Help create a strong brand with your videos!
As a small business, should you be aiming for your videos to go viral or should you just concentrate on making well put together branded videos?
For your business, it is important to concentrate on your brand as much as possible. To be perfectly frank, it is not really possible to simply make the decision that your video will become viral. It is up to the world to decide that, and all you can really do is make the very best video you are capable of. Also, it is more often that the video which goes viral, is not really selling anything. People don’t usually like to send videos which are selling something to their friends.
The more usual video to go viral is the one like that of Chris Crocker who in 2007 implored the viewer to ‘leaveBrittanyalone’. That video certainly went viral but it had nothing to sell, no hidden agenda. Sometimes, although rarely, a brand will get lucky and go viral. An example of such a video is the Old Spice ad featuring Isaiah Mustafa as ‘the man your man could smell like’. After 71 years, the Old spice brand had the reputation of being an old man’s brand. The new videos went viral and breather new life into something when had been seen as past its use-by date.
There is of course a huge difference between the Chris Crocker video and the Old Spice series. The Old Spice ads were a carefully coordinated and orchestrated branded content series of videos rather than viral videos. There is obviously a strong marketing message in them and although they may be seen as entertaining in their own right, their effects are longer lasting than the ‘short, sharp shock’ effect of viral video marketing.
Some of the best branded content will be in the form of a series of videos rather than just a single, one-off video. They will be carefully structured, orchestrated and planned, not haphazardly thrown together and put out there to ‘see what happens’.
If you are an online small business owner, your efforts will be better spent planning a carefully structured series of branded videos than hoping one of your videos will suddenly be picked up by the viewing public and ‘go viral.’ Your video may be lucky enough to be sufficiently entertaining to be suddenly viewed by million world wide, but this is something you cannot really plan for, and anyway, the effects may not last very long.
A branded video is more about telling a story and giving information about a product or service. It will have a long term effect and make the viewer connect with the brand. It is a message that you are trying to get across and it is usually more niche than a viral video.
The Old Spice ad is now taking advantage of the viral aspect by getting the actor Isaiah Mustafa to answer questions put to him through tweets. However, this is the exception to the rule, and not many ads will take off in the way that this one has. It is much better to carefully plan your series of branded videos than to hope for the one in a million chance that it will take off virally.
There are a lot of ways to promote your videos if you only know the techniques in doing so. Just click here for more tips on creating viral and branded videos for your business.
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