MiNeeds Blog

In my previous blog entry, “Using Online Videos to Expand your Business“, I talked about how online videos are starting to play a substantial role in business marketing. I also mentioned that I’ll be sharing some case studies that show the powerful effects online videos can have for small businesses.

Below, I selected two case studies that I was fortunate to witness for a couple of business members of my company, MiNeeds. While analyzing the effect of the videos that we created for those businesses via our filming service, we saw some extremely inspiring findings.

Case Study #1: A Chiropractor
Holly Hochstadt practices a very unique style of chiropractic care, which is a gentle style care from a holistic perspective. Holly decided to create an online video for her business and post it on her service profile page on MiNeeds (click here to view it).

Soon after her video was posted, we closely tracked her service profile page to monitor if there were any changes in traffic. It was incredible what we saw happen! The traffic on her page went up by multiple folds compared to before. Traffic numbers to her page at one week were over a 1000 unique hits, and continued to be higher than other chiropractors’ pages on MiNeeds in Seattle area.

Case Study #2: An Artist
Consider Erika Brumett. An extremely multi-talented artist in oil painting, wood burning, candle making, you name it! Erika recently created an online video on her service profile page (click here to see it). While tracking the traffic numbers for her page, we at MiNeeds noticed a spike in the amount of traffic Erika’s profile page was getting soon after her video was posted on her page.

We notified Erika of the traffic outcome. Inspired by the reaction of clients and the increasing traffic due to her first video, Erika bought her own simple camera gear and started filming herself while creating the art pieces. Her goal is to show clients how each art piece is made. Also, give her clients the opportunity to hear, in the artist’s words, what each piece means from every angle!

Imagine buying a piece of art and getting along with it such a video clip from the artist. What a unique smart gift! It’ll be hard to believe that clients won’t be loyal to such an artist for life!

Summary & Thoughts
Online videos have the ability to give small businesses a great unique exposure on the Internet. It’s an easy low-cost method to stand out. It gives the business strong branding. And the fact that online videos are available for online searchers to view at anytime is a great advantage for businesses.

In the coming few years, I believe that we’ll be seeing a dramatic transformation in small businesses’ focus on utilizing online videos to deliver their messages/advice and describe their products and service – to the world wide web.

I’m very keen on having my company, MiNeeds, continue to monitor, track, and analyze online videos’ effectiveness for businesses. In the next few months, I’ll be tracking direct sale returns based on online videos for businesses on MiNeeds. I’ll definitely be sharing any interesting case studies that arise so other small businesses can leverage.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com: A New Way to Shop Local Services

Not more than a decade ago, TV advertisements were the most dominant way to reach the masses and spread the word about a business, a service, or a product. Back then, television was the main hub that people used to get information and learn about their local community, its news, its services, and so on.

Today, the internet is rapidly replacing the traditional media, such as TV. People have become dependent on the internet to perform research about local services and businesses. Having credibility online has never been more crucial for businesses that want to continue to have an edge in their industry and local community. Therefore, businesses must be focused at presenting themselves in the most personable and approachable methods online. They need to educate their potential customers on the internet about their services and products.

The best way to educate your customers and let them know who you are and what services you offer is to meet them personally. Customers want to meet you and learn about you and your services. Therefore, creating an online video that describes your business values and services and possibly show your office space – is an extremely effective way to allow your customers to meet you before they even hire you.

One of the main advantages of online videos is that customers can learn about you at their convenience, whenever they do a search on your service. Unlike TV, your online video doesn’t just air at a certain time on a certain date; it is always there to stay. Anytime a user is searching for you, they can find your video and meet you online.

At my company, MiNeeds, we highly encourage businesses to create extremely personal service profiles so customers can learn more about them. We’ve been closely monitoring the profiles that contain videos and comparing them against other business profiles within the same industry category with no videos. The findings are amazing! In a nutshell, businesses that added online videos on their profile pages substantially increased their traffic. Moreover, their traffic became multipliers of the amount of traffic that other businesses are getting within the same domain that did not have videos.

In my next blog, I’ll be sharing some case studies from service providers on MiNeeds that created online videos, and share data on their traffic and how videos altered the way they think about marketing their business.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com; A New Way to Shop Local Services

We’re super excited to announce one of the really cool services offered by MiNeeds : Get Filmed!

A professionally done video advertising is not only an excellent way to express yourself and your business, but it also impresses your customers and creates trust. Video advertising has long been a dream for many small businesses, however, due to the high costs of video production, video commercials were limited to big enterprises with sizeable marketing budgets.

MiNeeds did an intensive study and re-engineering of the commercial video production process to cut costs and adopt it for web consumption to make it affordable for small local businesses. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for a commercial video, we were able to bring down the price to an affordable level so that all small businesses can benefit from this service and have a presence on the web!

To see our promotional price and a sample Get Filmed! video, click here.