How to Do a Great Online Viral Video for $150!
If you are a small business marketer, there’s a lot to love and to learn by watching this video.
When you need to make a splash in the small business marketplace and your budget is limited, imagination needs to take the place of money. That’s exactly what the folks at the Search Engine Guide had to do this spring to promote their upcoming Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference.
Of course, they could have gone the route of traditional press releases sent out to everybody they knew. But that’s what everybody does. Moreover, the search engine guide folks are big fans of social media marketing.
They had to cook up something a unique and compelling that would meet the challenge as they described it, “How do you capture someone’s attention online, where information overload has left most Internet users blind to anything resembling a sales pitch?”
Here is exactly what they did to break through that clutter.
After batting around a bunch of ideas they settled on creating a video with a simple but amusing idea: they would take viewers through a stack of cue cards while quirky music played in the background.
Once they made this decision, they wasted no time in taking the idea from concept to reality. Here are the key steps in the process:
- they defined five target audiences for the show including small business owners and entrepreneurs, folks new to search engine marketing, folks new to social media, work at home parents, and affiliate marketers looking for more traffic.
- A script about the selling points in the day and turned them into PowerPoint slides overnight. They then printed out the slides and mounted them on foam boards so they could use them as cue cards.
- They dug up some fun quirky music to buy from AudioSparx.
- They spent a day actually filming the slideshow–which takes just 90 seconds from start to finish.
Their total investment:
- slides– $110
- music– $38
- total dollars– $148
- total time 18 hours
You have to watch this fun, effective, and inexpensive video. You’ll love it.
I believe it works so well because its bootstrap approach matches matches its audience of small business owners and entrepreneurs. They make it very clear in the slides that there will be real practical, put it to work content that attendees will take away.
If like so many of us, you have much more imagination than money dryer hand at creating this kind of a fun video to promote a new product, a new business or an upcoming event. You can bet that it will have a heck of a lot more impact than a dusty old news release.
And, if you entrepreneurial mold, you should certainly consider attending Small Business Marketing Unleashed in Houston, April 21 — 22.
Trackbacks [0]
There are no trackbacks.
Post Comment
Fields marked with * are required.
Comments [2]
Simple but effective, you illustrated every concept of your key marketing strategy in the video postcard. Nice!
Interesting example. I wonder if they tracked actual conversions to paid attendees (could do so using Google Analytics)? Seems like a voice-over would have helped for those who learn audibly, but it is a good example of an inexpensive video leveraging exposure via YouTube.