Monday, April 16, 2012

Marketing With Audio and Video to Promote Your Business

I thought about sub-titling my book "Yes, you ARE the only person without a video on YouTube," but then I thought again. That statement isn't quite right. It FEELS right to me, because I'm a multimediapreneur, someone who makes their living on audio and video.

Combine that with the knowledge that YouTube is the most visited site in the world, and it makes for a convincing argument. There's only one problem with it - that's not the whole truth.

Someone shared statistics with me stating that 80% of the videos on YouTube are created by 20% of the people. Then I conducted a small survey of people who don't use audio and video for their business to find out why. The results and comments surprised me. Although they were the smallest segment of the group, 13% of the people actually said "I don't see any purpose in it."

In a November 2008 online report from Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist, I saw statistics stating that YouTube has 344 MILLION monthly unique viewers each month (55 MILLION a day). About 80 million come from the US, 77.5 million from Asia and 130 million from Europe.

Video viewing has finally surpassed online search views. In October 2008, 12.6 total billion searches were made - as compared to 13.5 billion videos viewed. "Video is now a standard, an expectation." Says Michael Boland, Senior Analyst for the Kelsey Group. Knowing these statistics makes me wonder how anyone cannot find the purpose in multimedia marketing. However, I (and other marketers) forget that not everyone KNOWS this information.

Many businesses are offline, and have been in place for a long time - before the internet was even a tool. Their ideas about business are based largely on face-to-face interaction and print marketing, because their clients have been local. What has changed?

The potential clientele for many businesses has increased as population has increased, AND most likely, the amount of competition has increased. Plus, people don't pay as much attention to print media as they used to (which is why many news papers, large and small, are closing). The main place people look for their goods and services is Google - but many offline businesses just haven't come to understand this, and can't be found on Google.

I was working with Chambers of Commerce trying to share an inexpensive way to marketing themselves and their members online. I actually had one President tell me that she didn't understand why people don't just grab the yellow pages and look a business up - that's what SHE found to be quickest. That showed me something important: just as I couldn't understand why people still use the yellow pages, she couldn't understand why people WEREN'T using the yellow pages. I haven't had a yellow pages in my house for YEARS, so that concept is completely foreign to me.

In other words, people base their expectations about what other people do or do not do on their own preferences and experiences - unless they are given reasons to believe otherwise. One person surveyed summed it up succinctly: "I don't spend time listening or watching...so why would others?" 344 million OTHER people beg to differ with that answer.

We MUST understand that many of our target clients DON'T think as we do - but in order to get their business, we MUST be found where they are spending their time. All of the statistics points to video sites being the ones with the most traffic. Facts and examples help people to move forward into areas where they have never been before, even if the idea of change is scary.

The second most popular reason why people didn't create audio and video (I'll tell you about the #1 reason in the first chapter of my book, "101 Things To Do With Audio And Video (To Promote Your Business)" was "I wouldn't know what to say or do." Now THIS baffled me. If you are in business, when people ask you what you do for a living, you have no problem answering them, right? When they ask you about your products or services, you can probably talk for days about them. Many of you stay informed about what is going on in your industry or niche, and could talk about current information.

Sometimes, you just need someone else to bounce ideas off of, or who can stir up your creative juices. For example, I used LinkedIn to survey some people, and was able to ask participants more detailed questions when they told me why they don't use audio and video. I normally ended up suggesting different things they could do, different topics they could cover, etc. By the end of the conversation, without exception, they all said that they now WOULD consider doing audio and video - if they had HELP.

So I encourage you to move past your fears and doubts about your ability to create multimedia, and do something small to get started. It does not have to be Steven Spielberg quality - a simple slide show video would do fine. Just break through your paralysis and start experiencing high Google rankings by marketing with audio and video.