Service Providers

Six steps to online video success

The popularity of online video viewing continues to grow.

This year, more than 68 percent of U.S. Internet users will be watching online video at least once a month. (Source: eMarketer, February 2011)

If you aren’t offering video content to your website visitors, now is the time to start. Dealerships can take advantage of the power of video to promote the unique or must-have features of new and preowned inventory, advertise sales events, increase repeat website traffic with helpful “how-to” features and personalize the testimonials of happy customers.

Getting started is simple and requires little investment. By following these six steps, you will be on your way to including online video into your dealership marketing mix.

  1. Obtain an inexpensive video camera, such as the popular Flip; an external microphone; a tripod; and some inexpensive lighting, which can be found at a hardware store.
  2. Choose a subject for your video. Videos that are natural offer more appeal than heavily scripted videos. Keep the length of your video on the short side. The average length of videos watched on a computer is less than 2 minutes and 30 seconds. (Source: Newstex, December 2010)
  3. Select the location where your video will take place. Choose a location away from a window and avoid empty rooms and tile floors that will create an echo.
  4. Film your video. Relax and have fun! The most viral videos tend to be those that are humorous.
  5. Optimize your video for search engines. Take care to plan out the title, description and tags that will help your video rise up in search engine rankings.
  6. Publish your video. There are many different locations for publishing your video, including publishing tools associated with your website, YouTube and Metacafe.

Now is the time to begin integrating video marketing into your website. By following the steps above you will soon be sharing compelling content with your site visitors.

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2 Comments

  1. Great post! The Flip camera is definitely the easiest, unfortunately doesn’t have an external microphone input yet. If you want to use an external mic (which is a good idea) I would suggest the Kodak Zi8 – about $100 on amazon and it has an 1/8th inch input.

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