Video Content Marketing: Your competitors are all doing it. You know you need to do it. Here’s what you need to know to get started.
Topic Summary:
- Making content your audience will want to watch
- Beyond Youtube: How will you share it effectively?
- Generate action and get something back from your audience
- Measure Your Success: Are Your Videos Working for You?
- Ryan’s Top Tip for Advanced Video Marketing
Making Content Your Audience Will Want to Watch
The first step is creating video content that your audience actually wants to watch. I know this sounds obvious, but video content is often not created with the audience in mind. So, always ask yourself: is the content you’re creating intriguing and engaging? If you were in the audience, would you want to watch it? This can be tricky to get right so make sure you take a look at my previous discussion about making your videos more engaging.
Once you know the type of content your audience is going to thank you for, you need to share it with them regularly. It’s no coincidence that TV episodes are in a series. If an audience likes the content, they want regular doses. So be consistent. It’s also really important to think about distribution. A lot of people seem to think that just throwing their video up on Youtube will be enough to generate interest, and drive loads of traffic back to their site.
Beyond Youtube: How will you share it effectively?
Youtube is a good start. But you need to go beyond. You can find out more about alternative hosting services here. You need to embed your videos in blog posts on your own site. And then drive traffic to those pages by social media, emails to your list, and pay per click advertising. You can also use social bookmarking platforms like Digg and Reddit to generate interest in your content. Your email signature file. Think about all the different places that your potential audience congregates.
Generate action and get something back from your audience
Now, once you have your audience happily watching your videos, you need to drive them to take action. It’s amazing how many online videos just reach the end and fade to black. So use a call to action to direct the audience about what their next action needs to be for example: contact us, download this ebook, fill in a form. But just ask for one action. That’s what will get the best result. It’s also important that you use your online videos to collect email addresses of your viewers. This will help you to build your email list, stay in touch with prospects, and build rapport.
Measure Your Success: Are Your Videos Working for You?
Are you measuring the results of your videos? if you’re not, how can you tell if they’re working? If you host your videos with us, we send you a monthly report. It contains important information like number of viewers, location, engagement rate etc. Even more importantly, we analyse the data and make recommendations to improve future videos.
Regardless of whether you host your videos with us or not, it’s vital that you study the video analytics of your videos.
Ryan’s Top Tip for Advanced Video Marketing
If you do all the things I’ve mentioned, you’ll start to get way more value from your videos. Here’s an advanced tip: To take things one step further, you can connect your videos to your CRM software, email programme, or marketing automation platform. You can then start to do magical things like track the viewing habits of your audience on an individual level.
This is powerful information for your sales team to know when to follow up. Or to track whether the members of your team are watching internal communication videos. Click here to listen to me chat with marketing expert Jake Hower for a more in depth look at automated video marketing.
Seven Golden Rules for Video Content Marketing That Works:
So, just to summarise the steps you need to take to ensure you have a great video content marketing strategy:
- Create engaging content
- Share it regularly
- Distribute it widely
- Use call to actions
- Collect email addresses
- Study your video analytics
- Link up your videos to CRM’s and marketing automation platforms
If you’d like a free consultation about your video content marketing strategy, contact me. I love talking about this stuff. And I’d be happy to help you create a map of the type of videos you can use to help achieve your marketing aims.
Get our Golden Rules of Video Content Marketing Infographic:
Ryan Spanger is one of Melbourne’s most respected and sought-after video production professionals. Ryan founded Dream Engine in 2002, and specialises in helping medium to large corporates, government departments, and the non-profit sector to connect with their audience more effectively by using video.
