Posted by: Rosemary Riley, Storyteller / Senior Copywriter

We’re keeping our eye on online video, as it becomes one of the Web’s most engaging mediums for blending information with entertainment. You’ve been on YouTube. You get the allure. It offers everything from the voyeuristic attraction of watching someone dance to a top pop song, to the educational appeal of a new product demo from your favorite brand. In its many forms, online video has such mass appeal that, according to eMarketer, more than 155.2 million people will watch one within the next year.

Optimizing videos with keyword-rich titles and descriptions, carefully naming video files, and submitting a video sitemap can increase rankings in the search engines. That’s right. Videos now occupy real estate previously reserved for text-based, organic listings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN search results pages.

Interested in incorporating video into your marketing strategy? If you don’t have the resources to create your own clips, you can take advantage of user-generated videos, or ones by other individuals or companies that align well with your vision, to gain visibility and reach an audience. Plus, YouTube now allows select advertisers to post 15-20 second ads within a limited number of videos at a price of twenty dollars per thousand viewers.

Marketers not only benefit from the visibility and branding that comes with online video, but according to a June 2007 study by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), half of the Internet users who had seen a video ad took an action, such as visiting a related website, looking for or requesting more information, clicking a banner ad accompanying the video, visiting a store or making a purchase.

Thinking about venturing into this space? Determine what message will resonate with your target audience and what format best suits that message. In an era when a sense of ‘reality’ in digital media draws a crowd, you might just breathe a little life into your next campaign.