In a perfect world, what would car dealers need to create a great video for showcasing vehicle inventory? Let’s see… a Steadicam or some dolly-type device for professional, steady shooting… high-quality recording hardware to do the voice-over… effects software to overlay images and text… about a dozen takes…
Ah, but you work at a car dealership, and you’re lucky if the General Manager approves a P.O. for a mouse pad. Plus, you probably wouldn’t have the knowledge or time on your hands to utilize the aforementioned resources, even if they were available. In the end, I guess automotive dealers are confined to posting those psuedo-videos… you know, the ones that are just a set of photos fading in and out Ken Burns-style. See ya later, conversion rate.
Well, the kings of Web 2.0 may have saved your asses again. Last week, YouTube announced the implementation of Annotations (read the YouTube blog post) in their videos. Annotations are basically text overlays of “video notes” that you can plop into your video, available in three different iterations:
- General Note
- Speech Bubble
- Highlight Area (mouse rollover)
Why is this awesome? Because now you or any other member of your staff can shoot a quick and dirty vid with a cellphone or digital camera, post it to your YouTube account, and fix’er up to be infinitely more appealing and useful to the consumer.
I created an example video for marketing dealer inventory to give you an idea of how useful YouTube Annotations can be. It’s not just about adding content either; if you conduct a less-than-stellar walk-around on the video and don’t have time for another take, you can use Annotations to correct your missteps. I purposely neglected items while shooting this walk-around so that I could overcome them with the video notes:
- Failed to mention vehicle’s mileage
- Failed to open hood and trunk
- Failed to point out all of vehicle’s highlight features
Check out the vid, and take notice of what is annotated and how it’s said. You can really make the video more engaging and useful for consumers with this new capability, and I promise you, that will lead to more units rolled. Of course, it’s a beta feature at this point on YouTube, which means I can’t embed the video here yet… and like a lot of YouTube vids, you might have to refresh the page once or twice if you get the notorious “no longer available” rejection. Come on you smug little billionaires, and get this thing into full operating status!
Click to watch the YouTube Annotations For Car Dealer Inventory Marketing video
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