Tips, thoughts and topics on marketing for small to medium-sized businesses in Michigan and throughout the world. Contributions by Chris Slocumb, Casey Frushour, as well as other members of the Clarity Quest team.
We've been using Animoto for a few months now and love it. Examples of the videos we've created with Animoto can be found on our testimonials and marketing portfolio pages. We're even more excited that Animoto now gives you the ability to upload your own videos and to mix them in with your still shots. They have upgraded their music selection library as well.
Free trials are available, however, the business package lets you customize the videos and delete the Animoto logos.
In our continued theme of "you too can make a video in under 1 hour", check out Animoto Business. Upload photos or graphics, choose a song from their library or yours and then Animoto creates a professionally-designed video that you can embed in your site, use on your blog, or share on popular social media sites. View sample videos on Animoto's case study page.
Once complete, you can share the video via web link or instantly upload to popular social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook. There's even a feature that allows you to download and burn DVD-quality videos. My favorite feature is a custom "call to action" button that can be embedded at the end of the video. You can encourage viewers to "visit your website" or "request a quote".
Business package pricing starts at a very reasonable $99 for 3 months, or $249 for 1 year.
Online Videos can truly differentiate your products and services from the competition because Google, Yahoo! and MSN give videos top ranking. In addition, visitors stay on a web page with video content over 50% longer than pages without video. With today’s video recording and screen capture technology, it’s easier than even to make and syndicate videos. Here are some tips for creating and distributing professional quality videos.
1. Determine whether you are going to shoot live video with a camcorder/camera or simply voice-over screenshots of a presentation. For software demos or voice-over presentations on a PC, we use Adobe Captivate and Microsoft Powerpoint. For the MAC, we recommend Keynote and Screenflow.
2. Create a script and rough storyboard. This will allow you to determine timing and will make it easy for the participants to quickly record the sessions.
3. Use a high-quality microphone. For voice-over of screen capture or software demos, we use a Snowball microphone by Blue. It’s only $99 and delivers great sound quality. Another popular model is the Audio Technica 2020 USB microphone. For videos, you will probably want the participants to use lavaliere microphones or at least attach an external microphone to your camcorder.
4. Eliminate noise in the recording environment. No room is 100% silent so record your voice as loud as possible, keeping your voice signal many decibels louder than the ambient noise of your room.
5. Keep the digital compression as high as possible for the best video and audio. For audio on the web, use a 22.5 Hz sample rate, 16 bit mono or stereo at 56Kbps. For video, save as AVI uncompressed for editing purposes, and then upload to the web in FLV or WMV format.
6. Optimize your video for search engines. Use keyword phrases in your video titles and descriptions considering as this is how the search engines will index your video. Most videos show up in Google’s result pages within 1-2 hours of submission.
7. Distribute your video efficiently. Rather than submitting your video to every online content site, use Traffic Geyser (www.trafficgeyser.com) . For $99 per month, you only upload once to the service and it automatically distributes your video to the most popular social networking sites in minutes - saving you hours of manual submission.
There are lots of reasons to post online videos and to embed them in your corporate website. Here are a few of the big ones: 1) Search engines are now ranking videos and there's a lot less competition in this area than for web page rankings. 2) According to case studies performed at StomperNet, People remain on web pages with embedded videos over 4 times longer than pages without video. 3) Prospects get a more personal view of you and your company.
Check out a video overview of Clarity Quest Marketing I recorded with Adobe Captivate and a Snowball microphone on its standard mini tripod. It took about 4 hours total for this first attempt and that included writing the script. Captivate has a bit of a learning curve, but it's easier than other Adobe products I've tried. The Snowball USB microphone is an amazing product. It's super easy to use and records a very professional audio output.
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