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We invited Kris Drey of video comparison site VidCompare to pen his thoughts on the dilemmas facing small businesses when considering online video as a means of marketing.

Small businesses today are struggling to be seen, to be heard, to garner traction in a highly competitive and economically suffocating environment. Funding from angel investors and venture capitalists has slowed to a trickle, marketing budgets have been slashed, and the economy is not picking up fast enough.

Where do businesses turn to build their brand, increase traffic, and generate incremental revenue during these rough times? The answer is online video. There’s no questioning the power of online video today; broadband adoption is nearly ubiquitous in the US, 25 billion videos are streamed on a monthly basis, video advertising is the fastest growing segment in the Internet advertising market according to the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), and search engines are incorporating video into their blended search results at a break-neck pace.

Where do I start?

Getting started with online video may seem like a daunting task. The questions I hear most often are, “How am I going to find or create video content?”, “Will I need a team of 10 engineers to implement it?”, and “Will it absorb the majority of my already diminishing marketing budget?”.

The first thing to do is to take a step back, relax, and get organized. Most businesses go into the process unsure of their goals and lacking an online video strategy and as a result become confused by all the options, and nuances of online video.

Producing video yourself is a viable option today. YouTube has numbed us to the issue of poor quality video so grab your Flip camera or your iPhone 3GS and shoot a few practice videos. Be sure you have good lighting, and hold the camera steady; you may want to invest in a tripod. Don’t worry too much about sound quality or a fluid shoot at first, you can edit these things with free software after you’ve captured your content. If you don’t feel confident in your shooting and editing prowess then find yourself a high-quality and affordable production company like TurnHere. They offer professional online video production services including video capture, editing, and scripting.

Once you’ve created your content, find a place to store and manage it. An Online Video Platform (OVP) provider, like vzaar, is a great place to start. OVPs simplify the entire process by offering top-to-bottom services including ingestion, encoding, storage, management, analytics, monetization, and playback of your videos. After settling into an OVP you’re only a copy/paste away from adding video to your web site. Put your video front and center on your home page and other high traffic pages. Be sure to tie page content to the video content, not only to maintain consistent messaging but also to enhance search engine optimization (SEO). The copy on the page around your video and the metadata (title, description, tags) stored within the video will help propel your content to the top of the search engine ranks.

Video SEO is a powerful weapon today for online marketers allowing them to push their content to the web with a few simple clicks (see TubeMogul if your OVP doesn’t have proper syndication services), capable of garnering first page and often #1 rankings within natural search on the engines.

Video solutions are in abundance today, with over 60 OVPs out there offering a wide range of services. Furthermore, video is highly affordable and dead-easy to implement. Online Video Platforms often offer free trials or a free solution, with limited streams and uploads, allowing you to get started in video with little to no overhead.

2010 will be a defining year for the online video space as it creeps out of infancy into toddlerhood. Businesses of all sizes with an online presence either already have video on their site or are evaluating solutions and setting aside marketing dollars to engage their customers with OV.

This Month we have the pleasure of introducing Areos Ledesma as our guest blog contributor. Areos recently used the vzaar api for one of his projects and has held posts as Interactive Consultant at Sears Holdings Corporation and is currently Senior Manager, Program Management at Sapient.

AUTHOR: Areos Ledesma : It’s amazing how much clients rely on our experience within the digital landscape to make decisions that shape their services and products. This can happen when we engage with a traditional business such as a brick and mortar looking to expand by shifting more budget and focus to digital. It can also happen when we’re hired by a new business built primarily - or even exclusively - on digital. What’s amazing about the latter situation is that our research and recommendation can and often will dictate their success or failure.

These days research is as important as technology because features that already exist can be “yours” without the pain and cost of rebuilding. And that can benefit everyone involved (including us) even if your client doesn’t know how it works.

Meet API. It’s one acronym we “tech guys” know well, but lots of people don’t.

