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Integrating Text Blogs and Video Blogs

In the previous chapter, you learned how to create a video blog (vlog); it’s relatively easy to use your YouTube videos as vlog posts. But a video blog is only part of your online marketing mix. A successful business needs to integrate text blogs, video blogs, and audio podcasts as well as other media components.

What role should a video blog play in your online marketing mix? That’s entirely up to you, of course, but you might want to follow some guidelines. Read on to learn more.

Communicating with Your Customers Online

Traditional advertising in print or on radio or television is a oneway communication. Your ad broadcasts your message to potential customers, but your customers have no way of communicating back to you. (Short of buying your product, of course, but that’s an indirect, if welcome, message.)

One of the key advantages of the Internet as a marketing medium is that it allows for two-way communications. Instead of talking toyour customers, you can now talk with them. This is especially true with blogs and vlogs.

When you create a blog or vlog post, you initiate a conversation. The replies to your post are your customers talking back to you, and one of the best ways to increase customer loyalty is to engage them in this sort of ongoing communication. With each post you make, you’re forging a tighter bond with your most important customers.

For this reason, most companies today, large or small, view a blog as an essential part of their marketing mix. Consider a video blog as a similar way to communicate with your customers online. You initiate the conversation by recording and posting your video musings and then encourage feedback from viewers either via text comments or through responding video posts—both of which YouTube enables your viewers to do.

The replies to your blog and vlog posts are what matter. By reading your customers’ responses to your posts, you get an insight into what’s on their minds—what matters to them. Over time, your blog/vlog readers drive your posts, and you hone your message for your entire customer base.

This is why any company that is not blogging or vlogging is at a competitive disadvantage. A company that talks only to its customers but doesn’t listen to them is left behind in this new online marketplace. If you encourage two-way communication via your blog/vlog, you’re more in touch with your customer base, and you can tune your products and services to meet their needs. In other words, blogging/vlogging is a great market research tool that appears only to a promotional device.

Your People Are Your Message

Blogs and vlogs also enable you to add nuance to the message your company communicates. Instead of a single, monolithic company voice, your blog and vlog can include posts from employees throughout your organization. Your company becomes personalized and easier to identify with.

This is especially true with video blogs, where customers can see and hear the people behind the posts. Even if only your CEO posts, your customers can better identify with a living, breathing human being than with an impersonal advertising message. It’s even better to have posts by multiple employees, from throughout your organization, so that your company has multiple faces.

It’s like that old saying—people don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. The more you can present your people as the face of your company, the more your customers can identify with them and your company. Videos let you put real, honest-to-goodness human beings front and center better than any other medium. You should take advantage of this facet of online marketing.

There’s another reason to have multiple individuals posting from within your organization. Each employee has his or her own unique interests, opinions, and voice. Any three employees talking about the same topic present it in three unique ways. One person’s approach might appeal to part of your customer base; another person might appeal to a completely different customer base. The more employees you have talking, the more types of customers you can attract.

In addition, you can engage different employees to talk about different topics. Let them speak about something they’re passionate about—create an army of topic-specific experts. This approach reaches the broadest number of potential customers online.

Expanding Your Message Across the Web

The two-way communication enabled by blogs and vlogs (and, to a lesser extent, audio podcasts) can take place only when customers find your site. How, then, can you publicize your blog/vlog and spread your message across a wider swath of the Internet? Here are some approaches that others have found effective.

Syndicate!

One of the key way to disseminate your blog and vlog posts is to syndicate your site content via a site feed. A feed is an automatically updated stream of a blog’s contents, enabled by a special XML (Extensible Markup Language) file format called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). A blog that has an RSS feed enabled automatically publishes any updated content as a special XML file that contains the RSS feed. The syndicated feed is then normally picked up by RSS feed reader programs and RSS aggregators for websites; Google indexes the feeds as part of its Blog Search function.

