Making Money With Genuine Product Review Videos

It’s no accident that advertisers spend billions of dollars every year on commercials for national TV, Radio and Print media. Advertising to a ‘captured audience’ has been a very lucrative model for a long time.
However, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock recently, you probably know that mass media advertising has entered a world of pain.

To put it simply, many big corporations selling household names and services are now faced with dramatic changes in consumer behavior – much of it fuelled by the spread of the Internet.
These changes include:

a) TV viewing figures for the major (US) networks are declining.

b) Mainstream newspaper and magazine circulations are in free fall (bad news for the careers of journalists, editors and photographers.)

c) Technology is allowing people to take more control of how, when and where they consume mass media broadcasting e.g. the TiVo, iPods, and e-Book readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s iPad.

And where are all those eyeballs going? Increasingly, it seems that many are moving online where they can choose from a vast range of entertainment, sports and career/jobs information delivered in text, audio and video formats.

Did you spot the massive opportunity in that last sentence for users of GollyGoose.com?
No?
OK, here it is.

The Internet is changing consumer-purchasing decisions because people can easily search for information such as “Product X review” or “Product X complaint”, and instantly gets a world of information at their fingertips to help them make choices.
But not only are they doing this from home computers, they’re also able to do it in the store (even at the very point of purchase!) with mobile devices that use wireless Internet.

Of course, the big corporations and their advertisers know this too. And they’ve attempted to respond by taking their ‘tried-and-tested’ mass-media advertising methods to the online world.

The problem is that online surfers are: a) more resistant to traditional advertising and b) they’ve limited attention spans while online.
Bottom line?
BS is out. And genuinely helpful information is in.

You can contribute to this new ‘consumer-led’ marketing experience by helping people make informed purchasing decisions online using genuine video product reviews.
By ‘genuine’ we mean that your video features real people who’ve actually bought and used the product or service. Not a bunch of actors paid to pretend! (There is a difference!)
There’s another angle to genuine that can make your video stand out from the dross that passes for ‘online reviews’ these days.
And that’s ‘integrity’.

You see, consumers are starved for honest information about what they can reasonably expect before they part with their hard-earned cash. In a tough economy like today that’s very important and people are interested in value for money, not in hyped-up and unrealistic promises.

How do you deliver a genuine video product review that’s both ‘genuine’ and based on ‘integrity’ and honesty? Simple. Try these four steps:

1- Briefly state the problem or issue that needed to be solved.

2- Describe your search for a solution and how you found the product to do that e.g. word-of-mouth, saw on TV, read about it on a forum etc.

3- Show how you used the product, along with an honest and brief account of the strong and weak points of the product (when compared to its competitors.) And remember to stick to describing features and benefits – avoid slandering the products of others by sticking to your experiences of their solutions.

4- Be honest if yours really was an exceptional result – most people are looking for what average folks can expect when they make a purchase.

(Government organizations like America’s ‘FTC’ are also starting to scrutinize the ‘Wild West’ of unsubstantiated and often false advertising claims that make up many so-called online product reviews. Don’t go there! By staying honest, your videos will attract the attention of not only advertisers and companies, but they are more likely to ‘go viral’ when discovered by real people online.)

Conclusion:
There are many thousands of companies out there who are just awakening to the marketing potential of Internet video. (Most are still asleep!)

Don’t focus so much on the big guns like Coke, Nike and the like – though it would be cool if their online marketing folks picked one of your videos up!

Instead, pay attention to all those companies who don’t make the mainstream news or advertising machine.Although they don’t have millions of dollars for Super Bowl commercials, they have serious money to spend for online marketing content.

One thing’s for sure – their online marketing efforts are suffering from a dearth of genuine product review videos. Will you be the one to help them solve this problem?