How does a music video in Korean get to the top of the US music charts and generate over 210 million views? I have no idea.
My friends over at Pixability had me as a guest on their video marketing show, where we chatted about:
- What exactly is inbound marketing, and how can it drive relevant leads to your company?
- How can you incorporate video into your inbound marketing strategy?
- Can inbound marketing completely replace your outbound marketing strategy?
- Can an inbound marketing strategy work for B2B companies as well as B2C companies?
I had the pleasure of presenting a session at Dreamforce this year, and I thought I would share it with you. My portion of the presentation is about 25 minutes, and there are a variety of formats below for your viewing pleasure.
While the corporate music video parody meme is not anything new, if the video is done well it never gets old. Here is a new addition from Nuesoft (a HubSpot customer!) called "Interface" (video w /lyrics).
It does seem like CNN, Fox, etc. are doing less and less actual reporting....
How do you get 4 million YouTube views of your new song? Use profanity in the title and the song, and post a video of it.
I had a chance to get to know Eric during both HubSpot TV and sharing a panel with him a couple weeks ago talking about the ROI of social media. Eric is a super nice and sage guy who has a real grasp of how social technologies are changing the business world.
We created a new video. Actually 20 of them. Four of them are in a series called Foursquare Cops. I think the first one has a lot of potential to be somewhat viral. Check it out.
Earlier this week at Woot Con, in addition to the keynote presentation, I gave a presentation about Lead generation, Lead Conversion and ROI.
Today I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote address at W00t! Con in Bakersfield, California. I used my new iPhone 3Gs to stream the presentation live on Qik (my old phone was just an iPhone 3G and did not do video). You can watch the presentation in full (until my battery died during th Q&A) or just see the slides.
What is the future of Search Engine Optimization?
How can you be successful in SEO in 2010 and beyond? How does social media affect search? Will Facebook replace Google? What about video? What about other social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter, will they affect search? This SEO in 2010 video covers the basics of SEO, and then goes onto more advanced topics to set the stage for you to be successful in search engine optimization in 201.
With the huge boost in user generated content on websites allowing product and business reviews like Amazon, Yelp, and more, how can you try to get more positive reviews?
- Co-create with key influencers
- Find fans before the launch
- Ask people you know to write the first few reviews
- As your fans to leave positive reviews
We tried to have a little bit of fun at HubSpot mocking Twitter in an office environment and how some companies are obsessed with it. How did we do? is it funny? (I actually can't tell if I laugh because I know all the people, or it is actually funny.) Do you have ideas for another funny office video?
I use video a lot for creating marketing content, mostly because I hate to type and I think and speak a lot faster than I can type. So for video I do marketing webinars, a great marketing video podcast, this smaller marketing podcast and lots of other marketing video through and with the team at HubSpot.
To be honest, for most people the first steps are easy. I do all these "Marketing with Mike" videos just using a webcam and a PC and edit with either Windows Movie Maker (free!) or Camtasia (expensive). You can use Quicktime Pro ($30) to convert the video formats if you need to, because Windows Movie Maker does not do a good job of supporting the iTunes formats.
What is much more important than the equipment is the content. For all these videos, I have notes to guide me, and I try to take topics from videos that come directly from people I have met in person or online, so I know the videos will be on topics interesting to all of you (hopefully).
Remember, think content before production value.
Karen Rubin and I are putting together 2 sessions for Podcamp Boston this weekend - August 8-9, 2009. Come join us!
- 11:15am - How can you use video podcasting for B2B marketing?
- 1:30pm - What equipment is best for a video podcast? (Steve Garfield will join us for this one to share his expertise!)
Both are on Sunday, so make sure to show up for day 2 of the conference! And if you are in town Friday, stop by the 1 year anniversary of HubSpot TV as well.
Let's say you are a B2B company that sells to marketers and small businesses and want to attract new prospects to your website, as well as spread your thought leadership message about inbound marketing.
What do you do? Lots of things. You blog, make videos, podcast, do webinars, write ebooks, be active in social media and just generally leverage inbound marketing. As part of this, you can also try to create a viral video on YouTube.
Here is our latest attempt at making something remarkable and viral for YouTube. And some thoughts of mine below about it.
- A rap song is a good choice because the lyrics are usually easier to understand, so you can make your point more easily. Rap songs are also easier to parody than normal songs, I think.
- The song is popular, and old. New songs might be a big hit, but the recall you get with an old song really works. It also helps you get an older demographic (usually better for B2B), rather than just people in their early 20's. This song was chosen after we realized it is now being played at weddings - meaning it is broadly popular.
- Get a bit crazy. The more uncomfortable you are during filming, the more likely it will be that your video is funny and remarkable and worth sharing. Find the line, and then go over it. I'm not sure we went far enough in this one.
- Try a call to action. You usually get very few click throughs from YouTube to your website. You can drive more traffic by adding a call to action at the end of the video. But don't just put your logo or"visit my website". Try somethign more subtle, we just encouraged people to Google "inbound marketing" (and we were darn sure we dominated the first page of results...)
Here are some ideas on how to cut down on all that budget you spend with outside agencies. The video was clearly done by someone at an agency or supportive of agencies. I can tell you have done nearly all of the things in this video to negotiate lower rates with agencies for various projects (and it often works). I think that it is up to the agency to say "no" and hopefully (for them) their service is valuable and unique enough that you will still pay for it.
With all that said... the video is still funny and really well done and worth a gander.
Musician Dave Carrol flew through Chicago, saw the baggage handlers throwing his guitar and told some clearly uninterested United employees. After he landed, he was unhappy with the result from United.
You used to just tell 5 friends when United pissed you off. So far Dave has told 130,000 people via YouTube (and counting...). Hey United.... was that worth a $3500 guitar? Here's to telling a few more people.
One possible technique for online marketing is to take your articles and copy and paste them onto ezine websites around the web to get more links into your website. Does the increased inbound links to your website balance out the negative effects of having duplicate content?
Probably not. The links will not be that valuable because the search engines do not give a lot of authority to websites that consist of mostly duplicate content.
This is a clever video that the creator sent to me. I think it is a great summary of the concept of inbound marketing, specifically for the recruiting industry.
A new question: What are the marketing goals of blogging? I think some of the goals for launching a blog are:
- Improve SEO performance - blog articles help with SEO a lot by increasing your presence on the web and attracting more links into your website
- Build thought leadership and bradn - if your blog has interesting content, it can build your brand as a thought leader in the market
- Increase social media performance - you are a lot more interesting in social media if you are writing and then promoting interesting blog articles (instead of telling people what you had for lunch)
- Get more leads and sales - by adding calls to action to your blog, you can get blog visitors to convert into leads and customers for your business
Often people ask me which is more effective, Twitter or a blog. As you can see in the video, a blog is much more effective because it has a lot of benefits over Twitter.
- Blog articles help you be more interesting on Twitter - it is hard to be interesting in 140 characters, it is much easier with a link to a blog article
- Blog articles perform well in SEO (search engine optimization)
- Everyone can read blogs, not many people use Twitter
I've been doing a bunch of work this week to put onto (virtual) paper a lot of the best practices we use at HubSpot for using online video for marketing.
I wrote a blog article about SEO for YouTube, and today Karen Rubin and I are doing a webinar on How to Use Video for Online Marketing. It will be interesting to see how a webinar format is different for us than www.HubSpot.tv
Here are the slides from our webinar - download PPT slides. Enjoy!