Cisco suggests that about 69% of the overall consumer web traffic falls on video content. It’s a good reason to think about the expansion of your marketing channels and getting started with video marketing. (Especially considering that 73% of consumers buy something after watching a video.)
Quick Links
Before you start coming up with a video marketing strategy let’s take a closer look at some basic yet vital tips.
1. Create the right content
The only way to succeed in video marketing is to shoot videos which would be interesting for your target audience. For this, you should experiment with different types of video content to figure out one that converts better than others and is a perfect fit for the brand identity.
Depending on the kind of business and objectives you may consider one of the following types:
Demo
Demo videos are perfect for digital products to show potential buyers capabilities of software they’re going to purchase. Such companies as Salesforce, Shopify, Groupon, Western Union use demo videos to educate and engage their clients.
How-to’s
It’s possible to shoot how-to videos for pretty much every business. They guide clients through different kinds of challenges and, in many cases, let them remember your brand as the one who helped solve a problem.
Case study
Case study videos work great if you need to increase trust in your brand. Just ask a client to tell about their experience of using your product or service. How does it stand out? Why did they pick your company? How does the product or service help them save time/money?
Many studies suggest that videos up to one-minute long work better compared to lengthy ones. But it’s not the case for many businesses.
2. Optimise videos
If you choose YouTube as a platform for video publishing, then you should invest some time into optimising them to get better results.
Get a script
Even though the presence of a script isn’t always necessary, it’s better to have one than not to have. Why? The text from a video script is indexed by Google and may let you rank higher as the search engine crawls the text and finds matches with particular search queries.
Add some links
By adding links to a video you let users easily navigate through products/services you provide or jump to the next related video. There are lots of templates from YouTube to avoid laborious work with animations.
Keywords and tags
Insert relevant keywords to the description to optimise videos better. It’s preferable to add them within 200 symbols of the description.
And, of course, tags are also important for video optimisation so don’t forget to fill them in before publishing.
Previews
Well-designed previews are what makes more users click on your video and start watching it. So it’s a good idea to invest some time into designing eye-catching view thumbnails.
Description
The description helps users navigate through video (using timing), learn more about the video content itself, and go to the links left. So make sure it’s informative and well-documented.
3. Track your success
To understand which kind of video works better you have to keep track of metrics. They are analytical data allowing to see the full picture of your users’ behaviour and, respectively, figure out what videos get the best results.
Let me list several important metrics to pay attention to:
- Watch time
- Average percentage viewed
- Average view duration
- Audience retention
- Re-watches
These and other metrics may be in handy to measure your success depending on the objectives.
4. Tools you may use
In fact, native YouTube Analytics is more than enough to track down everything you need. So it’s probably the best analytical tool to use for YouTube as for now.
To gather keywords you may use Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush.
If you need to get even more analytical data and see what your competitors do to rank higher, you might also want to try vidIQ.
Wrapping Up
These were the basics of video marketing. There are many more things to know before becoming a guru.
Author’s bio
Vitaly Kuprenko is a technical writer at Cleveroad. It’s a mobile and web app development company in Ukraine. He enjoys telling about tech innovations and digital ways to boost businesses.