Building a Video Marketing Strategy Before YouTube Existed
Google Video just launched and dedicated video-sharing sites are starting to appear. Here's how to build a plan while platforms are still being sorted out.
Google announced Google Video this week, and it’s the clearest sign yet that the major platforms are about to treat video the way they’ve treated text and images for years: index it, host it, make it searchable. Nobody knows yet which video-sharing site is going to win this, whether it’s Google’s own product or one of the smaller startups quietly building in this space, but the direction is obvious enough to start preparing for. This is a guide to getting ready, not a guide to a single named platform, because the platform landscape hasn’t settled yet.
Why now, even before the winner is clear
Broadband has crossed the halfway mark of US home internet connections, which means, for the first time, a meaningful share of your audience can watch a video without waiting minutes for it to load. Camcorders and even basic digital cameras with video modes have gotten cheap enough that producing something isn’t a production-house expense anymore. The bottleneck was never demand or equipment; it was distribution, and that’s the piece about to get solved.
Start producing before you have a distribution home
The businesses that will move fastest once a dominant platform emerges are the ones that already have a habit of making short video. Start now with something simple: a product demonstration, a behind-the-scenes clip, a customer answering a question on camera. Keep it under a couple of minutes. You don’t need broadcast quality; you need something worth watching for the length of a coffee break.
Host it yourself and syndicate it like a podcast
Until a dedicated platform wins out, the most reliable distribution is the same one podcasters, a term barely a year old itself, are already using: host the file, publish an RSS feed with the video as an enclosure and let subscribers pull it automatically. It’s not glamorous, but it works today, and it gives you an audience you’re not dependent on any single platform to reach.
Embed everything on your own site and blog
Whatever tool you use to host video, make sure it’s embeddable on your own blog and site, not locked away behind a separate viewer. A visitor reading a blog post is far more likely to watch a short embedded clip in context than to click away to a video-only destination.
Build the habit, not the platform bet
It’s tempting to wait until “the YouTube of video” is obvious before investing any effort. That’s backwards. The skill that matters, producing something short, useful and watchable on a predictable schedule, transfers to whatever platform eventually wins. Businesses that build that habit now will have a real head start the moment a dominant video-sharing site emerges, instead of scrambling to learn video production from zero.
What to watch over the next year
Keep an eye on how quickly a new entrant makes uploading and sharing effortless, because that’s the feature that will decide the winner, not video quality or company size. Whoever removes the most friction between “I made a short video” and “someone found and watched it” is going to end up owning this category.
More strategy pieces are here, along with everything published in 2005 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
