Web videos have been built into the user experience and expectations. Web users have been trained to see videos as a natural way to be marketed to and therefore it has become an integral part of the marketing culture.
According to Cisco, video will account for 69% of all internet traffic by 2017. No doubt social media has played a huge part in giving videos a wider reach, whether they are for Vblogs, commercials or branding videos.
ITN productions and B2B Marketing published 2014 findings showing that video was rated as the greatest content marketing medium to have an impression on its audience.
Now that we some idea of how important video is to your digital marketing campaign, how do we make it go further? How do you harness the power of online video so it has an even greater impact in the SERPs (search engine results pages). After-all what is the point of having great video content if it can’t be found?
Make Your Online Marketing Videos Count
Video content marketing is effective, track-able, and gives access to a wide range of potential customer insights. Digital marketers need to be aware of the force that video marketing will have on their brand (both positive and negative). Here are some simple, but very necessary requirements for making sure your video reaches the right audience:
Have a Plan Before You Start
What do you want to achieve from video marketing? Determine some benchmarks, goals, and KPIs (key points of interest) and monitor these results using Google Analytics. Learn and understand what type of video content works most effectively and produces the best results.
Optimize Video Content for Your Audience, Then for Google
There are many ways to optimize your video content so that it can be found in the SERPs. Here is a list of some search engine optimization factors to consider for your video content:
- Add video site-map to the website – this allows the search to crawl and index all video content
- Add your videos to YouTube (the second largest search engine) to help generate buzz and engagement
- Add a transcript of your video so that the search engines will be able to crawl and index the content appropriately. Because search engines can’t read videos or images, any text added to the page will be useful for ranking better in the SERPs.
Create Shareable, Unique, and Engaging Videos
Social media has become like no other marketing medium ever created. It has the ability to reach billions of people, offer engagement, and provide answers to questions within moments. Is your video content worth sharing? Does the video encourage engagement? These are qualities of video marketing that need to be constantly a part of the mix.
- Unique, quality video content is vital paramount. This content needs to be fresh, not something that is copied or has been done before. Taking time to be creative with your video content to make it different and useful is key. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge met these criteria and the results have been phenomenal.
- Engage with your audience on a regular basis to take full advantage of your video marketing efforts. Test a variety of short videos and longer versions to see what impact they have. Most importantly you want key influencers in your audience to keep coming back and being apart of your video marketing efforts because they have the ability to endorse your product, service, and brand.
Rinse & Repeat
Not everyone that uses video as a marketing medium strikes gold the first time because it can be quite confusing. That is why you need to know your audience, measure, and keep testing different video marketing strategies to find gaps in the market where your brand, product, or service will stick out and make an impact.
It’s Your Turn!
Video content marketing is worth the time and investment because unique, share-able, and ‘sticky’ video content does present a high capacity for ROI. Sure, chances are you won’t get this right the first time, but, hopefully, with the guidelines suggested above you stand a better chance of reaching your audience and having a positive impact on their online experience.