1. Use a dependable hosting service
When you are marketing your video, the last thing you want is an unreliable hosting service that ruins your efforts. It’s important to use a provider that will offer you consistent quality and give you the assurance that your video won’t be spontaneously taken down at any point.

Websites such asYouTube and Vimeo are traditionally pretty reasonable at providing such a service; if you want 100% peace of mind, then investing some money into a host such as Brightcove or Bitsontherun might be a good idea.

2. Remember video SEO

Video is a great SEO (search engine optimization) booster, and using sites such as YouTube can greatly aid your SEO efforts. Just as in any SEO strategy, your main aim is to allow your video to be found by online users who are searching for content related to your video.

When marketing video, making your video findable by search engines is your top priority. It’s essential, therefore, to fill out all of your video meta-data on all the video sharing sites it is hosted on, and to write as much information as the sites allow you to include.

3. Harness the power of social sharing
Cracking social media isn’t always easy, but the power of a social share is unquestionable. Sharing online video on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and other social sites allows you to reach an almost limitless audience.
One share to your primary audience could generate further social shares within that group, thus reaching audiences you’ve never interacted with before and spreading your video’s message way beyond your current online reach.

4. Interact on your platforms
No matter what platform you are using—your website, social profile, video-sharing site, or blog—as the home of your online video, you will need to embrace and interact with the communities there.
Engage with commenters and other users, Like or comment on their content, video-respond to them, share their work, and generally participate in the discussions taking place in those locations.
Doing so will encourage other users to do the same, in turn, with your content and will generally create good marketing karma for you.

5. Measure your success
Always remember that measuring success creates success. Whether you’re looking to improve your video views, social following, Likes, conversions, website visits, or bounce rates via online video… you need to regularly check the success of your strategy and tactics.

Video production is getting cheaper, so Google is creating a self-service option for pre-roll advertisements aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses.

Google’s AdWords program has long been an easy way for businesses of all shapes and sizes to post their ads on Google Search results. Now the company is expanding those capabilities to YouTube with its launch Monday of AdWords for Video.

As with the Search product, AdWords for Video is self-service. It allows small- and medium-sized businesses to bid on keywords and categories and have their video ads appear in front of some of the 3 billion YouTube videos that get viewed every day.

The move, though, signifies a larger shift. It used to be that only larger companies could afford to place video ads (or, more specifically, TV ads). They were simply too expensive–to produce as well as to air–for the average mom-and-pop.

But the cost of producing video has plummeted (this company made their first ad for $500), finally putting “TV” ads within reach of the masses.

That’s good news for small businesses, because video can be a powerful tool for drumming up interest from potential customers.

RevZilla, a motorcycle gear company based in Philadelphia, has long been placing video ads in YouTube search results. Founder Anthony Bucci tells Fast Company that video will become increasingly common for smaller businesses like his. “Depending on the business and how it reaches consumers, every business is going to potentially shine with video in different ways,” he says.

The new AdWords for Video product introduces a level of standardization with Google’s other services that will make it easier to buy pre-roll. “The way we set up a new video ad feels the same as if we were setting up a banner or search ad [in AdWords],” Bucci says.

EMarketer says video is the fastest growing online ad format. It projects that the share of online ad spending going toward video will double this year, from 7.9% to 15%. And according to Google, 50% of online ad campaigns will include video by 2015.

The service also allows users to place ads on mobile devices. Baljeet Singh, Group Product Manager for YouTube, tells Fast Company the company is planning to expand the service to other platforms, like connected TVs and game boxes.

AdWords for Video will also use YouTube’s “TrueView” system which only charges advertisers when users actually watch the video, Singh says. That’s a shift from the classic CPM charge model, which charges per impression. Small businesses need to stretch their ad budgets as far as possible, so providing a service that only charges them when viewers actually watch the ad makes the service increasingly attractive to those buyers.

The introduction of AdWords for Video is part of a larger emphasis at Google on small and medium-sized businesses. (See: “Google Goes After Your Local Small Business.”) “This allows them to play big with bigger advertisers,” Singh says.

A beta program for the service began last year. Google won’t reveal the number of advertisers participating, but Singh does say that the number of advertisers using AdWords for Video increased 10x from the end of last year’s Q4.

