Getting Started With Video and YouTube Marketing?

With video marketing becoming so popular, more affordable and favoured by search engines, you may be considering jumping onto the video band wagon, I know I am.

With YouTube having become the undisputed winner in the massive on-line video space if you are considering video marketing, you need to be learning more about YouTube.

In the last ten years I was involved in only three video projects, and just in the last year I’ve been involved in five more. I have seen the average production price of these small business videos go from $8-10K to $2-5K and now as low as $1,500. This is in the range of possibility for many small businesses.

I’m always looking for internet marketing books geared to small business owners and their on-line marketing teams. In this article, I introduce two very different YouTube books.

The first book is called YouTube For Business by Michael Miller with QUE Publishing and the second book is called YouTube and Video Marketing An Hour A Day by Greg Jarboe by Sybex and Wiley Publishing. Both books were published in 2009.
 

If you’re considering getting started with YouTube, YouTube For Business is the book to start with.

It is also the book to read if you, like me, prefer to digest books and quickly put their insights into action. YouTube For Business is pragmatic, very well organized, a quick and easy read. It provides an excellent overview of the video production and marketing process on and off YouTube.

The book follows the following outline:

1. Marketing Your Business Online with YouTube – broken into 3 subsections 
2. Producing Your YouTube Videos – broken into 5 subsections
3. Managing Your YouTube Videos – broken into 3 stages
4. Working with YouTube Video Blogs – with two subsections
5. Promoting and Monetization – broken into three sections 

Each section concludes with a case study to provide context for the teachings.

I spent the last 3 years researching and playing with various video technologies intending to develop training videos for my Being Profitable program. This book outlined everything I learned and more in a 2-3 hour read. This book will save you a lot of time and effort and is well worth the $25 US.

I really liked this book as the recommendations it makes matched most of what I ended up buying after my own research. It provided many third party resources to review and was a breeze to read. I recommend it to anyone considering getting into YouTube and Video marketing.

The second book, YouTube and Video Marketing is a totally different animal. This is a serious 446 page book for people who intend to jump into YouTube with both feet and make video marketing work for their business.

The basic premise of this book is you take 8 months to complete an hour-per-day program, so there is a lot of content and third party resource references to look into. This book takes a completely different organizational approach with a story telling format. The story telling is helpful in that it provides context in the form of 3-4 mini case studies you can review and relate to your business.

The book reads a bit like a text book but it is very friendly and conversational. The examples and the conversation provide the most valuable contribution as it attempts to shape the way you think and approach video marketing. The second most valuable contribution made are the third party references to key resources you will need along the way. This book is full of gems to follow-up on to take your marketing program to new levels.

This book is targeted to internet marketers more than your average small business owner. However if you are serious about marketing your business with video on YouTube, this book is worth a quick read for the big picture context. It will help you see what you are getting yourself into. Then if you decide to commit to marketing with YouTube, this book will lead you through the implementation and video promotion process.

The first chapter offers a history of YouTube and the online video segment as a whole. It is very interesting and makes a compelling case to get moving with video marketing on YouTube or get left in the dust. The table of contents is 7 pages long with 12 chapters in all.

1. A Short History of YouTube
2. The Online Video Market
3. Map Out Your Video Marketing Strategy
4. Optimize Your Video
5. Create Viral Video Content
6. Create A Channel 
7. Engage the YouTube Community 
8. Learn Video Production 
9. Become A YouTube Partner and Video Advertiser 
10. Trust But Verify YouTube Insight 
11. Measure Outcomes Vs. Outputs
12. Mysteries of Online Video Revealed

Chapters 3 to 10 are broken down into four weeks each and structured into daily assignments.

Being a bit on the impatient side, there is no way I am going to follow the proposed 8 month timeline. However I think the outlined approach is very thorough and in alignment with current best practices for internet and social media marketing in general.

In summary, I enjoyed both these books. I got pragmatic “How To” direction from YouTube for Business and “What To Do” direction from YouTube and Video Marketing. If you’re considering YouTube for your business I suggest you buy YouTube For Business first. If you decide that video marketing is a fit and makes economic sense for your business, then go purchase the second book and read it cover to cover to validate and ground your thinking. If, after this wake-up call, you still intend to market with videos on YouTube, then consider working through the outlined program.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He helps entrepreneurs Design Build and Grow market leading companies with internet marketing, social media and sales lead generation programs.

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Duct Tape Marketing, A great primer for small business owners

I’ve had Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch on my reading list for 3 years and I finally got around to reading it over the holidays. I help entrepreneurs grow market leading companies in my marketing consulting and business coaching practice, so I am always looking for good books to recommend to entrepreneurs. 

The process that Duct Tape Marketing outlines is the closest match to what my company offers that I have found so far. I rate it as one of my top 5 book picks for outlining the entire small business sales and marketing process. One caution is that the coverage of each topic is very general, making it more of a road map, a good big-picture overview, than a practical how-to book.

The book starts out with the assumption that you are a small business owner about to market your business and leads you forward from there. It’s divided into two sections: The Foundation and The Lead Generation Machine. There is also a small third section with some after thoughts and resources for learning more about the topics introduced in each chapter.

The Foundation section outlines a process for getting ready to market. A priming of the lead generation pump if you will. The Lead Generation section outlines what the components of a sales lead generation promotional machine look like and how they work together to generate results. Each chapter directs you to some useful resources and tools that might help you along the way.

The book is very readable and can be digested fairly quickly. I suggest reading it once from cover to cover and then again chapter by chapter as you develop your go-to-market plan.

One of my pet peeves with nearly all marketing programs is they make the assumption that an entrepreneur is actually ready to market. Unfortunately, this book makes the same assumption. In my experience, many marketing programs begin with little to no professional due diligence; due diligence in determining if an entrepreneur’s business is sufficiently well defined and economically capable of supporting a sustained marketing effort. Without it, an entrepreneur runs the risk of wasting his limited time and money on marketing before he is ready to benefit from it. I’d like to see this book offer some wisdom in this regard to prevent costly pre-mature marketing investments.

As a marketing consultant, one of the hardest things I do after a due diligence review, is say to an entrepreneur “Your business isn’t ready for marketing yet. I’m not going to do you any favours, by helping you market until a number of issues are addressed.”

I always say to entrepreneurs, “you need to be able to answer these questions specifically and with commitment before you spend any money on marketing”:

1. Who are you and what do you do?
2. Whom do you serve, specifically?
3. What core problem do you solve for your clients?
4. What is your key competitive advantage?
5. How does your business make money on first time sales?

The last question is the most problematic for a would-be marketer and where he often needs to rethink his plans. When an entrepreneur works out the likely cost of a sale from marketing and realizes there is no margin left in an average first sale, there is no point going further until a solution is found.

This “am I ready to market” discussion continually gets left out of marketing books. We need a more sober discussion about how time consuming, expensive and risky marketing can be. I think this book would serve its audience better if more emphasis were placed on core business definition, marketing planning, budgeting and forecasting. This would help an entrepreneur make informed decisions about how ready he is for marketing before he gets excited and jumps right in.

Despite this gap in coverage, I think Duct Tape Marketing is a very useful book for helping map out what your marketing program could look like. I also think it is a useful book to refer to as you implement your plan as it offers very practical advice at each step along the way. Just don’t be too eager to jump into marketing until you are confident that you can afford to finish what you start and can make money from the effort.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He helps entrepreneurs Design Build and Grow market leading companies.

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