Video is a powerful content medium for a storytelling, and can have a big impact on the success of your promotional campaigns and content marketing efforts. It also serves as an effective way to connect with people and build more satisfying and deeper relationships between you and your target audience.
To prove the fact that video plays an important part of your content marketing strategy, here are a few key statistics:
In other words, now’s the time for your business to create a winning video content strategy.
What’s in your videos is up to you. But I want to help you find viewers and promote your videos better. These are valuable business assets, so you need to make sure the right people watch them.
So without further ado, here are five actionable tips to get more eyes on your videos:
1. Have a simple video SEO strategy
SEO isn’t only relevant for your blog posts and website. In fact, YouTube (owned by Google) has become the second largest search engine online.
People not only use this network to find video, they’re actually searching for information more generally. Just like they do on Google.com.
There are also practical steps you can take to help make your videos easier to find on YouTube. Here are a few keys to video SEO.
- Titles are the best way to catch people’s attention. Keep it informative and short. The first 60 characters or less will show up onYouTube videos.
And make sure you plan your keywords, just like for any blog post. You can use the SE Ranking keyword suggestion tool or the YouTube keyword tool to find relevant keywords.
- Add keywords to your video description and include a link to your website. Keep it to 70 characters on YouTube and help users to understand what your video is about.
Here a good example from R-Tools Technology:
- Use tags properly with different keyword variations. Think about all the different things that people who watch your video could be looking for, and make sure to include these.
- Link-building is important here too. The number of links that lead to your video is important for keywords rankings in search.
- Thumbnails are the first thing that makes users watch your video. Create engaging, colorful, high-quality, branded and eye-catching thumbnails.
- To help your videos rank, a video sitemap is a good way to provide all details about your video content to search engines.
2. 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.
John Bottom says on his blog that 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. In this case, I love how Rand Fishkin does it:
3. Use social proof
Using social proof is a good way not only to increase conversions, but also to build trust and credibility between yourself and your audience. 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. Here is how Van Damme did it for Volvo:
4. Optimize video for conversions
Once you encourage people to watch your video, it’s time to get the most out of it and focus on conversions. All it takes is to optimize it correctly with a focus on conversions.
How can we do that?
A. Include a clear call to action. Savvy online marketers know how important it is to have a clear call to action. Everything depends on your objective, whether you want leads, sales or just a dialogue.
You can include a direct message from the video’s speakers, add a link at the end of the video leading to your landing page, add share buttons, and plenty more.
Make sure that it’s easy to engage with your video. As an example, you can see how Berenji & Associates demonstrate a direct prompt to start a free consultation, and tell people what to do next:
B. Define the best publishing time. Analyze and determine the best time to share the video and get the most views in the first 48 hours. The more views you get, the more YouTube will recognize the significance of your video content to other viewers.
C. Offer incentives. Give people immediate incentives to watch and engage with your videos. You could give discounts to your video viewers, a free white paper, a giveaway, or links to a free course. 
D. Get creative with your content. You can make your videos interactive and entertaining and show how your video can help users. Be creative and try different things to figure out what works best in terms of getting conversions.
As an example, Slack made this entertaining video where animals are the stars:
E. Give more options. Viewers’ opinions differ. Some people prefer emails and contact forms, others prefer to receive texts or make phone calls. Give 2-3 options for your customers to choose.
Take a look at this example from Fernandez & Karney:
F. Create simple and short videos. There’s a lot of advice to suggest that short and simple videos perform better than the long ones.
But in reality, the best videos are the ones that work for you. So find the length that works best for you and stick to it.
G. Say thank you at the end of the video. To increase conversions, show your sincere emotions about your customer memories. It’s a good way to get new customers and increase the retention rate in the long run.
5. 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:
- Use your video on your website. Even if you don’t have much traffic, this can encourage new visitors to watch your videos, and maybe improve your site’s performance.
- Upload your video to YouTube and Vimeo. The obvious places to start.
- Share your video directly on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Google+ 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.
6. 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, problem-solving content for these formats, do the same for video!
7. Analyze your video performance
No online marketing campaign can be successful without analytics. If you create a lot of videos, you should measure your investments in video marketing campaigns and make deliberate decisions to improve them.
You can use YouTube Analytics and Google Analytics to keep track of video performance and learn more about views, traffic sources, total watch time, and find your most popular videos. To measure your YouTube rankings, you can also go with the SE Ranking position tracking tool.
Moreover, you can measure your overall brand awareness such as total number of views, number of shares, number of mentions and brand recollection.
The best way to build a successful strategy is always to have clear methods of measurement.
The Bottom Line
It takes time and effort to create high-performing videos. But if you have the right video content plan and show a little creativity, you can capitalize on its potential to tell inspirational videos and encourage people to watch and take actions.
Do you have any ideas how to create a winning video content? Let us know in the comments below.
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