When you enable your blog/vlog for syndication, any user subscribing to your site automatically receives any new post you make. In effect, your site pushes your new content to interested subscribers, without them having to revisit your site to find out what’s new. The more subscribers you have, the more interested readers or viewers you have.

For this reason, you want to enable your blog/vlog for both RSS and Atom syndication. Most blog-hosting services make this easy to do, typically by adding an RSS Feed or Subscribe button somewhere in the margins of the blog. When users click the button, they initiate the process of subscribing; this might involve copying some XML code into their feed reader program or choosing which feed readers they want to use to track your postings. The process is simpler than it sounds, especially because many personalized home pages (such as iGoogle and My Yahoo!) can now track blog syndication as part of their content modules.

Link!

Another way to get your blog/vlog known across the Web is to make sure other sites link to it. This happens naturally if you have a truly content-rich site; if you build a blog/vlog that contains tons of useful information, word gets out…eventually.

You can speed up the process, however, by finding other sites to link back to your site. This is a time-consuming manual process, I’m afraid; you have to email each site you want to link to you and ask the webmaster to do so. Some sites do so if asked (and if your site is important to their visitors); some sites create a reciprocal link, if you also link to them; some sites link to you if you pay them to do so; and some sites won’t link back to you, no matter what. It’s a bit of a crapshoot.

If this sounds too daunting, you can employ a link management service to do this link hunting for you. Just Google for “link management” or “link building” and take a look at what comes up in the results.

Promote!

When trying to broaden the audience for your blog, don’t neglect good old-fashioned promotion. This could include all or any of the following, plus anything else you can come up with:

• Prominent mention on your official company website

• Mention in your company’s traditional print, radio, and television advertisements

• Mention in your company’s press releases, as well as a dedicated press release mentioning the launch of your blog/vlog

• An email marketing mailing promoting the blog/vlog

• Mention of your vlog in the text accompanying all your YouTube videos—and, perhaps, an onscreen mention of your vlog’s URL within each video

• A contest (conducted in other media) to draw visitors to your blog/vlog

• A concerted PR effort to get mention of your blog/vlog in related blogs

In other words, use your accumulated marketing prowess to uncover ways to let potential customers know about your blog or vlog—either on the Internet or off!

Be Social!

You can also spread the word of your blog/vlog by making your site more social. That means adding buttons for social bookmark and social news-sharing sites, such as Digg (www.digg.com) and Reddit (www.reddit.com). Visitors use these sites to share sites and pages of interest with other people.

You can also publish your blog/vlog to social news sites. These are category-specific sites that attract communities of like-minded individuals who consume news related to the topic at hand. Users of these sites can comment on your blog and vlog postings; if a lot of people vote on a story, it can hit the site’s home page and drive a lot of traffic back to your blog/vlog.

An added benefit of a bookmark to your blog/vlog on a social site is that each bookmark creates a new link back to your site. And, as most savvy webmasters know, your ranking in Google and Yahoo! search results is at least partly dependent on the number of pages that link to your site. The more bookmarks, the more links—and the higher your search results.

Make Your Blog/Vlog Search Friendly

Many visitors find blogs/vlogs by searching for related content; if your blog or vlog postings appear prominently in Google and Yahoo! search results, it attracts a lot of new customers to your site. The key, then, is optimizing your blog/vlog for these search engines. How do you do this?

Blog optimization is a lot like traditional website optimization. The first thing to pay attention to is your blog’s template—the content that surrounds the blog posts themselves. Your template needs to include keywords within the text that reference the main topics of the blog, preferably high on the page. You should also place keywords in the template’s <title> tag and in all alternative image text. Search engines look for these keywords when they’re indexing web pages; the more frequent, more prominent, and more relevant the keywords in your blog, the higher your site appears in the search engine’s results.

You can also optimize each blog post for search engine indexing. For this reason, it’s important to include keywords in the title of each post; because many syndicators/aggregators list only the title of a post, this makes the title much more important than the main text of a post. You should make the title a link so that the search engines pick up the link from the title to the post.

