Search-Optimised Video: The Next Frontier

For all the hype that social media gets in the press, and after hundreds of years of innovations in the advertising industry, the most effective way to reach potential customers is through appearing highly on search engines. In today’s information climate, customers look for the easiest way to find information. And now, all the information that a consumer could ever want is a simple search box away. A single, unbiased search box away.

If you aren’t convinced by your own behaviors, look no further than the latest BIA/Kelsey Survey, which found that 90% of all U.S. consumers use search engines to make purchasing decisions. Rarely does a study produce such an absolutely definitive result, but such is nature of the search engine revolution. It applies to almost every consumer with access to the internet.

At the heart of the marketing revolution is a shift towards consumers seeking out information directly before they purchase, with the least amount of effort possible. And search engines are, quite simply, the easiest way to find information.

No matter how much effort a company puts into their advertising budget - which can be substantial if working with a top ad firm – search engine optimization is the best way to reach your customers if you are selling a product that they are searching for.

This point brings up an important caveat. Advertising – be it via traditional methods or through other social media – can still be effective in crafting brand image, especially if you are marketing a product that your customers aren’t necessarily looking for, or are not looking for critically.

For example, the toiletries company Old Spice recently launched a highly successful campaign to promote their men’s deodorant line, which had acquired a stale reputation. Their new commercials featured a handsome young man in a variety of ‘cool’ situations. Because of the production quality and clever writing, the ads received over 12 million views on YouTube and helped transition Old Spice’s brand image amongst the younger generation.

Even in such cases, however, the link between (heavy) initial investment, well received advertisements, and ROI isn’t as concrete as one might imagine. In the Old Spice case study, sales of the brand actually dropped seven percent over the period in which the ads ran.

Why? There is limited potential for engagements with advertisements of any kind, and very little potential, in almost all cases, for search engine optimization. And because search engine optimization is the easiest way to reach your customers, this poses a problem for companies. If advertisements are expensive and difficult to position on search engines, and a company wants to project something deeper and perhaps more interactive than most forms of social media would allow, what can companies do to get their message and expertise where it can be found?

The answer is through search optimized video (SOV). In search optimized video, companies create video content with the explicit intention of aligning it with the terms that customers search for. To do this, companies assess what the most common questions that their customers are asking, analyze the popularity of the questions as search terms, and then shoot video “Answer Bits” around those questions.

These “Answer Bits” should focus on being genuine, answering the question directly, and offering helpful information, rather than on pitching the company. For example, a legal firm could offer a series of videos about the most helpful strategies in international business law. This series would show up when potential clients searched for business law strategy, would offer helpful information to these potential clients, and portray the legal firm as the foremost experts in their field.

So, why video? According to a recent study from Forrester Research, video was over 50 times more likely to show up on the first page of search results than text is. This is because there both far fewer videos than text on the internet, and because many of the videos produced today are not created with the objective of being found. So if a company creates video content with the objective of being found, they attain a huge shortcut to the first page of search results.

Additionally, video provides a level of connection that text cannot offer. There are millions of pages of text on the internet, so if a consumer finds a video, it automatically stands out. Instead of just words, the company now has faces and voices attributed to it – giving it a human edge against all competitors, and positioning it as a trusted source.

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