Video Advertising For Your Small Business

Why are videos a good option for small businesses?  Creating a video is a great way to tell the story of your business through a more personable medium than written text. Advertising your small business with videos is not only a great way to share your story, but a well-executed video can also set a professional tone for your business.

Videos are a great way to gain exposure through a variety of marketing channels. Some of the most popular channels are uploading the video to YouTube, displaying the video on your website, and sharing it on social media accounts.  Now there is a new channel available with the recent release of Google’s new AdWords for video.  You can now create paid advertising campaigns with your videos to gain more exposure and get more leads.  Continue reading for more information about using the new video advertising platform.

About AdWords for Video

This new advertising platform is very similar to the existing Google AdWords tool, making it easy to use for those of you that are already familiar with AdWords.   Here are a few of the top reasons why you should consider using this paid advertising platform to market your small business:

  • Geography – you can choose the audience you want to target by city, state, zip, or country. This can be a great advantage to a small business that wants to tailor the campaign to a specific target market.
  • Budget – you can set your own budget and there is no minimum spend limit. With no minimum spend limit it is a great option for small businesses that want to test the paid advertising space and not spend their whole marketing budget.
  • Reach – you have the option to advertise your video on YouTube and tens of thousands of other websites.
  • Return On Investment (ROI) – since you only pay when someone chooses to play your video you can rest assured that you are getting value out of your marketing dollars.

Creating a Video Campaign

You can easily select one of your previously recorded videos straight from YouTube by choosing to search your existing channel. If you don’t already have a YouTube video to submit, then you will first need to work on creating a video. There are many options available to you when creating a video. The primary options are choosing to work with a professional videographer or recording your own live video and using video editing software to put together a finished product. Before you decide on a traditional option we suggest checking out Animoto (www.animoto.com). This new online software is a good alternative option for small businesses because it can all be done in-house by any staff member. Animoto lets you easily combine your existing photos, video clips, words and music. All it takes is a little time and creativity to put together a great video.

Video Campaign Set –Up

Now that you have your video selected in Google AdWords for Video, the next step is to create your ad attributes. The ad attributes is the text that will be displayed for your video. You will want to make this enticing to people so they will want to click and watch your video. Not only can you create your own text but you also get to choose a screenshot, or thumbnail image, from your video to display. Be sure to choose a screenshot from the video that will capture people’s attention and preferably one with little text.  In addition, you get to choose the destination url for where these viewers will be taken after watching your video. Sending people to your homepage after finishing the video will not help get conversions from the campaign, instead we recommend choosing a landing page on your website that is related to your video.

In this section, you also have the option for the networks to run your new video campaign. To remove your ad from any of the pre-selected networks simply click “Let me choose” and then edit your display network options.  We recommend taking a minute to preview the formatting of your ads in each of the networks before scheduling the campaign to run.

Your last required step in this section is schedule a start date for the campaign. You can also select an end date for the campaign, but it isn’t required.

Reporting

The extensive reporting options are very similar to Google AdWords and make it easy to track your marketing ROI on your video campaigns. One thing that is different that you should investigate in your campaign is that you can track how long people are watching your videos and what actions they might be taking on the video.

In summary, even if you decide to not do paid video advertising you should still invest in developing a well-executed video to share your story on social media and your website.  Don’t let large businesses be the only one’s taking advantage of the millions of people watching online videos a day.

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