In past projects I have integrated the minutest functionality through an API such as a news headline feed in a page with low visibility for a Mortgage Broker site. I have also integrated full blown white-label video trans-coding turnkey solutions where the client couldn’t fathom how much technology had to be in place to enable a video clip transit from a camcorder inside a bedroom in Philadelphia all the way to a site visitor that’s watching in Shanghai about 15 minutes later. And if it wasn’t for our friend API, it would have never happened because of the astronomical costs to develop a custom solution of the same capabilities.

So yes… API is our friend, and during planning phases of my projects I often catch myself thinking, “Why don’t we just use an API?” If the answer is affirmative, the first step is research. And at high level, my thinking process starts with two general categories of questions:

1. Does third party really make sense?

• What’s the complexity and cost of minimum requirements?
• Would it make financial sense to build it in-house? (Often no…)
• Or is it cheaper and more reliable to utilize a third party? (Often yes…)
• Are there third party vendors capable of meeting all minimum requirements? (Often yes…)
• If so, what’s the selection criteria?

2. Do we have a winner?

• Who are the 800lbs. gorillas in this specific area of technology? (Start a matrix…)
• Who are their competitors and key differentiators? (Go beyond the elevator pitch!)
• What are some of their tech attributes? Open source vs. licensed, CDN, pricing model, admin tools, reliability, performance, do they offer a robust API … a-ha! There’s that acronym again! (And by now it could be the one that tilts the scale toward a selection)
• And finally… do they have a strong financial backbone? (Don’t ever underestimate this one. You don’t want to push your client toward a tech vendor only to find out they don’t know where their pay checks are coming from in the next 90 days…if you don’t ask, there’s a good chance your client will.)

It’s incredible how much API’s have matured in the last few years. Capabilities once thought to be highly advanced or premium are now standard, and robust API’s supported by good documentation are simply expected of strong technology companies. We can no longer assume an API “can’t do that”. Today’s questions are “how does it do it?”…and “how fast can you get us on it?”

Areos Ledesma

We asked Michael Oxley, CEO of Contextured, an online service specialising in Search Engine Marketing to be our guest this week.

If you are lucky enough to have an abundance of time then there are several PPC techniques that are not quick, but can make your AdWords search marketing campaigns more profitable. One of the most valuable and time-consuming practices is to create an ad group for every keyword you wish to bid on.

First the theory: “The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).” - Google AdWords Help

So let’s imagine you want to bid on two closely related keywords ‘outdoor chairs’ and ‘garden furniture’. The quickest option is to place both of these keywords in the same ad group and write a single ad:

    Great Outdoor Furniture
High Quality Chairs and Seats 
Order Today for Free 48hr Delivery

The more time consuming option is to create two ad groups each containing one advert with your keyword on broad, phrase and exact match type. The first is an ad group called ‘outdoor chairs’ containing the keyword outdoor chairs on all three match types i.e. outdoor chairs, “outdoor chairs” and [outdoor chairs]. The second ad group called ‘garden furniture’ containing: garden furniture, “garden furniture” and [garden furniture].

By grouping keywords together in a single ad group the quality score calculation will include the performance of both. This can result in the poorer performing keywords having a negative effect on the whole group. However if you place each keyword in a separate ad group then you are isolating them from each other in Googles quality score calculation. With similar themed keywords this can be just a small difference but the more keywords you run the greater the potential impact.

In multiple experiments we have found that if every other factor is kept the same, the ad group containing a single keyword will produce the best results. We even learnt that using the same keyword as the name of that ad group had a positive effect.

The obvious argument against this methodology is the time taken to setup and manage your pcc advertising. If you have a lot of keywords then it can take a lot of time to set up each ad group with each of its ads and keywords. This is undoubtedly true but if you have the time, then it is the best way to go. There are other good reasons for having individual ad groups per keyword such as the ability to write hyper targeted ads for each keyword but that is for a future post.

Michael Oxley,
Contextured