Orabrush has become one of those iconic YouTube marketing phenomenons that really push me to challenge the status-quo of YouTube marketing and video marketing.
If you’ve been around on YouTube for longer than a week you know that there are some videos that are fun, interesting, engaging, and some that are just not.
Especially a video trying to sell something.
If you’re going to make a sales or promotional video, it’s important to choose a topic that you are confident your audience will like. If your topic or product is boring… Guess what? You gotta figure out how to make it interesting.
Videos MUST Engage the Audience
In my mind, tongue scrapers are probably one of the least interesting subjects I can think to make a video about.
When you think of a tongue scraper video, I am sure you think of a video from your dentist like this:
I’ve seen worse videos, and Dr. Rosenberg has done pretty good job connecting with his audience in the video, and even titled, and tagged it decently. He even has a link to his website in the video description. Very smart.
By looking at the demographics alone you can see the marketing direction Orabrush took was drastically different than what most would take when marketing tongue scraper.
76-year-old Dr. Robert Wagstaff aka Dr. Bob tried selling the Orabrush countless ways with no success. (even as an infomercial) Then, Wagstaff tried one last thing.
He knew that Brigham Young University offers local companies a case study on their product for $1500 to find additional marketing strategies.
So, he ponied up even more dough. (infomercials are expensive) The verdict? What he already knew, only more exact. 92 percent of the offline retail market simply would not buy the product.
After the class Dr. Wagstaff was approached by a student named Jeff Harmon who pointed out that 8% is still millions of people. Harmon asked if he could sell the Orabrush online.
By August of 2009 The YouTube channel was redesigned and then, one most famous commercials on YouTube, was uploaded. Cost of production of said video?
$500…
When Harmon looked at the idea of quickly info-taining a very broad audience he saw an opportunity to reach the 8% that the other students felt wasn’t worth serving, and it spread from there. The orders started flying in from all over the world.
The Orabrush YouTube channel at one time had more subscribers than Apple. Currently Orabrush has over 181,000 subscribers, and they have over 300k likes on facebook.
They even got Wal-Marts’ attention by creating some VERY strategic ads on Facebook designed to get Wal-Marts’ higher ups to pay attention to.
They did it backwards! They promoted first, and THEN got into big retail stores.
If you want to learn more, I’d recommend reading this:
If there was a YouTube video that perfectly merged the idea of being ‘viral’ and selling a product it would be this one:
If you think that’s cool, check this out:
1) There is a decent, easy to read, keyword dense description.
2) The name of the service and URL is mentioned first in the title, the beginning of the video, AND the description, but also in a very informative natural way.
side note: I would have put the link to the website higher up in the description so you could see the link to the website without having to click ‘show more info’. But that’s about it.
3) The choice of keywords tell me that the uploader knew that the tags in a YouTube video are meant to help explain to YouTube and Googles robots what the video is about and where it should show up in relation to the words people use to search for content.
4) Their motto is in the keywords too. (smart)
5) The channel name is the name of the product. This is really smart branding.
6) Millions of people saw the title: DollarShaveClub.com – Our Blades Are F***ing Great and they saw the channel name that uploaded the video DollarShaveClub which the channel background is a custom background (also very smart) that looks like their homepage, that has the video auto-play as soon as you get to their home page.
Not all commercials are created equal. Most are 30 seconds, and most people hate them. The video you just watched was 94 seconds.
Take a look at this 2012 Superbowl commercial list and tell me that the video you just watched wouldn’t fit into this list of usually pretty good commercials.
Over the course of 30 days, 4 million people learned in 94 seconds how Dollar Shave Clubs service works, how it would benefit users, and offered a clear compelling reason to visit the website and buy.
It’s a konk on the head, DUH! Idea.
Using a similar video strategy to Orabrush this video got a lot of traffic, and fast. If you think about it Dollar Shave Club is out marketing Wal-Mart for a single product.
Pretty smart.