Post Your Videos on Multiple Sites

Finally, here’s one that you might not have thought of. The more sites on which your videos appear, the more opportunities you have for inclusion in Google and Yahoo! search results. If your video is embedded on three different sites, you could get three different places on the search results page—all for the same video!

So, where can you post your video? You can post it on your video blog, of course, but also on your traditional blog, on your company’s official web-site, and on YouTube. Also, you should enable the embedding feature on YouTube to encourage interested viewers to embed your video on their websites and blogs. The more places your video appears, the more viewers you have!

What Makes a Good Video Blog?

With all this talk of creating and promoting your video blog, it’s critical that your vlog be as appealing as possible to attract the highest number of viewers. Just how do you go about making a good video blog?

First, realize that a good video blog is just like a good text-based blog: It’s engaging, relevant, timely, and personal. It’s a two-way communication between the people of your organization and your customers. It’s not an overt commercial.

You make a video blog good by thinking about your customers—not about your company. This isn’t (solely) about your company, your brand, your products, or your senior management team. It’s about what’s important to your current and potential customers.

A good vlog isn’t just talk. It’s also about action and giving your customers what they want in information, education, and entertainment. You have to provide real value in terms of what matters to your customers.

The way to get smart about making a better vlog is simple: Spend time in the community. That means diving head-first into other online blogs and forums frequented by your customer base. Find out what they’re talking about; what they like and dislike; how they talk, and why they talk, and when they talk. Get to know what’s going on so that you can better integrate your vlog into this community.

Here’s something else you need to know upfront: It’s going to take a lot more time than you thought. You have to make a lot of posts, and each post takes time to shoot, edit, and upload. In addition, you need to monitor and respond to all the comments left on your vlog. Your vlog, like a text-based blog, is a living thing that requires constant attention. You have to be prepared to keep it fresh and functioning.

Managing a Multiple-Channel Online Marketing Mix

As noted earlier in this chapter, your video blog is just one component of your online marketing mix. Vlogs, blogs, social networks, search advertising, banner advertising, public relations—they’re all important. How do you manage all these diverse yet interrelated components?

First, realize that no matter how many different elements you’re managing, they all have to present the same cohesive image and message to the customer. Don’t think that your customers know of only a single element; they see more than one thing you’re doing, and the different pieces can’t be cognitively dissonant. What one element says, the others should reinforce.

With that said, you need to play to the strengths of each component. A banner ad is best for presenting a simple, bold image to a mass audience; a blog is best for encouraging two-way communication with individual consumers. Know how to use each component of the mix to best effect, and don’t try to make any single element do what it can’t do.

You should also recognize how different elements affect each other. For example, the popularity of a blog or of your online videos can help to drive up the ranking of your search results; thus these (and other) elements affect the success of your search engine marketing. Learn how to drive customers from your mass market advertising to your more targeted blogs and email marketing. Make each element work on its own and with other elements.

Converting Viewers to Paying Customers

Now we come to the hundred-dollar question: How do you convert a customer from being a passive vlog viewer to a paying customer? Here is where your vlog page design comes to the fore. You have to forget what you think you know a vlog or blog has to look like. In reality, a blog/vlog can look almost like a traditional web page. There’s no reason you can’t list your specials of the week in the margin, put a link to a product page at the top, or even display a banner ad for your other website at the bottom. The key is to include some sort of conversion mechanism in your vlog’s template to drive traffic from the vlog to your action-oriented web-site.

That’s right, your blog or vlog is only the first step to customer conversion. In reality, it functions like an advertisement in that it attracts eyeballs; your job is to transfer those eyeballs to a page or site that contains a direct call to action. The success of your presentation is not (just) about the information contained in your blog/vlog, it’s also about what people can do with that information. Your ultimate call to action has to tell visitors how they can buy what they’ve been viewing, reading about, or discussing. It is, at the end of the day, all about the sales.