Hop On The Internet Video Marketing Wagon
August 22, 2009 by Alexis Jameson
Filed under Traffic
Internet video – the next big thing? It has knocked e-mail right off the charts as the hottest fad online. Sure, videos have been bouncing around the net since it went mainstream, but internet video marketing is still fresh and ripe pickings. It all started rolling with sites like Yahoo and everybody’s favorite, YouTube. Now, new video sites are breaking onto the scene like 1950’s pop-band one-hit wonders. The marketing possibilities are endless, especially for those working on a shoestring budget, because if put together just right, anyone, any company, big or small, can go instantly global.
The first small attempts at internet video marketing happened back in the early 90’s, and were mostly ignored, leaving the online video niche to people with travel tapes, lame home-bloopers and garage-band MTV fodder. Because the market is wide open, you should join the herd before it stampedes. People are tired of reading their advertising but they love watching it.
The fact is that people have become basically blind to advertising attempts. Nothing seems to catch their eye anymore. It’s become so commonplace, it’s like the wallpaper outside an elevator – no one even notices it.
E-mail is actually the bad guy in this story. People just blow through it, ignoring the marketing spam, deleting it without giving it the time of day.
And I haven’t even mentioned the viruses, worms, spy ware, blah, blah, blah… You get the point. If I don’t know who it’s from, nine times in ten I don’t even open it.
And, of course, like any top-notch bad guy, e-mail has become dangerous too. Open the wrong message and your hard drive crashes. Another e-mail might send your credit card number and passwords to someone in Uzbekistan. It is really just so much easier to ignore it than risk it. And there’s the reason for the newfound success of online video right there. E-mail is ignored, filtered, trashed. How can marketers possibly use it as an honest means to send their messages?
But, if you are the owner of a small enterprise, this is all great news. Internet video marketing is poised to fill the vacuum as e-mail goes the way of the dodo.
There are hundreds of free sites out there, waiting for you to come along and post your customized product video, or you could just do it yourself on your own site. You’ll already be jumping light-years ahead of the competition.
If your target market is under 40, you’ve got it made. Gen. X’s and their successors are eating up online video, and internet video marketing is absolutely exploding. Take advantage of it, and send a brilliant visual message to your target audience that a flat old e-mail could never convey!
