Video On Websites – From Fun To Business Generators
November 1, 2009 Website Strategy 1 CommentNo, we’re not talking about normal corporate videos here, but something a little bit different. We’re talking about combining your expertise with humour to generate brand awareness and new business.
In the world of website design, development and online marketing, those of us within the industry often witness very similar words coming out of the mouths of potential clients. These words tend to be along the lines of “a website isn’t complicated to create, it’ll cost a minimal amount and it’ll look fantastic if you’ve used the logo created by the one-legged daughter of the bosses half-brother”. That’s why a particular series of videos are particularly amusing to anyone who works within this industry.
Those videos are all available on YouTube and there are many variations. The examples below are probably the most perfectly matched to anyone in the web design/development/marketing industry. Warning: the language is very ‘colourful’!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sU3KaT74JE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfprIxNfCjk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCjcwBGQtiw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyTpzgAW5NA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx14XCNNARw&feature=related
But let’s go beyond the fact that those videos will amuse most people working within the web industry and look deeper at what’s being achieved there. At the end of each video there’s reference to the Xtranormal website, where such videos can be created. When you go to that website, the best page to view is http://www.xtranormal.com/about_state/, which has a video you can play that explains how the system works and also allows you to download the product for free.
And pause …..
At this stage, the company that’s developed the video creation software has put an advert for their product at the end of each video that people create, which is free advertising. They’ve also made it free for anyone to create videos of their own and through those people creating such videos and uploading them to sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and more, further people are seeing their brand name at the end of each video, and so want to find out how they can use the video creation software themselves. There becomes an ongoing Xtranormal brand awareness and although most people would just use the free download to create videos, the more people using the system, the more potential there is to get people to buy into the premium edition. This, of course, is a classic way to build new business – give away something for free and publicise it well, and then make money from premium subscriptions.
Let’s look at this from a different perspective though. Let’s think about YOUR own business …
What is there that you could portray about your line of business, through the medium of such a video creation system? Depending on your business sector, humour could be a great angle – even if you may think the nature of your business isn’t that exciting. In fact, even better if the nature of your business isn’t exciting because if you can make people laugh in a way that’s not detrimental to the ‘real’ side of your business, then that could put you ahead of your competitors.
As an example, someone selling a service could portray that in an amusing way through such videos. It’s not uncommon for many service type businesses to lose out to competitors purely on price but in reality the lower price services often don’t provide the benefits that the client actually needs. A video could portray a discussion between a buyer of that service and the cut-price company that is selling the service. It could be narrated with the buyer asking particular questions about what the service covers and the seller responding with comments about how poor the service actually is, but it’s cheap – to the point of mocking the buyer. However, the buyer doesn’t hear those words because they’re focusing purely on the cost of the service.
Through creating a series of such videos, including reference to your company as being ‘the good guys’ and publicising them effectively, brand awareness can be built and if you’ve made people laugh along the way then even though perhaps only 1 in 100 people will go on to buy from you, that’s still one more than would otherwise have done so.
On the other hand, if you look at those example videos and the Xtranormal software and still don’t see how you could use such systems to capitalise on the combination of fun and video, then feel free to contact us and we’ll give you some free pointers in the right direction.