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Posted on Mon, 02/4/2013 - 05:19 PM by
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This is a guest post by Joshua Hardwick. I hear about “content marketing” all the time and to be honest, I’m sick of hearing about it. Ever since Google rolled out their Panda algorithm update a year-or-so again, it seems to have been the topic of just about every blog post out there. “But why does it annoy you?” I hear you ask. Well basically, it’s because every online marketer worth his/her salt has been doing content marketing for years (before all this Panda nonsense) and I find it annoying that it’s become yet another “SEO tactic” where, more often than not, it’s more about “getting a link” than creating great content. The truth is that great content will always attract links (and social shares and all the rest) and a lot of content marketers are creating great content every day. However, there seems to be one aspect of content marketing that is still (for whatever reason) extremely underused; video. In my opinion, video should be part of EVERYONE’s content marketing strategy; and here’s why… It Sets You Apart From The Crowd As I mentioned above, almost every online marketer on the planet is involved in some sort of content marketing these days (i.e. guest posting, blog posting, creating infographics, etc.) but for some reason, very few are using video marketing at all. Sure, a lot of the bigger companies have started using it in the form of viral ads or perhaps on landing pages but hardly any of the small companies out there are using it. But why should you care about standing out from the crowd? Well, let’s say you were given the choice of reading two blog posts; one of them was 1000 words of plain text and the other had the same information, but presented in a video format. Which one would you choose and which one would you be more likely to share/link to? Exactly, the video post. It’s Embeddable!One of the best things about video content is that it’s easily embeddable on just about any website or blog you can think of. This means that bloggers can easily share the great content presented in your video with their readers too; they just have to embed it. Let’s compare this to a standard blog post. If another blogger wanted to share your blog post with their readers they’d not only have to ask your permission (thus decreasing the likelihood of them sharing it) but also, have to significantly rewrite the post to ensure that Google doesn’t hate them for stealing your content. If this wasn’t enough, you can probably generate a huge amount of back links to your site if you host the video yourself (and provide an embed code) too (check out this post if you want to do this). It’s Not As Expensive As You ThinkWriting a blog post is cheap; if you go on any popular freelancing site you can probably find a decent writer for just a few bucks quite easily. Now, creating (quality) video content is never going to be this cheap admittedly, but firstly; it doesn’t have to be and secondly; it’s still not as expensive as you might think. The fact is, millions of people are writing blog posts every single day and while they’re still a great form of content marketing, there’s nothing special about them in most cases. A piece of video content is probably going to have chance of generating links and ranking well on popular search engines than any, bog-standard blog post. As well as this, quality video content is becoming cheaper than ever to produce in-house. If you’ve got a Smartphone (e.g. iPhone, Galaxy etc) or perhaps a decent (i.e. $500+) DSLR camera with video mode, you’ve got everything you need to create a great video. Remember, it’s more about great content than fancy video editing. You’re Probably Already Doing Similar ThingsA lot of content marketers are constantly producing different forms of content in order to keep their strategy as diverse as possible and therefore, you’re probably already doing similar things to video marketing. One of the things that springs to mind is infographic marketing. For years, infographics have been an extremely popular way of not only gaining links but also, sharing expertise and building trust. Now one things for sure, infographics aren’t cheap (at least not the good ones anyway) so why not use that budget and produce a video? With thousands of infographics created every day, bloggers are inundated with requests to republish them but rarely are they asked to republish a video (hence you’ll stand out from the crowd). The World Loves To Watch VideosIf all the above reasons weren’t enough to convince you, then hopefully this one will be; people LOVE videos. Content marketing is all about creating content that your target audience is going to love and currently, the world seems to be in love with video content. Sure, people love reading a well-written blog post (as you’re doing right now) but let’s face it, it’s much easier to sit back and watch a video. I could throw statistics about online video at you all day (if you want some, here’s some mind-blowing ones) but really, you only have to look at the success of YouTube to see just how much people love them. And That’s A Wrap!Well, I hope that I’ve convinced you to experiment with video marketing at least as I know it can lead to wonderful things. However, just remember that video marketing works on the same principles as any other form of marketing; it has to be great content or no-one will care about it, no matter how much outreach you do!
image: EmpowerNetwork originally appeared on Danny Brown - Social Media * Marketing * Influence under a Creative Commons license.         Related Stories
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About the author: Joshua Hardwick is the Managing Director at ShortyMedia, one of the leading video production companies based in the UK. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus for more video marketing tips and ideas.