Incorporating video into your marketing plan is a must for success, but unfortunately many marketing teams don’t know how to effectively implement video.
Unlike static images and text, video combines text, sound, and image into one media form, which means the content you create for video should not be the same content you create for articles or images. So, how do you create a video that is effective and relevant? Here are seven ways to excel at video marketing:
1. Know Your Goals and Market
What do you want to achieve?
Pick out the core purpose of your content. Should you build different bits of content to achieve different aims, or can you hit all your goals with one bit of content? Decide how you will define your success (i.e. 100 links back to domain).
Who do you want to reach?
What style of content will work well to achieve for your goals, while interesting your viewers? Where does your market hangout on the internet, and what types of content do they engage in? Should this be an episodic series, or a single linear piece? Something for a stand-alone webpage or content designed to augment and improve an existing page? Will the audience require certain knowledge prior to watching the video?
2. Create Valuable Content
Good content is absolutely necessary for a successful video. If your video is well edited and aesthetically pleasing but your content is bad, your video will not gain a large viewership. Three big questions can help direct your content creation process:
- What do people care about?
- What might work in your niche?
- What have other people done in different niches that was successful or inspiring?
These three questions can help you identify content gaps, or holes, in your market. The skill to creating great video is in working out when and where to use it, and focusing on identifying and filling content gaps rather than form gaps. Core content gaps are usually readily identifiable; typically determined by the needs and wants of your target demographic.
3. Improve User Engagement
To improve user engagement through your video, your content will need to be thought-provoking, provide useful information or creative value, and invite further action following playback.
An important factor in improving user engagement is working out the appropriate placement of video content on the page, optimizing the user experience and design to encourage people to watch and respond to the video. Additionally, when launching the content, making space for things such as social responses and comments can be a great way to elicit better user engagement.
4. Improving Conversions
Improving conversions is usually achieved through the product video model; with videos created specifically for relevant commercial landing pages to aid users in their decisions about purchasing, or taking the next step in a conversion funnel. The importance here is in enriching an existing page or section on a site with content that provides easily digestible information or entertainment.
Product or service promotion videos can be great for this, but ads should not be used as a step to conversion. Ads are an invasive, outbound form of marketing, designed to attract attention to a product or service. If users are on your website, they have already partially bought into your company, and are at the very least interested to know more. In this case, hard-selling the virtues of your company is unnecessary, and can turn an otherwise captive audience off.
5. Link Building
In order to get links, content has to be relevant to a specific audience who has a wider presence on the web. For example, a video targeting fashion bloggers will probably get links because it is specific to a niche that has a wide internet presence. Your video has to engage with this community well enough so they will see specific value in promoting it through links or embedding it on their site.
If you’re creating a video specifically to get links, your content needs to be exceptional. People don’t embed or share mediocre videos. If someone embeds a video on their site, it is because they want their readers to temporarily disengage from their own content and spend time watching yours.
6. Use Video Search Engines
The YouTube and Vimeo communities value a wide variety of content, from videos of cute cats to technical tutorials, but no matter what the style of your content, successful videos invariably always do one of the following:
- Entertain
- Instruct
- Provide useful or interesting information
To succeed on video search engine sites, you need to think about targeting a specific subset of the overall audience. Think about who will want to search for and watch your video. Consider that most people who view your videos through video sharing sites are unlikely to have prior knowledge of your brand or marketing efforts, which means that you need to consistently work for their attention.
For more technical information on how to use video search engines, refer to Distilled’s video marketing guide.
7. Outreach
Outreaching is the process of contacting people, bloggers, or sites who might be interested in embedding or sharing your video. Outreaching can help you build contacts, links, and increase viewership. When outreaching video for links, make sure you have a simple embed code for the blogger to use. When reaching out, include a link to the original video on your domain, so your targets can view the content before deciding whether or not they want to embed it. If they do, you have an embed ready to go for them. The goal should be to make it as easy as possible for people to link to your content.
For further information about outreach and pre-outreach (finding people who care about your idea and will help you promote it prior to launch), check out the following great blog posts:
- Distilled’s Linkbait Guide
- Guide to finding outreach targets with competitive research
- SEOmoz white board Friday on Outreach
What Next?
YouTube is now the world’s second largest search engine, which strongly indicates that people love video. If you’re involved in marketing or outreach, you need to incorporate video marketing into your campaigns in order to reach the millions of people who actively watch videos online. The downloadable PDF below is a thorough video marketing guide that can further help you in your video marketing creation process.
About the Author: Adria Saracino is the Head of Outreach at Distilled. When not consulting on content strategy or leading her team of outreach warriors, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.