Many small businesses have already experimented with TV commercials, placing spots on local cable channels to drive traffic to the websites and call centers, and into their stores, showrooms, or offices. If you’ve already got that video footage, why not leverage it to drive more traffic to your website? It’s fairly easy to adapt TV commercials into online videos you can use on your website, in video marketing or email campaigns, on video advertising networks, video sharing sites and other online marketing programs.
Leveraging your TV commercials for online distribution can be a powerful and effective way to reach new customers. In October 2009, there were some 139 million unique views of online video content online, and 11 billion individual streams, according to an October 2009 study by Nielsen. The average person viewed 79 online videos in that month alone, spending 212 minutes watching them, according to Nielsen. In other words, people are increasingly watching video on their computers and watching less cable and broadcast TV. So if you transfer your TV spots to the Web, you’ll have the potential to reach a massive and growing audience that might never see your TV commercials.
There are several strategies to keep in mind when turning your TV commercials into online marketing videos:
Add calls to action. Unlike a TV commercial, where you can only suggest that customers “call now” or “visit the store”, the online video format allows you to add immediate calls-to-action. When transferring your commercial to the online video format, make sure to include a clickable link to your company’s website and your phone number and address. But you shouldn’t stop there! With online video, you can include a printable coupon or a discount code and add a link to your local online directory listing using a teaser such as “Check out our great reviews on Yelp!” Some online video services such as Jivox also provide advanced interactivity features, such as enabling viewers to email or text your video to a friend and click to email you directly.
Modify your commercial. Online video editing services allow you to alter video content with the click of a mouse. You may want to change the voice-over in your TV spot to speak to a wider audience; if your TV commercial is extremely targeted to a local audience, for example, you want to expand the message to a national one to drive purchases on your site. You can record these voiceovers yourself or have a professional do it, then upload the audio file to the video creation platform to give your commercial a new message more in line with your online advertising goals. You may also want to add new music or still images, and you can do all of this with a video creation service like Jivox. Lastly, don’t forget that online audiences are less patient than TV audiences – you online video ad should be short, preferably 15-20 seconds.
Place your online video. Once you’ve transformed your TV commercial into an online video, it’s time to put the online video to use. Start by putting the video on your website. Then, experiment with video advertising. You can place the video on a targeted video ad network, like the Jivox Publisher Network, to get maximum exposure for your ad on high-quality websites. Your video ad will usually play within a banner, or as a “pre-roll” ad before a video plays on a website. You should also place your video on YouTube and other free video-sharing sites, as well as on Facebook if your company has a page. You can also use the video in email marketing campaigns (just embed a link to the video in each email).
Measure the success of your online video campaign. One of the best things about online advertising is how measurable it is. With a TV spot, you have little idea how many people have viewed the ad, and whether new customers have found you because of it. With online video, every view, click, and follow-through to your website is measurable, so you can see with certainty how many people viewed the video and took an action after seeing it. Make sure the online video advertising network on which you place your video ad offers full measurement services – tracking every view and click down to final sale on your website, as well as “soft” metrics like customer engagement and brand recall. Review the results to see what parts of your online video marketing campaign worked the best, and which were less successful. Maybe your email campaign with embedded video links drove more sales on your site than your YouTube posting, but your online video ad network placement drove the most sales overall. By finding out what worked and what didn’t, the next time around, you can create an even more impactful online marketing video, and carry these learnings into your next TV spot as well.
Tags: Best Practices, email marketing, internet videos, marketing videos, online advertising, Online Marketing, online video advertising, online video marketing, small business marketing, smb marketing, Tips, video creation tool, video marketing, viral video
Thanks for writing about this. There’s a heap of great tech info on the internet. You’ve got a lot of that info here on your site. I’m impressed – I try to keep a couple blogs somewhat live, but it’s a struggle sometimes. You’ve done a solid job with this one. How do you do it?
Absolutely. Calls to Action is what is needed by today’s marketers and online video is highly effective at exposing this immediately. We can overcome the fears of yesterday for businesses of all sizes. How do we do that. Knowledge and examples and Metrics as you pointed out.
Thanks for doing your part to stimulate the economy.
J Michael
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