YouTube: An Excellent Way to Reach the Professional Tradesman

youtubeAre you looking for ways to get in front of tradesmen? If you’re a manufacturer and don’t have anything on YouTube, you’re missing a great opportunity. What better way to show a customer or prospect how to use your product, highlight features and benefits or even have a customer testimonial.

Next to Google (who by the way owns YouTube), YouTube is the highest searched. The numbers are staggering:

  • YouTube has 1 Billion unique visitors each month and sees four billion video views every day.
  • 1 hour of video is uploaded every second – that’s 60 hours a minute!
  • Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years) watching video.
  • integrated into Google Results.

When considering content, here are some suggestions. Tell the story first and don’t worry about the length. Shorter is always better and you should focus on the first 15 seconds. If you get their attention, you have a better chance of them viewing the entire video. They need to determine up front that the video will help them. When telling a story, your goals are:

  • Engage the customer
  • Educate the customer
  • Make points of differentiation
  • Entertain customers
  • Be different

Rich Brooks in Social Media Explorer explored ways to maximize your YouTube presence. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Create compelling content – Address the needs of your customers.
  • Make it findable – both in and out of YouTube. Your Title, Description and Tags are important.
  • Brand your channel – Create a custom background that goes along with your branding . Use “Player View” as your layout and select autoplay feature.
  • Post a bulletin and alert your friends and subscribers – Create a link and put it on your home pages.
  • Leverage other social media platforms – Blog about it, Tweet it, post it on Facebook and submit it to StumbleUpon.

What are you doing to leverage your YouTube videos?

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How Are You Using Social Media to Find and Engage Your Target Audience?

Do you know where your customers and prospects are spending their time online? Wouldn’t that be an important part of an overall social media strategy to find and engage them?
share of total time spent on internetIf trends continue, social networks will soon surpass internet portals like AOL and Yahoo!

I recently read an article by Phil Mershon in Social Media Examiner that highlighted five ways to use market research intelligence on how consumers behave on social media networks. Although the article is focused more on the consumer side of things, he brings out some points that us in the B-to-B world should take notice of.

Here are some highlights:

  • Know where your customers spend their time – Over 21% of internet users spent their time on social networking sites. Do you know where your customers and prospects are spending their time? One way is to ask your current customer base where they find meaningful content.
  • Develop content that is relevant to your reader – Content is king and if you want to stand out in the crowd, you need to become a good source for not only product info, but for industry issues. Remember, content isn’t about you but how you can help your customer or prospect.
  • Take video seriously – Next to Google, YouTube is the most searched site. Video views have increased 43% and currently over 100 million videos are viewed daily. What are you doing to tell your story and points of differentiation?
  • Consider the role of Mobile – 8% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Make sure your website is mobile friendly and that content is easy to consume and respond to.

Using key words and investigating sources on the internet, you can find places where your customers and prospects are spending time. Get there and start engaging them.

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Why a Mobile Strategy is so Important in Reaching the Professional Tradesmen

2012 Trends of Smartphones and Tablets

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Are You Using Backlinks to Build Your Web Traffic?

Google optimization is based on the premise that the more people like your site, the more credible it is and therefore it gets a higher ranking.

Right, wrong or indifferent…that’s how the game is played. So what are you doing to make sure other sites are linking back to you?

I recently read a guest post on http://www.convinceandconvert.com/ by Nicole Sorochan that outlined 14 Easy Ways to Build Backlinks. Nicole stresses that if you’re going to go to the trouble of doing backlinks to make sure to make them complete.

The more info you give the engines, the better chances you have of getting their attention. I thought I’d share five ways that hit home with me.

  • Google profiles – Create for key employeees. Add a custom link with anchor text (words that make up the link).
  • LinkedIn – Build a company profile as well as individual profiles on key people.
  • Digg – Great place to put articles you want to promote.
  • Stumbleupon – Another popular article discovery site.
  • YouTube – Create a custom YouTube channel for your company.

So what are you doing to capitalize on backlinks?

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Make Videos Part of Your Direct Marketing Plans to Professional Tradesmen

Everyone knows that a picture is worth a 1,000 words. Can you imagine what a video is worth? Online video is growing at very fast pace (more than 24 hours worth of video is being uploaded every minute to YouTube). There were over 30 BILLION views over the past year. YouTube is only second to Google when it comes to search.

In other words, you need to seriously consider video as part of your overall marketing strategy especially.Viral videos are affordable to make and are one of the most effective tools you can use. Contractors and tradesmen want to see how things work. What makes your widget better than your competitors. Better yet, wouldn’t it be nice to have a customer say or show how great your product is. They are also great tools for training both sales and distributors. Here’s an example of a product demo from Arbortech that has helped them gain interest and decrease the selling cycle.

Plus, YouTube has metrics attached to it where you can see how many views, country of origin, where links are coming from and audience profile info.

Your website is also a great place to promote them as well or use Quick Response codes to push people from ads or packaging to more info. The key is, if you’re a manufacturer, don’t overlook videos as a viable marketing tool.

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Why Online Videos Help Attract Professional Tradesman

Manufacturers should not  lose site that videos are a powerful informational tool when it comes to building credibility with contractors. Consider if you will that next to Google Search, the next highest search is YouTube. That alone should tell you something.

From case studies, testimonials and training, to new product info, videos are a unique way of telling your story and add another dimension to the story by engaging the viewer. According to eMarketer.com, rich media ads with video had a higher dwell rate than those without, and almost double the dwell time.

Rich Media Metrics Worldwide: Video vs. No Video, Q4 2008-Q3 2009

This translates into fewer impressions needed for the same results.

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