One of the best things to cut through the online clutter and get your business noticed whether it is big or small is utilizing online video. With online video, you don’t need to be the next George Lucas directing Star Wars, you just need a strategy and a plan. Getting started with online video may seem daunting but there are online marketing video specialists who can help you. Here are a few tips to help you make the most out of your video marketing:

1. Keep It Short

One of the shortest Star Wars characters was Yoda, he was also arguably the most smartest. Key takeaway: short = smart. It’s important to remember that nobody cares about your brand as much as you do. So the less the viewer is familiar with your brand, the shorter their attention span will be for watching your video. If some one clicks to watch your business video they want one question answered:

What’s in it for me?

Will your product or service help them? Speak to that. If you can’t answer that very simple question quickly…they are gone. In fact more than half of online video viewers leave after one minute.  So edit, then when you think you’re done…edit some more.

2. Stay on Target

The words “Stay on target” were aptly spoken by the fighter pilot Porkins in Star Wars right before he was blown to smithereens in the rebel attack on the Death Star. But I digress. The point of this was to stay on target. Before you begin even writing your script it’s critical that you define who your target audience is. Man? Woman? Just starting a family? Newly retired? The more targeted the better. Then once you’ve defined your audience, script to the main benefits – show how your product or service will solve their problem, save them money, or improve their efficiency at doing a certain task making their lives easier. Every aspect of your video has to communicate these benefits rather than just describe your product or service. You’re not selling your product or service, you’re selling a solution to their problem. Create videos that the viewer can identify with and the problems they face.

3. Be Creative

When George Lucas was pitching his idea for a space saga, most studios questioned the feasibility to make a film with all those action sequences and imaginative landscapes that had never been done before. Through some creative film-making, he revolutionized the way movies are made. You don’t need to revolutionize your industry with every video, just be smart and clever about the content you are producing. Your business videos should be creative and entertaining but keep the message focused. Make videos that your target demographic influencers, decision-makers, and co-workers will want to watch over and over again but, more importantly, will want to share. If you create boring content, no one will want to watch it…much less share it.

4. What Did He Say?

C-3PO was always quick to point out that he was “fluent in over six million forms of communication…”. The point is to make sure your message is clear, no matter who is watching. Nothing ruins a great video more than bad audio. Spend the money and hire a professional voice over person, it will make a world of difference in the end product. Also it’s important to consider that some businesses have policies against audio being played in the work place, so create captions or subtitles for the video. A final thing to keep in mind in regards to effective communication, is if you plan to distribute the video internationally, it’s a lot easier to produce a foreign language version if the English version is an animation with off-camera voice over. Then all you need to do is replace any onscreen text and get a new voice over audio track made. Much simpler than creating a whole new video.

5. Include a call to action.

When Luke Skywalker was in battle to destroy the Death Star he heard the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi speak to him and say “Use the force, Luke.” You can’t ask for a more direct call to action than that. Many businesses create great videos and don’t tell the viewer what they’d like them to do next. If you want clients to fill out a form to download a white paper or share it with a friend, ask them. Be as direct as possible. Make sure whatever the next step is, make it as easy as possible for the viewer to take action. If you want them to share, make the sharing buttons easily accessible or built in. Want them to sign up for a newsletter? Put the form right on the page next to the video.

So the point is…

You don’t have to be the next George Lucas, not even close. Just keep these five tips in mind when you are planning the strategy for your next online video and you’ll at least be starting out on the right path toward success. Let the force be with you.

Are you either a full-time or part-time freelance animator? Would you like to pick up some project based marketing animation work? Well…Adelie Studios is looking for a few reliable animators with great personalities and insanely creative animation skills to work with.

What is Adelie Studios all about?

We are a virtual organization – we work with freelance animators, voice over artists, writers, musicians and character designers all over the country for projects on demand. This allows us a lot of flexibility when quoting projects because we can keep our overhead costs very low.

What skills do I need?

• We are looking to work with animators who have a strong background in Flash animation.
• 1-2 years freelance experience producing Flash animation.
• Used to communicating, working independently and meeting deadlines in a virtual environment.
• Experience producing animated marketing videos or a strong interest in producing marketing animations.
• Creativity oozing out of every pore and not afraid to speak up as everything we do is collaborative.
• Sparkling personality to match is a must.

That sounds like me, how do I find out more?

