Jumping on the Online Video Bandwagon

With the economic downturn and its effect on the Jamaican Real Estate Market, you need to continue to develop ways to stand out to your prospects. As I have said before it is key to continue marketing efforts, build your brand and the prize will be yours. Money is tight, but those who are on the market for real estate are spending cautiously, buying with more discretion in a competitive business environment.

Going back to online and social media marketing methods, video marketing comes to mind. Search engines tend to index video content higher in the search results. Also, there is no denying that people are watching online videos more than ever. An August 2008 study by eMarketer estimated that 129 million people watched online videos at least once a month.

Here are 7 points to help you develop your own Online Video Marketing Campaign:

1) Ensure the video covers the key points your target audience is looking for. Include the key selling points about your company, vivid images, contact info or website and a call to action. The good thing about online video is that people usually don’t care about whether your video has high production quality like a television show. They will choose content over quality.

2) Post your video on your website and across other video sharing sites. If you have several videos, show one on your website and include a link to your YouTube Channel. Also, in order to help optimize your website for the search engines, it’s good to have the videos on other websites with a link pointing back to your company’s website. Some other video sharing sites include Metacafe, Vidilife, Revver, Yahoo Videos and more.

3) Ensure that people can find your videos by using keywords / tags effectively, plus keyword rich titles. So if you have made a video about a listing in Barbican, your keywords could be “Barbican home in Jamaica for sale, Barbican Jamaica House for Sale, Jamaica Real Estate in Barbican”. You should include your company name in the keywords as well.

4) KISSS Keep it Short, Simple and Sweet. This is key for online videos due to slow connections which make it difficult to watch a long video and short attention spans when it comes to online videos. Two to three minutes is adequate.

5) Refresh your videos Keep updating your YouTube channel with newer videos. Even if you don’t have any new properties to showcase, you can tape customer testimonials from time to time.

6) Network within the online video community. Subscribe to other related YouTube Channels, befriend other users, etc. You can view and subscribe to the Jamaica Real Estate Guide channel here.

7) Tie in your online video marketing campaign with other online or social media efforts. If you have a Facebook Fan Page or Group, corporate blog, MySpace page or Twitter account, then you should promote your videos there too.