In case you missed it, a quiet revolution is occurring in B2B digital marketing, especially in the professional services realm.

Previously, the center of the B2B online universe revolved around that colossus, the website. B2B marketers all had one goal in mind: Drive traffic back to the website. Today, however, the cyber world has shifted. And a a new end game is being played that has everything to do with the customer–not the company. Multi-channel marketing, from tablets to smartphones to videos, has moved the center of the digital universe from the website to the customer. The new dictum is: Be relevant and discoverable everywhere your customer is.
A leader and key practitioner of this new world view is Deloitte, which is scoring some big wins as it embraces multi-channel marketing. One metric tells the story: Since launching video podcasts–short interviews with thought leaders–a year ago, Deloitte has found each video gets downloaded about 3,000 times, compared with average downloads of 1,000 per white paper. Not bad–especially when you consider that a video can take one twelth the time to produce as a white paper and be far more timely. In fact, the videos have been so successful, Deloitte releases one a week.

I spoke with two Deloitte digital marketing experts, Jennifer Chico, Director of Internet Marketing, and Kelly Nelson, Marketing Leader, Deloitte Analytics. Here are some lessons straight from Deloitte’s experience.
WENDY MARX: What is your new digital marketing model?

JENNIFER CHICO: We’re moving from a hub and spokes to an entanglement model. If you envision a wheel, in the past, Deloitte.com was in the center, and the spokes were email marketing and Google advertising, things that drove traffic back to Deloitte.com. Where we are moving today is more an entanglement model, where we need to be relevant and discoverable across all channels. The website is the fundamental home base for digital strategy, but it is not the be all and end all. We need to be where our customers are, and be relevant and discoverable.

How has your new relationship with the customer affected content?
KELLY NELSON: We’re taking some pointers from B2C companies where the content is often short, sweet, and to the point, with the focus on benefits, and people are spoken to in a way they recognize. In the past, we often started with a white paper, with a big piece of thought leadership. We said, “What if we flip that around? What if we don’t start with the big thing but with the seed, the small idea?” Not everyone is interested in a 20-page piece of content. Now we start with shorter pieces, such as our three-minute guides. We then look at the metrics see where the interest is; if there seems to be lot of interest in angle X, we’ll dive a little deeper there.

What other approaches are you taking to content?

NELSON: We’re taking a blog-like approach. We post content that is very conversational in nature and can run the gamut from analytics about talent to supply chains. It’s short–about two paragraphs or less–and more conversation than thought leadership, such as “here’s a couple of things to think about when thinking about tax season.”

What do you measure?
CHICO: We look at the following to measure our effectiveness: The awareness and engagement we’re driving, the volume and reach, the level of engagement we’re creating with various constituents–are we having a back and forth? Have we increased the conversation rate? Have we instigated action? Did they download something? Subscribe to something? View a podcast? Did they take action?

Tweets, status updates, pins, check-ins: They may seem trivial to you, but they’re valuable content to social networking companies.

For example: Next time you make an update in Path, consider that you just helped that company make 50 cents in revenue.

Just how much value do you represent to these companies? Backupify, a cloud data backup service, decided to do some quick math. The infographic below gives you a glimpse. Dividing the estimated valuation of the company by the number of users tells you, roughly, how much value each user contributes to the company’s value.

 Path: $12.50 per user
 Instagram: $18.52
 Yelp: $21.21
 Pinterest: $28.09
 Foursquare: $40.00
 Twitter: $71.43
 Dropbox: $80.00
 LinkedIn: $104.46
 Facebook: $118.34

But it’s the value of each individual status update that’s especially interesting. To get this number, Backupify took each company’s estimated annual revenue and divided it by the number of items of content. Here are the results:

 Tweet: $0.001
 Facebook share: $0.024
 LinkedIn search: $0.124
 FourSquare check-in: $0.40
 Path update: $0.50
 Yelp review: $9.13
I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to imagine that a simple FourSquare check-in is worth 40 cents — or that there are any Yelp reviews at all that would be worth nearly $10. But that’s market economics for you.

backupify-social-data-infographic