Excellent! Please contact us and include a link to some of your animation work you have recently done. We look forward to speaking with you and hopefully working with you on a project soon!

Let’s say you have a website and you post regularly to a blog. At some point someone (not affiliated with your company) randomly posts a comment on one of your blog posts mentioning another company or linking to a video about that company on YouTube. Then that company mentioned sees the comment and isn’t happy about it. Rather than engaging in a conversation in the comments to defend their brand position or asking that the comment be removed; they have the power to shut down your ENTIRE domain. Sound like censorship? It is.

The Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are bills which would give corporations and government the ability to censor websites on the net. Both of these bills had, at their heart, good intentions. However both bills are so horribly written with vague definitions of piracy that basically ANY website including any form of user-generated content could be at risk of being shutdown. Think of Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and the implications these bills could have on the way these websites fundamentally operate if passed into law. All of these websites rely heavily on user generated content. SOPA /PIPA would completely alter the way Americans would be allowed to use the Internet. Key word in that last sentence is “allowed”.

It also presents a nightmare for web hosting companies which will be forced to police all of the domains that are hosted by them. Let’s say you own a boutique baby clothing store and you had a post about how babies do the cutest things on your website blog and someone posted a link of their baby dancing to a top 40 song. If that top 40 song’s recording company were to claim that this content were piracy, your web hosting company would have to shut down your ENTIRE domain as soon as the complaint was received. There would be no pre-shutdown notification email and no friendly ‘please remove this from your site’. The next day you’d wake up and like flicking off a light switch – your entire website would be gone.

Companies such as DreamHost where the Adelie Studios website and blog are hosted, have over 1.2 million domains that are hosted by them. If this layer of enforcement were required because of the liability they’d be forced to take on, you can all but say goodbye to affordable web hosting. DreamHost has their own response denouncing the bill and the negative effects it would have in their blog post “Don’t drop the soap, drop SOPA!”

As a small business producing niche animated content and marketing animations for the web, both of these bills are incredibly frightening to us. Fight for the Future produced a great little animation (which we are always fans of people using animation) to explain and illustrate the way these bills could potentially censor the internet. Check out their animation below.

SOPA comes up for a vote on Tuesday, January 24th. To find more about the SOPA & PIPA bills yourself and to see what actions you can take, visit: http://americancensorship.org/

 
 While clicks are not the only key metric for video advertisers, they are one of the easiest to measure. Most video ad goals are some sort of call to action, whether that is to like the brand on Facebook, some sort of social sharing or getting the viewer to take an action like buying a product online; many advertisers still use clicks as the main tracking statistic for specific campaign goals. This may be because tracking after the click can become too labor intensive for small marketing staffs or they lack the understanding of how to measure beyond the click.

So if measuring clicks is your primary measurement and you believe the campaign reached the right demographic, did you reach them at the best time to drive these clicks? TubeMogul just completed a research report to answer this exact question. You can read the full report from TubeMogul with their key findings on their research report “Driving clicks, ‘Likes’ with Video Ads?” Here’s my quick thoughts on the results…

While completion rates do not differ significantly throughout the day, click-through-rates steadily climb during business hours to a peak around 5pm. After 5pm, clicks drop significantly, reaching less than half the peak value by midnight.
 

CPMs for both 0:15 and 0:30 second pre-roll ads show very little variance over the course of the day of less than 10% difference for both video lengths. While CPMs for the two video lengths closely mirror each other over the course of a day, 0:30 second ads consistently commanded a higher CPM than 0:15 second ads.

During the working day between 7am – 7pm, Cost-per-click (CPC) remains very similar for both video lengths. However, as the Click Through Rate (CTR) of 0:30 second ads fall in the evening, CPC becomes more attractive for 0:15 second ads in the evening between 8pm – midnight.

So…what does this all mean?

I’ll admit up front, I’m not a huge fan of pre-roll video ads and TubeMogul also reported in an earlier case study that nearly 87% of unique visitors to a site’s homepage featuring video will never watch a pre-roll video ad. However, in certain circumstances and on select community or news based websites, pre-roll ads can be very successful. I think the biggest takeaway from TubeMogul’s findings is if you are using clicks as a goal, you may want to think about increasing the volume of your 0:15 second ads during the evening hours to take advantage of higher CTRs during this time. To be successful with your video advertising you should be opportunistic with your spend to get the biggest bang for your buck by buying at ideal times. Your thoughts or success stories with video advertising? What worked for you?