…

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People make buying decisions based on emotion, not based on how rational it is. Any worn-out parent who has had to deal with a whining child in the supermarket check-out line knows the intense emotional reaction that enticing sugary treats can evoke in a toddler. Kids are not the only ones who make buying decisions…

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Since Google purchased YouTube, those willing to take a risk of creating a video have been rewarded in different ways. In the early days, after the purchase, you could place a video on YouTube and have it show up on the first page of the Google search results for the keyword of your choice within…

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Last year, video sharing service, Vine, hit the mainstream. Shortly after that, Instagram launched a similar service. The death of Vine was immediately predicted because of the huge user base that Instagram already had. Yet, here we are, and neither platform has been declared the winner of the Short-Form space. These two services are not the only…

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Animated video has become very popular online.  It is a very good tool that your company should consider.  One thing to note about animated videos is that they  should never be a substitute for using real people in your videos.  Using real people in your video gives the viewer someone to connect with. People will…

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  Is your brand making one of these 6 mistakes using video in social media? It’s been said that those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it and, even though video in social media is still relatively new, the internet is littered with brands that have had to learn the hard…

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Who is the target for your video? It takes an understanding of how people buy.  We know that people buy emotionally, not rationally.  I know this to be true when I look at my auto loans each month.  We also know that people don’t like to be sold to but they love to buy.  Knowing…

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It seems that YouTube gets overlooked as a social network despite the fact that it is the most popular of the video sharing sites. (Vimeo is second.) In fact, seventy-two hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, but not enough of it is from marketers. YouTube, like Google, has tons of free information…

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I am writing this post today because I wish that someone had written this for me when I was looking for a solution.  You see, I made a big mistake when I chose my original YouTube username, so today I write this to make sure that you don’t make the same mistake. I recently wrote…

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