Video is a powerful medium for storytelling. It can have a big impact on the success of your promotional campaigns and content marketing efforts. It also serves as an effective way to connect with people and build more satisfying and deeper relationships between you and your target audience.
To prove the fact that video can play an important part in your overall content marketing strategy, here are a few key statistics:
In 2019, video content accounted for 80% of all consumer internet traffic.1
Social media videos generate 1200% more shares compared with images and text combined.2
87% of online marketers use video content.3
The volume of mobile video consumption increases by 100% every year.3
In other words, now’s the time for your business to create a winning video content strategy.
What’s in your videos is up to you. But we want to help you find viewers and promote your videos. So, here are seven actionable tips to get more eyeballs on your videos:
1. Have a simple video SEO strategy
SEO isn’t only relevant for your blog posts and website. In fact, YouTube (owned by Google) has become the second largest search engine online. People not only use this network to find specific videos, but they also use it to search for broad information – just as they would on Google.
There are practical steps you can take to make your videos easier to find on YouTube. Here are a few keys to video SEO:
Titles are the best way to catch people’s attention. Keep it informative and short. The first 60 characters or less will show up on YouTube videos.
Plan keywords, just like you would do for any blog post. Utilize the SEO Ranking keyword suggestion tool or the YouTube keyword tool to find relevant keywords.
Add keywords to your video description and include a link to your website. Keep it to 70 characters on YouTube and help users to understand what your video is about.
Use tags properly with different keyword variations. Think about all the different things that people who watch your video could be looking for, and make sure to include these.
Link-building is important here too. The number of links that lead to your video is important for keywords rankings in search. Thumbnails are the first thing that makes users watch your video.
Create engaging, colorful, high-quality, branded, and eye-catching thumbnails.
2. Make it clear what the video is about
If you want to get more views for your videos, provide enough information for people to decide whether they want to watch it or not. This means more than just the title and description. Don’t expect that people will choose to view your 5 or 10-minute video instead of scanning in seconds a piece of text or image. So, how do we fix this problem?
Write an accurate and informative synopsis. Highlight 3-4 benefits that viewers will get after watching the video. If it’s a narrative, you can plot the main points.
Try to transcribe your videos. This way you give viewers the content in a text format they can skim read first, then watch if they prefer. Moreover, you will help search engines crawl your video content.
3. Use social proof
Using social proof is a good way not only to increase conversions but also to build trust and credibility between yourself and your audience. For instance, 50% of customers find testimonial videos useful. There are a lot of effective ways to do it.
For example, you can show likes, votes, views, comments, and such to showcase how other people have found your video content to be informative and valuable.
4. Optimize video for conversions
Once you encourage people to watch your video, it’s time to get the most out of it and focus on conversions. All it takes is to optimize it correctly with a focus on conversions. How can you do that?
Include a clear call to action. Savvy online marketers know how important it is to have a clear call to action. Everything depends on your objective, whether you want leads, sales or just a dialogue.
Define the best publishing time. Analyze and determine the best time to share the video and get the most views in the first 48 hours. The more views you get, the more YouTube will recognize the significance of your video content to other viewers.
Offer incentives. Give people immediate incentives to watch and engage with your videos. You could give discounts to your video viewers, a free white paper, a giveaway, or links to a free course.
Get creative with your content. You can make your videos interactive and entertaining and show how your video can help users. Be creative and try different things to figure out what works best in terms of getting conversions.
Create simple and short videos. There’s a lot of advice to suggest that short and simple videos perform better than long ones. But the best videos are the ones that work for you. So, find the length that works best for you and stick to it.
5. Choose your distribution outlets
To engage even further, you need to find the right distribution channels and deliver your content to the perfect audience. This means sending your video to as many places as possible. Here are smart ideas you can consider for your video content strategy:
Use your video on your website. Even if you don’t have much traffic, this can encourage new visitors to watch your videos, and maybe improve your site’s performance.
Upload your video to YouTube and Vimeo. The obvious places to start. Share your video directly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Introduce your video presentations on SlideShare.
Embed your video directly in your emails.
Once you share videos through these well-known channels, keep going and find new ways to promote them. There are likely plenty of options in your niche that may work for your video strategy.
6. Maximize the reach and impact of your videos
Now that your video content campaign is ready, make sure you get maximum impact. Here are some helpful things to consider in your video marketing strategy:
Engage with your viewers. Try to ask viewers’ opinions and respond to all comments that are posted under the video. If you run live videos, you’ll get instant notifications when someone leaves comments under your video. Your job is to let them know that their opinions are heard.
Pay to promote your video. Facebook and YouTube are great advertising tools to reach a large, targeted audience. You don’t need to have a huge budget to grow subscribers and exposure. Just make a compelling introduction, know your target audience, and customize your parameters.
Make it part of your overall marketing campaign. Video is just another format to present the same information you have in blog posts, web pages, podcasts, white papers, and all your other content efforts. So just as you create informative content for these formats, do the same with videos!
7. Analyze your video performance
No online marketing campaign can be successful without analytics. If you create a lot of videos, you should measure your investment in video marketing campaigns and make deliberate decisions to improve them.
Use YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics to keep track of video performance and learn more about views, traffic sources, total watch time, and find your most popular videos. To measure your YouTube rankings, you can also go with the SEO Ranking position tracking tool.
Moreover, you can measure your overall brand awareness based on the total number of views, the number of shares, and the number of mentions.
The best way to build a successful strategy is always to have clear methods of measurement.
The Bottom Line
It takes time and effort to create high-performing videos. But if you have the right video content plan and show a little creativity, you can capitalize on its potential to tell inspirational videos and encourage people to watch and take action. At Deforest Group, our seasoned creative pros can provide guidance and help to create dynamic video content. So why not arrange a discovery call with our team — there is no obligation, and we make it fast and painless!
Source:
1 – Cisco Systems 2020 White Paper on Service Providers
2 – Mention.com 2021 Social Media Engagement Study
3 – Forbes.com Agency Council Study – Future of Content Marketing