Years ago, you could craft a high-converting marketing strategy with written content and some images.
But today, that's insufficient. You need to add video to your marketing mix.
With YouTube gaining immense popularity and video gaining ground on social media networks, you’ll see that video is a popular content format today.
Why are marketers investing in video marketing? Perhaps, it could be because most online users watch videos.
What are the possible benefits if you exploit videos in your marketing strategy?
Video Content Can Increase Conversion Rates
Video Can Build Relationships Between a Brand and It's Customers
Video Marketing is Available Anywhere, Anytime
Videos increase your chances of ranking on the second-largest search engine, YouTube.
Videos encourage social shares.
Having mentioned these benefits, you can only achieve them by using the right tool.
Here's how you can create effective short social media videos easily:
Make it clear what the video is about
If you want to get more views for your videos, obviously, you should provide enough information for people to decide whether they want to watch it or not.
People skim the titles at first before watching the video, which makes sense.
But aside from the title and description, video isn’t an easy format to skim.
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.
How to fix this problem?
A. Write an accurate and informative synopsis. Highlight 3-4 benefits that viewers will get after watching the video. And if it's a narrative, you can plot the main points.
B. 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.
Use social proof
50% of customers find customer 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 find your video content informative and valuable.
If you offer services or products, provide video testimonials or case studies from your customers, experts, celebrities or friends.
Choose your distribution outlets
To engage even further, you need to find the right distribution channels and deliver your content to the perfect audience.
And in short, this means sending your video to as many places as possible.
Here are smart ideas you can consider for your video content strategy:
- Upload your video to YouTube. The obvious places to start.
- Share your video directly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat 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 probably plenty of options in your niche that may work for your video strategy.
Maximize the reach and impact of your videos
So, your video content campaign is ready, and you want to get the maximum impact out of it.
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 really 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!