Viral Video Marketing Explained
Viral Videos are referred to as forms of video clips,
interactive flash games, or a set of images that have gained
widespread popularity by method of Internet sharing. It is
usually shared over blogs, email or instant messages and
other media-sharing websites. These viral videos often
contain humorous content from anything between famous
televised comedy sketches to accidental amateur video clips
created by various people across the globe.
With the emergence of new media devices such as camera
phones and digital cameras, the creation of many viral
videos have become as easy and as prevalent. The
accessibility of low cost video editing and publishing tools
or software applications have allowed amateur videos shot on
camera phones and simple digital cameras to be easily
disseminated across various media devices and the Internet.
Bluetooth technology is also one way of making the fast
spreading and sharing of viral videos between friends,
colleagues and family as easy as possible. Daily instant
messaging and email also add to the faster distribution of
such media files.
With the concept of the viral video phenomenon in mind, a
number of business marketing organizations are trying to
come up with new ways and strategies where they can adopt
the viral video concept into existing marketing strategies.
This is for their pursuit of generating an increase in brand
awareness and customer responsiveness. A few companies,
counting in Kodak and Ford, have spearheaded this new trend
in marketing strategy.
The presence of humor, comedy, wit and creativity in joint
collaboration with the unpredictable power of the
word-of-mouth theory have made distribution of viral videos
among a wide range of random people a very tempting
technique for brand exposure and promotion for these
companies. Many small businesses have proven that these low
cost viral videos have often sky-rocketed their brand’s
popularity as opposed to high cost commercials and
advertisements. A lot of marketing companies and strategists
are now focusing on the development of viral video creation.
While it is common knowledge that a happy and satisfied
customer tells an average of three people about good
services or products that they were happy about, it is not
well known that they also inform eleven more people bad
products or bad experiences on services that they’ve had.
With this, the concept of viral video marketing has
encompassed the scenario where viral videos that carry their
brand names in a funny and humorous way cannot negatively
affect their products and services, so they promote it and
make use of it. Just as the case with Coca Cola, there was a
viral video made by two individuals – The Diet Coke and
Mentos Experiment – it was so popular that Coke decided to
play on its popularity with a contest on YouTube.
In the emergence of the Web 2.0 networks and technologies,
viral videos have sprung the new online marketing concept
which is Viral Video Marketing. Backed up by the concepts of
Viral Marketing wherein the goal of marketers to create
successful viral marketing programs by aid of identifying
high Social Networking Potential, individuals have now
become goals to identify the highest level of Viral Video
Optimization as a new way to spread messages and ultimately
brand awareness to viewers across the many virtual social
networks. Viral video outlets are now considered as new
global marketing tools that will effectively change the way
business and companies advertise themselves.
In a recent online study, it was stated that viral marketing
is now one of the most powerful ways to market online. This
means that viral marketing through videos is also the
easiest and cheapest. The study led to a list of essential
tips to optimize the potential of viral marketing videos in
terms of the advantages it can create for business
institutions. Here are a few of those tips:
1. Keep videos short and most preferably less than
five minutes. There are way too many videos available for
viewing. Having long videos will likely result to
abandonment.
2. Always make sure that content is of utmost
importance. Videos that are interesting, provocative and
entertaining are top on the most watched list. If it doesn’t
credit a “WOW”, then most likely they wont have the
initiative to share the video across their social networks.
3. Be very careful in including commercial
advertisements and promotional content. Make the videos as
interesting as possible as to lure viewers into logging on
your site. Once they’re on your site, then that’s the time
they should be seeing your promotional sales messages.
4. Create as many short videos as you can. One of
these videos will surely find its way to the enjoyment of
people and will eventually turn itself viral. Having just
one video will not work as it is hard to determine and
predict what and which kind of videos will catch the
virality characteristic. With this, always plan on creating
and deploying a series of video clips and learn from each of
them the points that made them best.
5. Optimize video clips to take the full advantage of
distribution across vast social network websites. Make use
of tags and keywords or bookmarking links to make it easier
for people to search, find, save and share your created
videos.
6. Make videos with a lot of guest appearances by
strangers or celebrities. They will tend to patronize and
share the videos with their families and friends.
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