Dear Search Engine Optimization Resellers: Use GoPro as Your Example of How to Video Market a Company Successfully
Imagine video marketing your company to the world in under a minute, and getting millions of viewers to replay your video, jonesing for just one more look.
For San Francisco-based camera company, GoPro, this has become their reality, every day.
The 12-year-old business has hit the video marketing scene in a big way in the last four years. It began shooting marketing videos on a unique YouTube channel as a way to promote their high definition cameras, using professional stuntmen and athletes willing to perform extraordinary feats to feature the quality of the lenses.
But now, customers are taking GoPro’s idea to a new level, and are uploading their own video content, adding GoPro into their video titles. This has turned into an unexpected marketing boost for the company, making it YouTube’s top brand in the world, according to New York Daily News.
In 2013 alone, the company experienced a 60% increase in the number of videos posted to YouTube with its name attached to them, and currently, about 6,000 videos are uploaded daily. This is far cry from the two to three videos GoPro used to post each week when it first launched its YouTube channel.
Why has GoPro’s marketing campaign become so popular?
"We get users to submit content and are able to distribute it to as many people as we can over the world," says senior director of content distribution, Adam Dornbusch . "They are using their (cameras to capture) their greatest passion. What the camera enables you to do [is] a whole new level of content capture and creation."
For companies looking for ways to promote their product, taking a page out of GoPro’s book wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Content Creation has been a major focus for businesses utilizing search engine optimization resellers to enhance their online presence. Many SEO marketing companies have onsite writers who create high quality content for clients, and upload these to their website.
But with Google and YouTube’s partnership, your search engine ranking on Google will subsequently affect your ranking on YouTube if you produce videos, and according to Forrester Research, Google is 50 times more likely to give you organic page rankings if you use videos instead of plain text. It is also worth noting that the global research firm reports that one minute of video can sum up 1.8 million words.
Furthermore, your chances of appearing on the first search engine results page increase by 53% with a video on the landing page, says Mist Media, a digital media company.
Social video marketing is not a new concept, but it has catapulted its way to the forefront of online marketing strategies in recent years, making it critical for search engine optimization resellers to hop on this viral express.
And GoPro’s success shows that this type of media is worth the investment.
The camera company’s initial public offering (IPO) filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision shows that from 2011 to 2014, GoPro has almost doubled its profits annually, generating over $2 million in 2011, more than $5 million in 2012, and just under $100 million last year.
As a result, GoPro’s camcorder was the number one selling product of its kind in the U.S. in 2013, according to the IPO filing, and while Kelly Baker, GoPro’s spokeswoman, declined to comment about the impact of the online videos on camera sales, she did reveal that the company is recently enjoying greater success.
This is a critical point for any search engine optimization reseller or business to understand about how to increase digital presence. Online videos actually help to retain internet user attention, and website visitors are 64% more likely make a purchase after watching a video advertisement.
In addition, in the last month, 80% of users watched a video advertisement. About half of them took some action based on the video, such as researching the product further, and visiting the company’s website, and 12% actually purchased the product featured in the video.
So what does all this mean for you?
Video marketing could be the strategy of the future and the best chance you have at pushing your company to the top of a search engine. You don’t need to produce hours of video either, as studies show that you lose about half of your viewers with a video that is 60 seconds long -- just a 10-second blip is enough to retain about 80% of them. (But if your video is as exciting as the death defying tricks shown on GoPro’s channel, go ahead and shoot away).
While you may not see the same success as GoPro with your video marketing ploy, there is enough research to support that it will likely boost traffic to your website, and ultimately up your profits.
