How are you using YouTube as part of your online marketing plan?
A lot of people understand the value of a huge audience being exposed to their web videos, but few are taking full advantage. I’m talking about making your online movies interactive.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Remember the old ‘choose your own adventure’ books that let you pick how a story moves along? You can give viewers the same ability with YouTube annotations. All you need to do is create a video, then give people two or more options to click on that will take them to the follow-up movie of their choice. Annotations let you add all the links you need to make it possible.
Now, instead of trying to create one killer viral video, we’re building a deep linking, user driven lead funnel.
Even though we’re talking about YouTube videos as a marketing tool, that doesn’t mean they have to be boring.
Check out the Dress Us interactive video from the ‘hotandcrowded’ channel.
The idea for the video series is that you choose one of two female comedians to dress up, from underwear to dresses and shoes. Now, it’s not a hard sell to get people to watch a barely covered woman — but notice how many people stayed interested enough to keep watching?
Deep Links Filter Your Audience According to Interest
See how there are over one million views for the first video, then two to four hundred thousand for the second? That’s a good drop, because it means the audience is being filtered correctly based on interest. Some people want to see a pink pair of underwear on a blond woman while others are more interested in black boy shorts on a brunette.
OK, enough with the underwear.
You could make a series about Photoshop, then segment it into lots of mini guides. Or build a general video about any category and link to more specific products and services. The key is to make your videos fun and interesting. If it can entertain and educate at the same time, you have a great shot at going viral.
Here’s the Dress Us video — maybe it will inspire a few ideas inside your own head: