BLOG | 12-01-19 | DIGITAL MARKETING
The Future NOW
The Future NOW Digital Marketing series locks in on digital marketing sure bets starting with website and YouTube advertising trends.
Some of our customers have wondered if we’ve gone mad… Or mainly me since my people usually shrug and just tell them “well that’s just Jim … you know…”
All the recent activity with the expanded video production studio in Birmingham and our “production everywhere initiative” where we setup our key employees with small studios at home complete with green chroma screens and overpriced optical focus cameras has been getting some attention so I guess in part I of our series I’ll cover what’s going on.
FORWARD TO NOW
What's Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is defined by the seat of whosoever pants that is trying to explain it. It’s nebulous and everybody has their definition in this industry. This is ours:
- Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Ads
- Landing pages targeted at specific markets
- Full blown video and animation Ads on YouTube or streamed from website
- Long term branding
As you can see there’s a lot under this umbrella. If I think of more I’ll change the definition next week but for now this will probably stand as our definition of Digital Marketing.
What's With All Those Cheesy Videos? The Video Everywhere Initiative
For those who have seen some of the Alpha videos where – me – The President – has been experimenting with my new initiative Video Everywhere I apologize for hurting your eyes. You won’t go blind though – trust me.
While we have a studio in Birmingham I have believed for a long time – considering our remote employees are growing – that with today’s technology you should be able to pop out great videos from your home. I’m not referring to the crappy ones on YouTube you see all the time but top notch production with chroma key special effects and most of what our studio can do. My experiment has been a long learning lesson as I’ve spit out train-wreck after train-wreck with about every mistake imaginable but I’m starting to get this developed into a system we can finally use.
The power of this initiative is it enables us to produce more videos faster and only use our larger studios for our larger productions such as VISA advertisements, etc.
The Video & Animation Revolution Is Here! No Really... This time it's actually arrived...
About three years ago I decided that EngineX would have to evolve in order to stay relevant and a major player in the Online Marketing World. This is what I’ve laid out:
- Move away from “we’re a website company” and to full service digital marketing – done
- Expand and consolidate to Birmingham Alabama to allow larger video production studio – done
- Take vacation – ???
- Turn EngineX into the leader in video and animation in the Digital Marketing World – Working On Now
The YouTube Revolution
For years YouTube advertising has been a useless gimmick in most cases for other than the largest corporate brands that can afford low return “brand awareness” advertising. For small to medium busiensses that are looking for measurable results … forget it. A waste.
This is finally changing fast as the short attention span market is starting to pay attention to YouTube advertisements sometimes preferring to watch a short video instead of reading online content. By 2021 it’s predicted that if you’re a small to medium business that you will need to get behind this or see revenue and customers go elsewhere.
2020
2020 is around the corner and we have been working day and night for rolling out the new EngineX. EngineX Design will be in parent name only and we will be changing our name and branding to EngineX Digital. Of course that’s not really the most important thing – we will be:
- Shutting down Tuscaloosa focusing on our downtown Birmingham office
- Expanding services in Ireland to include the UK side
- Enabling 8 employees including myself to create first class video production from their 10×15 designated room in the comfort of their home. The Video Production Everywhere Initiative
- Rolling out about 20-50 videos per month