You blog. You use Facebook. You showcase your photographs. But what about video? Are you using video to enhance your marketing efforts? As photographers, we think “stills”. Yet it’s easier than ever to create a video – many DSLRs have the capability. So why not use it to help you market what you do? Here are a few tips to help you use video to enhance your marketing efforts.
Create Compelling Content
By creating a YouTube video, your goal isn’t to create the most watched video ever. You’ll never be able to compete with Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, who have pulled a half billion views for just one of their videos. But do you really need a half billion views? What would you do with that much traffic? Would you really be able to shoot that many portraits, or service that many wedding clients?
Instead, create content that addresses your audience’s needs and desires. If you are in the world of fashion photography, showcase what you look for every day. If you regularly work with brides, showcase your trash the dress shoots.
When you look at the videos showcased in the above two niches, you’ll see that they don’t create videos that sell what they do. Instead they focus on creating content that shares a little about who they are and what they look for – you can quickly find the talent and expertise, and choose to search further into how to use their services.
Use Easy Techniques To Make Your YouTube Video Findable
When you search Google, you no longer get standard results. Instead, the results you see are built around giving you choices, and offering you results based on what you like to find. For any search you do, you’ll quickly find a plethora of results, ranging from images, to websites, to blogs, to YouTube videos. And the fact that Google owns YouTube means that videos will get equal if not extra weight when coming up in the search results.
To make your video more findable, make sure you use all the tools YouTube has to offer when you load in your video. Create a title that uses keywords most likely to be searched by your potential clients. Don’t be afraid to restate your keywords in a couple of different ways – just don’t repeat yourself throughout the title. For instance, you may use Trash The Dress: A Photographers Guide To A Unique Bridal Portrait Experience.
Create a description that fully describes your video, and combines it with more keywords. Again, make your description readable – don’t just stuff it with keywords to make it SEO(Search Engine Optimization) friendly. But you can be cleaver in how you state things. Also, don’t forget to put your company name, photographer name, URL and any other distinguishing features that will help people find you.
One of the great things about YouTube videos is they are sharable. You never know who will share it with their personal audience, and how a potential customer will follow the trail back to you. Give them as much detail as possible; yet never make it sound like you’re selling. You’re sharing, not selling. Don’t ignore the tags. By this time, you have keyworded your title and description in detail. It’s easy to take those and add them one more time to the tag area.
Use Call To Action Tasks In Your Videos
If someone comes across your video and likes what they see, what do you want them to do next? Do you want them to sign up for your YouTube channel? Do you want them to visit another video? Whatever you decide your call to action should be, you can build it easily into your YouTube video with annotations. Annotations are clickable actions that appear on top of your videos – you choose what it says, and how long it shows up on the video. After your video has been created and published on YouTube, click to edit it. Then click on the “Annotations” tab. You’ll then be able to add an annotation, or edit an existing one. Publish one again, and you’re ready to go.
Use The YouTube Ads
YouTube has millions of searches every single day. Which means there is plenty of opportunity to reach out and connect with potential customers.
YouTube works in a similar fashion to Google. People come to YouTube and search for what they’re looking for. You can bid on those keywords, and will come up in the side margin with your information, a thumbnail, and be clickable to your video. The best part is YouTube is still at the bottom of the advertising frontier, which means you can pay pennies for pay per click potential. Compare that with Google, and YouTube can be an extremely great value right now, especially if you have something people are searching for and willing to pay to have you as their photographer.
Leverage Other Social Sites
YouTube is a social media site, and is therefore built for sharing across different platforms.
- Share videos on your blog posts
- Post it to your Facebook account
- Tweet it
- Share in on Google Plus
- Use sites like StumbleUpon to make it go viral
- You may even advertise your YouTube channel in a variety of places when you build up a number of videos
The important thing is to bring in the traffic, and get people talking about what you do. And if a two minute video can do that, why not give it a try.
