Your Video Marketing Doesn’t Need to be Viral

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video-marketing“Viral” is perhaps the most overused words associated with video marketing. Everyone wants to go viral because everyone thinks that this is where the real money is.

While a viral video will probably make you a lot of money in display ads, you can’t say for sure that it helps increase your brand image or sales. It’s like trying to make a AAA blockbuster movie. Even those that follow the Hollywood formula and have an ensemble cast might fall on their face. This article will show you why video marketing doesn’t need to be viral, it needs to engage.

Engage the Viewer

The main thing that your video marketing needs to do is engage. Making a miscellaneous funny video might go viral for a short time, but will it be able to build your brand? Will it make people trust you? While there are some viral videos that have been able to really increase a business’s sales, the fact is that engaging videos are always the most dependable.

Video marketing is about making a series of videos. You can’t rely on one to lay the golden egg. You should make every video dependable, engaging and useful for your business. You can try making a viral video every now and then, but your main content should just try to engage.

Views are Earned, Not Granted

If you have tried video marketing before, then chances are that you probably didn’t have much success with your first video. This isn’t because the video is bad. It might actually be your best one. The fact is that most people don’t understand that they also need to market their video marketing.

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What is Inbound Marketing & Outbound Marketing?

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With all the latest buzz words in Digital Marketing such as content marketing and integrated digital marketing; Inbound marketing seems to have got a lot of traction in the past 5 years.

inbound marketing

Marketing was just marketing and people really did not talk about Inbound and Outbound until recently. To understand what Inbound marketing is, we should first define Outbound marketing.

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing is the traditional marketing that a lot of companies used to do (and are still doing) to market their products and services. Outbound marketing includes the following marketing activities:

  • Television Ads
  • Newspaper Ads
  • Radio Ads
  • Cold Calling to a list of prospects
  • Mass Web Display Advertising
  • Mass (Unsolicited) Email Marketing
  • Marketing via Trade Shows
  • Ads in Trade Publications and Magazines

The common thread in all the above marketing methods is that the prospective customer never asked for an interruption and communication of a sales message. Many people may wonder, is there any other way to market?

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7 Powerful Ways to Convert Website Traffic Into Leads

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More traffic to a website does not always mean more revenue, unless the revenue model is purely based on display advertising. Display advertising model brings the lowest revenue per visitor compared to all the other revenue models and there are some studies that suggest that only 27% of the internet visitors actually end up looking at a display ad.

web-traffic-leads

One of the best ways to monetize internet web traffic is to convert them into leads and then promote a product or service to them via email marketing or a follow up phone call. This is also called Inbound marketing. Outbound marketing or interruption advertising is no longer effective because people are getting better at tuning out of interruption.

The best way to attract traffic to a website is via content marketing. Content marketing is best done through blogging, social media and email marketing. However in this post we will not be covering how to attract traffic but rather we will talk about how to convert those traffic into leads.

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What is eCPM & RPM and How to Calculate it

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ecpm-rpmeCPM stands for effective cost per Mille (or effective cost per thousand impressions) and RPM stands for Revenue per thousand impressions. Both the terms usually mean the same but they are used in different contexts.

When advertisers want to run display ads on a particular website, they will calculate the eCPM and see if they can afford to run the ad. Advertisers will compare the eCPMs of various channels and determine which one is converting better. The obvious choice would be to go with the channel which offers the least eCPM paired with maximum conversions.

RPM is usually publisher’s language and they find out how their web property is performing. Page views keep changing but RPM for a website in a specific industry and with a specific audience fairly remains constant over a period of 6 months to a year. A health niche website may have a higher RPM and a cine gossip entertainment website may have a relatively low RPM compared to the health website.

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YouTube TrueView Video Ads – What are They and How to Setup

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youtube true view adsIt is a known fact that Google is the No.1 search engine and almost all online businesses either have advertised or know about ads on Google. But there is another big website which people often forget about. YouTube. YouTube is not just the world’s No.1 video hosting platform but also the world’s No.2 search engine. A lot of people go to YouTube directly and search for video content instead of going to Google.

So I guess it is time to start exploring video marketing on YouTube and YouTube ads. There are different types of ads on YouTube and it may be a little confusing at first, but the very purpose of this article is to bring clarity about the whole YouTube advertising process and possibilities. Mostly the focus of this post is on one type of ad called the TrueView ads.

YouTube advertising can be ineffective and one can get into the trap of treating it as just another website where you put up the ads and bring traffic to your website. But the best use of ad dollars spent in YouTube advertising would be to push video content that is already hosted on YouTube so that it creates a snowball effect. Hence the first step would be:

Step 1: Start with Video Content Marketing on YouTube

Before you start exploring how to setup YouTube ads, my recommendation would be start using YouTube as a video content distribution channel first. Setup a YouTube channel, publish some quality videos on the channel, spread the links through social media and your own website. The types of videos may be customer testimonials of your product or service or a how-to video demonstrating your product in action.

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How to Setup Campaigns and Track Different Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

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trackingI have always been an advocate of data driven marketing decisions. Intuition is great but only when the data is unavailable. With data, decisions are always better than emotional guess work. Marketers never had this kind of data even 20 years back. Now with so much data around testing, tracking and optimizing is no longer optional.

In this article you will find out how to setup Campaigns for different promotions and track those traffic sources using UTM tracking codes in Google Analytics. All websites installed with Google analytics has the capability to track individual campaigns. A campaign is nothing but a particular promotion that you are running and it may be a free one or a paid one. For example, you can run a campaign for the promotion of the sales of your latest eBook. The traffic may come from your blog, newsletter, paid ads on Google, Facebook, other websites and so on.

To track the traffic from a particular source you need to build a new URL for it and then use that URL in the campaign that you are setting up. This URL will lead back to your original page but it will have tracking parameters in the URL which Google Analytics will pickup. To build a URL for a specific campaign, you should use the Google URL builder.

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Keyword List Refining – Finding Out the Keywords that Bring Revenue

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keyword list refiningKeywords are one of the most important data for an online marketer. Keywords find its way through PPC Ads, SEO, Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing. Keywords are not just vague words to be used in the marketing. They are the words and phrases that run inside the minds of prospects and customers. That’s the language they use to describe what they want and need.

It is important for us, digital marketers, to speak the same language in our marketing materials so that it “rings a bell” when our prospects come across marketing material with that language.

With the latest automation tools, it is easy to generate a big list of keywords. One of the most used, most talked about and authoritative tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool, as you may already know, helps you generate keyword ideas from existing keywords, or with URLs.

Why Keyword List Refining?

Keyword generation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an online marketing strategy and work flow. While it is VERY easy to generate a big list of keywords, it is challenging to find out which keywords convert well and bring revenue and profits to the business.

This is important because low performing keywords are eating into the marketing budget all the time and without scavenging such low performing keywords, it will be VERY difficult to increase the ROI of a digital marketing campaign.

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