If you haven't tried videos for marketing, you really should. While they may take more effort than writing a blog post or an article, the extra investment can be well worth it. Marketing via video is still in its infancy which means that you have a chance to gain a competitive advantage over your main competitors by doing something that they aren't. However, perhaps the biggest reason that you should consider video marketing is that it can convert at nearly 73% according to Animoto - that means that nearly three quarters of viewers may be interested in buying after watching your video.

Video Production is Easier and Cheaper than you Think

The biggest misconception of video is that it's expensive to do. While that may have been true in the past, that's no longer the case. In the past, you may have had to hire a videographer or video production company to film and produce video of you, but that's no longer the case. Due to advances in technology, it's both easy and affordable for you to create your own videos. You can create videos of yourself using video that you take using camcorders and edit them using software such as Adobe Premier or Sony Vegas Video Editor. Software like Camtasia Studio and Screenr allow you to record what you're seeing on your computer while you talk. That's perfect for demonstrating software or giving a presentation.If you don't have the time to spend on creating a video, there's also plenty of affordable of ways to outsource this. You can use a service like Green Screen Talent Now where they supply professional speakers and video equipment to offer you a first class advertisement at an affordable cost. Or if you're on a real tight budget, you can hire someone from Fiverr to do a video or a voice over to promote your product and/or services.

Spread Your Video to Increase Your Sales

Once you've created your video, you should consider creating either a Vimeo or YouTube account to post it to. Doing this will greatly increase your reach because people searching on the internet for keywords on Bing, Google or YouTube may stumble across your videos. Also, both of the sites make it easy to embed the video on other websites, which will save you money on bandwidth (to serve the videos) and storage costs (on your website server). From here, embed it on as many websites as possible and, of course, share it with as many of your fans and followers as possible.You should also strongly consider getting more people to watch your video using YouTube ads. These commercials play before YouTube videos. Using Google's (YouTube's parent company) ad platform, you can target your audience (i.e. location, gender, interests, age, etc.) and measure their response rates (i.e. make a purchase, skip a purchase, fast forward thru the ad, etc.). Better yet, if you a viewer elects to fast forward thru your ad before watching a certain portion of it, Google will often not charge you for the ad. With YouTube's TrueView in-stream ads, the advertiser is not charged unless the viewer watches the complete ad or 30 seconds (whichever is less). Viewers have the option of skipping the ad by clicking a link in the video after five seconds. Therefore, a common technique among YouTube video advertisers is to tell people to click the skip link early in the video, if they feel it doesn't interest them.

Be Ahead of the Curve

The bottom line is that you should consider video ad now before others do it ahead of you. Many people offer things like white paper, blog posts, or articles now, and that's the problem - it's become so common that it just makes you another person in the crowd. To stand out, offer video which offers not only a more interactive medium, but also a way to let people identify with you a more personal level (especially if you appear in them). Not only do they allow you to be unique, but research has shown that they lead to sales more often than other types of website content.[contentblock id=1]