I’ve been lucky enough to meet some pretty rad people in the world of video marketing. One of those people is Austin Craig. I first met Austin while I was speaking at a local conference and then also had the opportunity to work with him at Startup Weekend. Austin is a brilliant guy and has been the man behind a very successful YouTube video campaign for a company called Orabrush.

I sat down with Austin to talk about how he has successfully used YouTube to get his product (which is nothing more than a freaking tongue scraper) on the shelves of WalMart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, and other big name retail stores.

So in case you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know who Orabrush is, here’s a little bit of background. It wasn’t that long ago that Austin was just your typical college student studying Broadcast Journalism at BYU. When he saw that the industry wasn’t exactly taking off, he started looking into other options. During this little moment of soul searching he met Jeff Harmon, Chief Marketing Officer at Orabrush. Jeff basically said “Hey wanna help me sell some tongue cleaners online?”.

What would you do? Sounds like the business venture of the year right? Yeah it doesn’t sound like it to me either but it just goes to show that if you know what you’re doing you can use video marketing to sell just about anything.

Austin agreed to help, thinking he was getting into a one-time, fun little weekend project. They didn’t just take some expensive camera and take cool super slow-mo videos of their tongue scraper and cats or something then throw it up on YouTube.Before filming anything they started by researching what kind of videos were generally successful on YouTube. Research is often one of the most overlooked yet most important steps in any marketing campaign. Don’t forget it!

One thing that played a huge role in the success of Orabrush’s first video was testing different features like title tags, durations, thumbnails, and all kind of stuff in order to find out what brought them the best conversion rate.

They didn’t just make their video and upload it then sit back with their fingers crossed saying “Well, I hope this works”. They finally got the video to a point where they were their conversions were bringing in more cash than they were spending on advertising.

All of that extra money got put back into advertising and making other videos. It turned into a giant money snowball! They started hiring more people, making more videos, and with each video were making more money.

If you really think about this and you get creative, there’s probably a solution for your unsexy product or service that’s really going to capture people’s attention.”

-Austin Craig

The bottom line is this: Orabrush found success doing video marketing for a freaking tongue scraper, so who’s to say that you can’t find success for your product or service even if you think it’s kind of boring or unexciting. Austin tells me that the model that Orabrush used is “absolutely repeatable” and that “employing most of the same strategies today you could do a lot of the same things and see growth”.

I know what you’re thinking now, “Ok so what exactly did they do? How do I replicate Orabrush’s model?”. This is just the first video in a 5 part series I did with Austin. In the next parts he talks more about Orabrush’s success and gives some simple steps for you to follow, how internet video is changing the world of TV advertising, things to avoid in video marketing, and what everyone on YouTube wants to know: how to make a viral video.