If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million

Editors note: Today’s guest bloggers are Troy Olson, Digital Advertising Manager, and Jeff Loquist, Search Marketing Manager, for ShoppersChoice.com. ShoppersChoice.com owns and operates a family of web stores with a wide selection of products, from barbecue grills and accessories to patio sets.

We sell everything from home furniture and fireplaces to kitchen cookware, but our true passion is barbecuing and grills. We’re in BBQ country, where people are fanatical about barbecuing and smoking. We’ve found that the best way to connect with customers is to provide them with great videos – grill reviews, how-tos, and recipes – presented on our branded YouTube channel, YouTube.com/BBQGuys.

We started with instructional videos to address customer service. Then our attitude toward video morphed when our CEO was on a business trip 1,000 miles away from home and was recognized as the “Barbecue Guy.” We saw how great YouTube could be for reaching many people at once and conveying our company image. Our important performance indicator is our relationship with viewers. It excites us when we see comments such as, ‘Great recipe! I tried it a few days back, loved it.’
In 2009, we brought on Chef Tony. He knows Cajun food and has a gregarious personality that our viewers love. We get hundreds of thousands of views whether we’re showing how to smoke a brisket

or how to make honey-glazed sweet potatoes

We want our customers to love our grills, and the way we do it is to give them recipes that make them proud and happy with the results they can achieve.

Through Promoted Videos, there have been almost 100,000 views on our YouTube channel and more than 15 million impressions of our brand name – all at the most competitive cost-per-click you will find anywhere online. Our campaign is easily managed in the Google Adwords interface. Every tool we need is there to grow quickly and manage easily our video efforts. So far this year, we’ve had over 2,200 visitors to our BBQGuys.com site from YouTube. We’ve also seen a significant increase in subscribers across all our social media channels since we started using YouTube.

Online video advertising is central to our business. For this past August, our revenue was up 48%. Our videos were viewed 94,000 times during that month alone. Overall traffic to BBQGuys.com is up 20% from last year.
We’ve been so successful on YouTube that we are now planning to extend our YouTube presence to our SportsmanGuys brand and beyond.

For us, video is our secret sauce. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million!