Getting Online Video Marketing Right  

Online video marketing is big business. Whether you do it on Youtube, Facebook or any other video-sharing platform, online video marketing has to be a part of your business strategy. I’ve just learned a costly little lesson about it on a recent Youtube campaign I was testing. Hopefully this will save you making the same mistake.

My mistake really came down to not doing my homework properly. Even with the best training, systems and tools available things can go wrong if you don’t pay attention. Sadly with online video marketing – in fact all forms of paid marketing, it’s the boring stuff that can make all the difference.

I have access through my SFM and DEA membership to a Youtube marketing course. It comes with a set of tools that makes setting up an ad campaign pretty simple. Having worked through the course some time ago I got everything set up for an advertising campaign aimed at people who were looking for a franchise business opportunity.

I’d built a fully compliant website, set up and linked Google Adwords, Analytics and Youtube accounts for it. I’d built new landing pages and created 3 short video ads to split test against a range of related keywords.

So I went ahead and launched the campaign. Luckily I got everything right as Google approved the campaign very quickly. I set a daily budget and let it run for a few days. Mistake 1: I didn’t check it soon enough. It can take a few days for an online video marketing campaign to gather momentum and it wasn’t costing much. But there were other things I should have checked.

Using Online Video Marketing Systems 

I use a system that finds Youtube videos that are related to the keywords I choose. From there it’s a simple matter to just copy and paste them 50 at a time into the campaign. I should explain: These are the short videos that appear as ads on longer videos. The ones you can skip after 5 seconds. In this type of advertising these are called placements.

Ideally you would hand pick the videos you want your ad to show on. That would involve looking at hundreds of videos and cut and pasting their urls into the campaign one by one. Nightmare. Automating that process is obviously a godsend but not without it’s disadvantages – as I discovered with mistake No 2

I stopped this campaign after about 4 days as it wasn’t delivering any leads despite having had a decent number of views. When, with the help of my SFM business coaches I looked at the results more closely, I got a little shock..

When they showed me how to look at the placements – the videos my ad had been shown on – I saw why the results had been so bad. Although I had researched the keywords related to business franchises carefully the videos that had been matched to them were way off track.

They were related to the word franchise in general. That meant that my ad had been placed on videos about game franchises, movie franchises and host of other irrelevant subjects. Doh!

Doing The Right Research

Obviously I could have/should have done a little more research. I should have spent time on Youtube making sure there was an audience there for BUSINESS franchises. I can’t blame the system I used for this. All it can do is electronically race through Youtube and pick up what seem like relevant videos. In this case that seems to hinge mainly on the word franchise – in all its connotations.

Luckily for me this wasn’t too expensive. More than I would have liked but it taught me a valuable lesson that will save me making the same mistake twice.

Online video marketing like everything else in life involves a learning curve. It doesn’t have to be a steep and expensive one though. The course I mentioned was incredible and the system included is fantastic. As I say, if I’d put a little more thought and homework into this particular campaign things would have been different.

I also have the advantage of being able to call on experts in the field who can quickly point out where I’m going wrong.

That comes with being part of the SFM and DEA. They provide cutting edge education on all areas of online marketing and online business success. You can find out more about them by grabbing their free 7- day video training course on the link below.

By Dave Menzies