Video Marketing: 5 Guidelines On How It Should Be Done
Video Marketing is a great tool to boost your brand/products/public awareness or any other business goal. Here are examples of successful marketing campaigns:
Of course i can already hear you “Video marketing campaigns are expensive and time consuming”. Small businesses might think that it’s not worth the money and time investment. Luckily, there are a few ways you can can create affordable videos that will help boost your business. So here are 5 guidelines that along with a good strategy will help you create powerful marketing videos.
1. Keywords Research
Making sure the right people are finding and watching your videos is a crucial step. By finding out the keywords and terms people use in connection to your business you can create a video strategy around those keywords. This gives you a better chance to be found once the video goes online.
2. Tell your Audience what they want to Hear
Most people’s first instinct is to make videos about either things that interest them or promoting their company/product/services. This is not the right way to go about it, think the other way around. What would your customers want to hear ? What are they interested in ? What are their problems ? What solutions do they need ? You can see a great example of this in the Facebook video. People at Facebook know how to use the block mechanism. However they noticed people were having trouble with it so they decided to make and how-to video. Having this mentality will help you build trust and credibility with your customers.
3. Choose your Distribution Channel
Keywords are not enough to guarantee that your videos will be seen, the distribution channel is also very important. And with that being said there aren’t that many choices.Indeed, YouTube is the second search engine in the world. The traffic and other advantages you’ll get from posting on YouTube instead of your own website are pretty big.
When posting a YouTube video make sure you have, a catchy title, a short but informative description and (very important) a nice thumbnail picture. All these will contribute sending more traffic to your video.
You can also post your videos on Facebook and if you really want to reach a big audience consider paying for a targeted ad campaign. If you did your job properly on step 2 you know what people you are targeting so can reduce the ad budget to a specific target.
Also be sure to send a email to your contact list with your video and ask them to share and like. It’s a nice friendly way to keep your business in their minds and to boost your video reach.
4. CTA!
Make sure you have a Call-to-action button. You need to think what you want people to do after watching your video. Of course CTA’s will be different depending on the goal of your video campaign. Here are a few examples :
- For brand awareness you might ask them to like and share your video
- If you are running a competition you might ask them to subscribe to your channel and leave a comment
- If you are promoting a new product you might ask them to click a link that takes them to a landing page
- If you want them to phone in and book an appointment, ask them to email/call.
- If the video is for a limited time offer you could tell them to download a coupon
- Other ideas could be to ask them to subscribe to your email list, visit your website, offer a free gift to download, or watch the next video in the series.
5. Track your results
With the new era of marketing and digital (being myself a digital analyst) this is a golden rule for every type of campaign. If you can track any kind of metrics for any campaign do it! This enables you to easily know what works and what doesn’t. Check all the different metrics (views, time on video, CTA click, conversion rate…etc) and decide how you can improve (and there is ALWAYS room for improvement. For instance:
- If you have a good sized audience watching the video but no-one is following through with what you ask, then you know your call to action needs to be more compelling.
- If a lot of people click through to the video but don’t watch it all the way through then you need to understand what is putting them off.
By always trying to understand what works, what doesn’t and what can we do to make it better you’ll see over time a constant improvement in your results.
Finally just always remember to take the time to study what goals you want to achieve with what strategy and what resources!
Hope you enjoyed the read!
Cheers
SERRA Paulo (@pauloserra449 / @digitagTv)
Digital Advice Group is guiding businesses in their Digital Transition, providing the skills and processes to allow them to communicate effectively on the web.
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