The secret’s out—people love video. Learn how to utilize this powerful medium to remedy your marketing pain points.
Everyone loves videos. Cat videos, sped-up meal preparation videos, videos of people pouring buckets of ice over their heads—we can’t get enough.
Video is fast becoming the preferred method of online content sharing. Even social sites like Facebook are finding their place in the video world. By their own admission, Facebook has averaged over 1 billion video views per day over the past year, and recently implemented an update to significantly increase video functionality on their platform. Clearly, the social powerhouse realizes something that other sites don’t—video support is the secret to customer engagement, better conversions, and establishing yourself as an authority in your industry.
Video as the most effective type of content, highlighted by Hubspot.
Video Content Strategy
Research gathered via Hubspot found that 52 percent of marketing professionals worldwide regard video marketing as the type of content with the best ROI. So, how do you leverage this growing preference for video to find success in your marketing efforts?
The first step in unlocking the power of video is to produce content of value for your viewers. All the SEO and market segmentation in the world won’t help you if your viewers don’t care about what you’re offering.
This starts with knowing your audience and what their reasons are for seeking out your material. Even with targeted informational content, your video outreach must accommodate your market in other ways. Your viewers will typically fall into one of two categories:
- Emotion-driven: Viewers who respond to videos that elicit emotion and find catharsis in entertaining or heart-warming content.
- Education-driven: Viewers who respond to informational content; these users are looking for self-help guides, tutorials, or industry-specific info that they can apply in their own businesses.
For the most inclusive video outreach, include both types of content in your video strategy.
Video is a medium that people enjoy and watch regularly, as found by Hubspot.
Getting Yourself Found
After content creation is underway, the next step is to optimize your content with the tags and titles that help your users (and web indexing spiders) find you in organic search:
- Use researched keywords in your video title and URL link.
- Tag your content with the appropriate keywords to bring viewers in. Remember, your goal is engagement and retention. Tag your videos with the intention of bringing qualified eyes to your content.
- Write a clear description for your video. It’s to your advantage to utilize as much screen real estate as possible when optimizing for search indexing. Identify a few relevant keywords to include to improve your visibility across all platforms.
Research by Digital Diode via Singlegrain found that when given the choice between text and video, 60 percent of users will choose the video first. Put yourself out there and give the people what they want.
Taking Action
Your sales funnel relies on more than just generating views and providing value, though. For an improved ROI, conversions need to happen at some point. The best way to meet this need is to include a strong call to action (CTA) in your video.
The problem with CTAs in other mediums is that they often come across as a sales pitch and are easy to ignore. This is where the video medium really starts to work for you. If your viewers watch to the end of your video, it’s a safe bet that they found some benefit from your content. This is the time to provide a strong CTA that motivates them to take further action—while they’re still glowing from the value of your material.
Get Your Name Out There
You spent plenty of time optimizing your content, and now it’s time to show it off. Promotion is the last step of your video optimization campaign.
The idea here is to maximize your online exposure—plug your content like crazy across social media, relevant blogs, or other industry websites. Encourage discussion on your content and open a dialogue with your audience. Visibility doesn’t stop at clicking “play,” after all, and data by Insidecxm reported that over half of marketers believed that brand awareness was one of the biggest benefits of video marketing.
The Power of Video
So, just how powerful is video? Forrester Research took a stab at quantifying it—one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. That efficiency is tough to beat.
Video marketing can be applied at nearly every stage of your marketing campaign to see better growth in customer engagement and brand visibility. Implement a video plan alongside your other marketing strategies to bring more eyes to your content and keep them there for longer—the world is watching.
How else have you leveraged video outreach for more success in your marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments below!
