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You haven’t started your video marketing campaign yet? Well, according to current statistics, you really need to get started. 87% of your competitors are already using marketing videos. By 2019, video is expected to make up 80% of all online content.
90% of customers base purchasing decisions on product videos. 64% of those who watch product videos are likely to make an online purchase. Besides that, it can take up to a year for any digital marketing campaign to see results. If you don’t think you’re ready for online video marketing, here are two things that will help.
First, you can no longer afford to wait until you’re ready. It’s time to jump right in. Secondly, we’re about to make you ready. We’ve made you a detailed guide of the essential, unbreakable, and yet, flexible rules of video marketing for business. Read this one guide and you’ll have all the expertise you need to start your video campaign today.
Before you start cranking out video content, it’s kind of important to know why you’re doing it. How will you know you’re successful unless you define and track your success?
Why are you starting a video marketing campaign, anyway? What are you hoping it will do for you? Is it for brand awareness, selling specific products, or something else? It’s probably for selling, but what are you selling and to whom? Perhaps your video content itself is the product you’re selling.
Whatever your reason, write it down. Then you can start coming up with specific goals and plans to achieve them.
Now that you have your motive, how exactly are you hoping your video campaign will help you achieve it? Here’s where we break down the reason above into measurable goals. If your video campaign is for brand awareness, how many people per day are you trying to reach? What demographics are you aiming for?
If you’re selling, which products are you planning to sell? How many of each product do you hope to sell this month as a direct result of video marketing? Are you trying for in-store sales or online sales? Goals such as these are specific enough that you can measure their success.
As with any marketing campaign, being able to track ROI is essential. Otherwise, you’re spending money with no idea if it’s accomplishing anything.
When you hire employees, you don’t just leave them to themselves and trust they’ll do a good job. You set goals for them to achieve and hold them accountable. Neither does it make sense to invest in online video marketing without tracking its success.
Fortunately, online video marketing is extremely easy to track. With analytics software, you can see which videos are being watched, who’s watching them, how long they watch, etc. You’ll also include clickable calls-to-action in your videos and you can track those as well. From this, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Use this knowledge to guide future content production.
“Who cares?” That’s what most viewers say about most marketing videos. You don’t want to be liked “most.” You want to be among the select few that everyone shares to their friends on Facebook and Twitter.
An advertisement that people want to see–does it sound too good to be true? It’s not. It happens a lot, and it’s what you need to be aiming for.
Here are tips on adding value to your videos:
86% of YouTube viewers use YouTube regularly to learn new things. Among millennials, that number is 93%.
Education is arguably the single most valuable thing you can add to your videos. To give your videos educational value, start with that age-old writers’ creed, “Write what you know.”
So what do you know a lot about that others do not? We’ll give you a freebie: it’s you!
It’s great to teach your audience about topics related to your niche. But all of that info will likely be found in thousands of other people’s videos as well. Though, it’s still valuable content that’s easy for you to make.
But when you teach people about yourself, your brand, your goods, your services, it’s all new information. This gives you an exclusive well of valuable content topics of which you’re the one and only expert!
If you thought the other statistics were impressive, check this out. 98 percent, yes, 98 percent of viewers have watched an explanatory video to learn more about a product or service. Make sure you’re the one making these explanatory videos about your brand before someone beats you to it.
Also, follow our example: use stats. People love stats and believe them immediately, almost without question. Use stats and you’ll instantly become a genius in the eyes of your audience.
The next-most valuable aspect of marketing videos is entertainment. Technically, entertainment is just as valuable to your audience as education. But it’s second on our list because it’s significantly harder to achieve entertainment value.
It’s easy to relay valuable information. But it takes uniquely creative talent to stand out in the entertainment field.
So the easiest way to start is to add entertainment value to whatever educational videos you’re already making. Depending on the talent you have on hand, try to make people laugh or show something creatively impressive. Depending on your budget, you can also recruit influencers or celebrity endorsers to guest-star.
Additionally, you can invoke a positive emotional response with inspirational content. Use some of those educational stats to give the audience hope for the future and faith in humanity. A video that makes them feel good is a video they’ll want to watch again and again and share with friends.
As a side note, the easiest time to do this is around the holidays.
This is a fancy phrase marketers use. It really just means, “Make the audience think the added value is the reason for the video.”
You know you’re selling a product (or some other call-to-action). But you want your audience so distracted by the educational, inspirational, and entertainment value that this agenda barely enters their mind. In short, the video should be valuable enough to be a desired product in and of itself.
We’re off to a good start. Now, let’s start the unending process of refining your content, which will continue throughout the entire life of your company. This is the beginning of earning massive passive income and revenue for your company..