Besides, Wal-Mart will barely notice. It won’t fall to pieces if a few hundred thousand people decide to buy a basic razor online for a variety of practical or obscure reasons.
It’s easy to say, if one million people give me a dollar, I’d have a million dollars. But these guys give a very compelling reason to have you give them a dollar. And not just once, but every month.
It’s sad that the graph at the top of the image was not available. That would have told us more at a glance where the video was discovered and by how many people as well as a broader scope of what pages it shared in the related videos.
Most of the time you can see the data, but they chose not to share it, which is a bummer.
That aside, the website has been rumored to be back-ordered until May.
Oh, and did I mention it raised $1 million of venture capitol money?… In 30 days. (better clear up that back-order problem fast)
As cool as all that sounds, making it look easy is what’s so difficult. This is why they got it right.
Even though you watched a 94 second video a lot of time and creativity energy was required to pull that off just right. Not to mention, they had to gamble on the fact that they know a very broad audience so well, that they will not only like them, but like them enough to buy from them.
The video was equal parts funny, thought provoking, surprising, well paced, and ultimately 94 seconds that most don’t regret watching.
After doing some additional research, I found that a big reason the video now has over 1500 views is because it shares keywords with a much more popular channel than mine.
But, since our videos have similar keywords, content, and some good timing I have got a burst of views.
Thanks DevinSuperTramp! I’ll go into why the channel link above is an ‘on the rise’ YouTuber, and how you can too later.
I’d say this is equal parts ‘about me’ and ‘what I can do’ blog post.
I edited this video in about 30 minutes. Once on YouTube I used their video editor, (yes YouTube has a video editor connected to every account) to stabilize the footage.
I always have my flip cam. Most of the time I film what’s going on if I think it’s interesting, and sometimes I can whip up a video with the footage and get it up onto YouTube.
As long as I edit the footage within 72 hours of filming the world will see it. Any longer, and it collects virtual dust on my video ‘to-do’ shelf.
Interestingly enough I uploaded it on Saturday night, (it’s now Monday) and it has 211 views. Pretty slick huh?
How Did I Get so Many Views so Fast?
I searched for the term ‘festival of colors’ in YouTube. I opened up the first video to see why the video was ranked so high in the YouTube search engine.
To my surprise, the author put some thought into the titles, tags, and the description. This was why the video has over 100k views.
While YouTube a video sharing platform, it still relies heavily on the text of the titles, tags, and descriptions to catalog the videos themselves. Google also has to rely heavily on text as well.
With that said, as a business, you need to make sure the text you use in the title, tags, and description are words that your audience is searching for.
You can use keyword tools such as Googles Keyword Tool, as well as YouTubes Keyword Tool. These tools will tell you the search volume certain keywords get on a monthly basis.
You can also tell how closely related your content is to your topic by looking at the related videos to the right of your video. If these videos are very similar to yours, then you are on the right track.
While researching what your audience is searching for is a good idea, I used a shortcut by copying the title, tags, and little bit of the description because I wasn’t overly concerned with how many people saw my video. It was just for fun.
If I were doing this for work related reasons, I would have dug deeper into other videos, blogs, and websites to see what other traffic driving keywords I could work into the title, tags, and description of my video.
Taking a few extra minutes to see what your audience is looking for can make all the difference in the world.
The domain name info is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet, The name is derived from information indicating that the domain is intended for informative Internet resources, although registration requirements do not prescribe any theme orientation.
All websites are considered in one way or another an information website; but when I registered zanemiller.info it seemed to say, “hey, this is obviously an information site about Zane Miller.”
Marketers and business owners seem to clamor over .com’s, .net’s, or .org’s every day. The biggest reason for this is because there is a slightly better chance of being found in search engines like Google if only they could acquire the perfect domain.
While this benefit is quite real, what it really comes down to is what you plan to say, and how you are going to say it. If you can connect with your audience and you give them a way to find you, where Google places your website won’t even matter.
