It’s hard to believe that just seven years ago, YouTube posted their first video. Now they bring in 800+ million unique visitors each month. With faster connections commonplace, video content marketing is constantly growing in popularity on the web.
A Forrester study reported sites with optimized video content have a 53X greater chance of being on the first page of Google. In addition, ComScore data shows that online shoppers are 64% more likely to purchase a product after watching a video.
Video content has really given itself a name in the past few years and has increased in popularity for marketing professionals.
Video Content Marketing & SEO
Video is just another form of content. It has many of the same benefits as any other forms of content. It has the ability to engage, inform, entertain and build your brand. Just like any type of content marketing, you still need to develop your plan and strategy before implementing. Don’t just start creating videos and sharing them everywhere without first creating a campaign and aligning all your teams’ efforts.
In 2007, Google implemented “Universal” search which can pull results from multiple channels – like text, images, videos and news rather than just providing the traditional “ten blue links” of the older search result page. Doing this opened up a whole new way of online marketing for most businesses. Videos now show up in the search results on the first page, which adds even more credentials to the medium.
Video content marketing can get you a foothold in a competitive search result space if your competitors aren’t making their own videos. This can return results quicker than a traditional SEO campaign, providing one of those elusive “quick wins” that businesses love.
What Type of Videos Should You Use?
Depending on your business model and the type of image you want to portray, there are different strategies for producing video content. Below are some ideas of what type of videos you could create. If your business is more serious or more casual, you can play with the overall theme and tone of your video.
Some businesses like to really entertain and some like to stick to the facts. Both are fine, you just have to choose what works best for your company. Track your results so you can monitor your results and if it’s working. If it’s not, maybe try a different tone for your video or find a new topic.
Types of Videos:
- Introduce a New Product or Service
- Show Testimonials from Other Customers
- How To Videos (Tutorials)
- Answer Questions/Solve Problems
- Company Overview/History
Where Should You Post Videos?
Video production can be costly; therefore, you want to market your videos as much as possible. You want to utilize all the resources that make sense to share them.
For example, Dropbox put a video on their home page and conversions went up. Also, last year Think Vitamin replaced an example tutorial video on their homepage with a 50-second overview of their services, and conversions went up by 24.4%.
Both of these examples show how you can utilize video, and how you also may need to adapt your videos after you test them for a period of time. Be flexible.
Places to Use Videos:
- Put a Video on Your Home Page
- Use Videos on Your Product Pages
- Create a Video-Only landing page
- Post and Promote on Social Sharing Sites; YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Etc.
- Email Marketing Campaigns (And read these tips to learn more about improving email marketing campaigns)
- Newsletters
How to Utilize YouTube
In addition to posting videos to your website or landing page, you want to take advantage of other platforms to get your videos out there. YouTube is one of those platforms. YouTube isn’t just for teenagers to post and watch funny videos. You can utilize it for promoting your business as well. In fact, businesses are successfully using YouTube to help them acquire customers and sales.
Video marketing is fairly easy once you get started and can be more cost-effective than other mediums because of the viral effect it has.
Why Youtube?
“36% of U.S. businesses over 100 employees already use YouTube for marketing purposes. YouTube adoption is growing at 24% per year.” Emarketer, August 2012.
- Largest video platform: 154 million monthly viewers in the U.S
- World’s second largest search engine
- Offers hyper-targeted video advertising
- Passionate audiences in all B2C and B2B verticals
- Significant impact on search engine optimization
- The only video platform available on all devices: PC/Mac, phones, tablets, game consoles, connected TVs
When YouTube is combined with other marketing initiatives, it can produce a very dramatic and measurable change.
Test Your Results
Finally, you will want to remember to test your progress and overall video content results. No marketing campaign is complete without implementing tracking. You will want to see how many views your video gets, actions completed by online users before and after clicking on your video, how long they watched, if they shared it or not and, of course, if they converted to a lead and/or prospect.
For some of you, this may be a learning experience. After you begin to track your results, you will be able to then adjust your video content marketing strategy to better fit the needs of your company; without tracking, you wouldn’t be able to understand what needs to be adjusted.
Final Thoughts
Creating videos and posting them online is not the final solution to video content marketing. You need to properly optimize your videos. In-fact, proper optimization increases the chance of front-page Google results by 53x. Also, keep this in mind; visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not. I don’t know about you, but those are odds I as a marketing professional want to hear – and take advantage of.