As time goes on, you’ll have more and more content published, and it gets better and better. After a few years, that old content continues to serve its purpose, just by sitting around on the internet. Meanwhile, your new content also serves its purpose and keeps getting better at it.
That’s when the passive income starts rolling in. This means income your content generates on its own without you having to do anything new with it. As your content quantity and quality keep going up, your monthly passive income increases.
Here’s how to do it:
Step one is targeting. Over time and refining, you’ll find out who your specific online video marketing audience is. But when starting out, target these three groups: your company’s established audience, the general YouTube audience, and the audience of related video content.
First, target whoever your company would normally target. Appeal to your previously-researched demographics by making the type of videos they want to see. Your biggest research goldmine for this is social media. Pay attention to what your audience is talking about on your social media accounts. Make videos about the topics you know they want to hear more about.
Next, target the average YouTube crowd. We don’t have time to go into this here. But do your research on who’s on YouTube and what they like to see. Then, dig deeper and research the niche-specific audience of content similar to what you plan to produce. This includes researching popular keywords to include in your content.
After a month or so, you may begin to have enough analytics data to start refining your targeting efforts. You’ll start seeing what isn’t working so well and what’s working way better than you expected. Then you can prune and perfect your future content for more relevant targeting.
However, this process can be very slow-going. It will more likely take up to a year of building up traction before your data does you any good. It may require a significant amount of guessing and luck up to this point. But, eventually, the time will come when you have enough analytics to get a clear picture of your online video marketing performance.
So don’t worry about being super successful right away. It’s not going to happen.And don’t worry too much about the quality of your initial work, either. It will get better. Your entire first year might be nothing more than you testing the water. Just keep this perspective in mind and focus on long-term success.
Once content is produced, here’s how to optimize success.
Start with your website. That is, before posting on YouTube and other video sites and social media, host it on your own website. This will increase the search rank and conversion rates of your website. As it stands, businesses who include a video on their landing page increase conversion rates by as much as 80%!
Be sure to allow embedding of your video onto other sites. This gets you some really good backlinks. After hosting the video on your own site, post it on YouTube and elsewhere to expand your reach even further.
Other than that, the same SEO techniques you’d apply to your website should also be used to optimize your video content.
Base topics on popular and demographically-relevant keywords. Use these keywords in the title, a few times throughout the content, and in the tags, description, and meta description of your video. Include stats and illustrative visuals.
Take everything you know about blogging for SEO and do the same for your video content.
With these basics out of the way, it’s time to enter the lightning round. Just like a cheezy gameshow from the 90s, you have 10 seconds to impress the judges before they hit the buzzer and you’re out! But, of course, by “judges” we mean “audience” and by “buzzer” we mean “back button on their browser. That’s right. If you don’t capture the viewer’s attention in 10 seconds, 20% of them will click away.
The solution, then, is to create every video as if the first 10 seconds is all the audience will ever see because, for thousands of them, it is! Those are some important seconds! What will you fill them with?
For starters, try everything. That is, do what you can to cram all 3 of the above points into the first 10 seconds of the video. Present inspiring, educational stats in an entertaining way that’s most relevant to the appropriate demographic.
If you think this is impossibly complicated, consider yourself proven wrong. This 6-second Samsung ad gives us new product information, flashy visuals, and people dancing to fun music. It feels like a party and makes us excited to get our new Samsung phone, all in six seconds.
It doesn’t even utilize the full 10 seconds and still provides an entertaining, somewhat inspiring, education of their new product. It’s clearly targeted toward millennials. And it ends with a CTA link so ROI can be easily tracked.
This is just an illustration to show you that you can cover all necessary bases in not 10 but 6 seconds.
Of course, not all videos can be 10 seconds or less. You obviously can’t do an entire product review in ten seconds.
However, what we said earlier still stands. Assume your audience will not be spending more than 6-10 seconds on your video. With this in mind, use the same 6-second story method above for the first 6 seconds of your video. Think of it as a preview. Instead of advertising a CTA link, you’re advertising the rest of the video.
It’s like having two videos with two separate CTAs put together. Watching the full video is the CTA your first 6 seconds is advertising. After that, the remaining portion of the video will have its own CTA. This is absolutely necessary for any long videos you use as ads before YouTube videos. Most of your audience will hit the “skip” button after the first 5 seconds.
But afterward, many of them might have second thoughts and want to know more. So the next time the ad pops up, they won’t skip it.
That’s it! You’re done. You’ve graduated. Now, go get started!
If you were expecting a big conclusion here, you may have missed the point. And that is: your biggest obstacle is time. Your targeting will get better. Your quality and quantity will get better with refinement. But nothing can get better until it gets started.
Stop procrastinating and start your online video marketing strategy this instant!
That said, don’t close this window just yet! Keep it open in case you want more tips on Visual and Video Creation.
