Video is a powerful content medium for storytelling. It can greatly impact the success of your promotional campaigns and content marketing efforts. There’s no disputing it -it’s clear that a significant portion of the population prefers to consume content via videos. More and more businesses are investing in a video marketing strategy.
It also effectively connects with people and builds more satisfying and deeper relationships between you and your target audience. With over 4 billion hours of video being watched every month on YouTube alone, it’s clear that the popularity of video content is at an all-time high.
In other words, now’s the time for your business to create a winning video content strategy. Given the trends, video marketing provides a great opportunity to connect with your ideal clients and develop stronger relationships more effectively. People respond well to video, as it can facilitate more of a human element and enable your prospects to get to know you more intimately. These are valuable business assets, so you must ensure the right people watch them.
So without further ado, here are 5 Ways To Optimise Your Video Content.
1. Optimize your videos
For people to watch your videos, they need to find them first. This is essential for YouTube marketing as it is the second largest search engine, next to Google.
When optimizing your videos for a social media channel, you’ll want to ensure that you’re familiar with the current best practices for video on each platform.
For example:
– Facebook – Keep videos short, upload videos directly to Facebook and add captions
– YouTube – Wait two weeks after the video has launched to make any tweaks or refine your target audience
– Twitter – Upload videos directly, keep them short and find a balance between fine-tuned targeting (interests, keywords, devices) and not targeting to accurately track results
As well as optimizing your videos on each channel, you also need to optimize them for SEO. Keep these tips in mind when creating your videos to help them be found when your ideal clients search for related topics:
– Plan your keywords for your video, just as you would for a blog post
– Include your keywords in the title and description
– Keep titles short as well as informative -less than 60 characters is ideal
– Include a link to your website
– Use tags with different keyword variations
– Work to build natural backlinks to your videos
– Use eye-catching, branded, high-quality thumbnails
– Optimize your videos for viewing on mobile devices
2. Host or third party
Deciding to host the video on your website or post it on a third-party site such as YouTube depends on your end goal. Hosting your website is a good idea if you’re looking to increase traffic and improve your performance in search results. Video content is a great way to get your website ranking higher for organic searches. However, if you’re looking for maximum exposure for your video, then a third party such as YouTube or Vimeo may be a better choice. Google and YouTube are a match made in heaven, and you won’t have to worry so much about creating a video site map or keyword saturation as YouTube automates this for you.
If in doubt, do both, host the video on your site and upload it to third parties. Just remember to include your website details in the description or video to drive traffic back to your website.
3. Consistently brand your videos
Whether you’re creating live videos on the fly, professionally scripted and edited webinars or something in between, you need to be consistent with your digital branding.
This will make it easier for people to recognize you when they see a video you have shared, while it can also instil a sense of professionalism which, over time, will build trust.
Decide what branding element(s) you’ll include in all of your videos, which will help your viewers recognize your video content when they see it. This could range from something as simple as a unique item of clothing you always wear when recording to a simple brand logo in the same corner or a short, branded intro or outro on each video.
4. Use social proof
Social proof is a key influencing factor that people use when deciding on who to do business with. People look to what others have done when deciding, which is why reviews, testimonials and endorsements can be so powerful for businesses.
In simpler terms, social proof helps people make decisions when uncertain, based on the experiences and choices others have made or have made in the past.
Social proof can also form your videos’ likes, votes, views or comments. It can also be very effective to share customer testimonials and case study videos. Depending on your budget, you may consider incorporating experts or influencers into your video marketing strategy.
5. Analyze your video performance
No online marketing campaign can be successful without analytics. If you create many 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 based on the total number of views, the number of shares, and the number of mentions.
The best way to build a successful strategy is always to have clear measurement methods.
The Bottom Line
It takes time and effort to create high-performing videos. But suppose you have the right video content plan and show a little creativity. In that case, you can capitalize on its potential to tell inspirational videos and encourage people to watch and take action.
