Rosalind Henshell
5 Steps To Create A Winning Video Marketing Strategy
Video is a fantastic way to grab people’s attention, but it can also be expensive and time consuming to produce, something that leaves many small businesses feeling that it’s not worth their resources. Fortunately, there are lots of affordable ways to create videos for your business and as long as you’ve got a great strategy then you will be able to create a powerful impact without blowing the budget.
Step 1: Do Your Keyword Research
If you want to ensure that relevant people are finding and watching your videos then you need to make sure your work is optimised correctly. By understanding the keywords that people use to search for the terms related to your business you can create your video strategy around those keywords. This means that your videos will stand a better chance of being found and seen.
Step 2: Make Sure Your Videos Tell Your Audience What They Want To Hear
It can be very tempting to make your videos about the things you want to talk about, for example products, services or issues that you want to promote. Instead, flip this idea on its head and think about what customers would be more interested to hear. What are the most common questions that your customers ask? What problem are they trying to solve that you can help them with? Make your videos so that they target these customer questions and provide your audience with the solutions they need. This will help you build trust and credibility with them.
Step 3: Put Your Videos Where They Will Be Seen
Keywords alone aren’t enough to ensure your videos will rank well in the search engines, you have to make sure that you are also putting your videos in the right places. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and the advantages you get from posting your video there are far greater than if you were to only post the video on your own website.
When you post your video to YouTube, make sure you also complete the title and description boxes and choose an interesting Thumbnail picture for your video too. All these things will affect how many people find and click through to watch your work.
You should also post videos to Facebook too and if you really want to reach out to a new bigger audience consider boosting the video by paying for a targeted Ad campaign.
Don’t forget to send an email update to existing contacts with a link to your video and encourage them to like and share it too. It’s a fantastic way to keep your business fresh in their minds and to put yourself in front of their friends and contacts too.
Step 4: Don’t Forget A Call To Action!
Whenever you make a video you need to think about what people to do after they watch it, and then make sure you ask them to do that. If you don’t include a call to action in your video then you will lose much of the benefit of making it. You must tell your audience what you want them to do next, otherwise they will just watch the video and walk away. What you want them to do may be different depending on the ultimate goal of your video, so have a think about these examples:
- If you are trying to build brand awareness, you might ask them to like and share your video
- If you are running a competition you might ask them to subscribe to your channel and leave a comment.
- If you are promoting a new product you might ask them to click a link that takes them to a landing page
- If you want them to phone in and book an appointment, ask them to call.
- If the video is for a limited time offer you could tell them to download a coupon
- Other ideas could be to ask them to subscribe to your email list, visit your website, offer a free gift to download, or watch the next video in the series.
Step 5: Track Your Results
With any form of marketing it’s important to know what works and what doesn’t. Monitor the statistics so you know how many views your video has, how long people watch for, who is watching and what action they take afterwards.
- If you have a good sized audience watching the video but no-one is following through with what you ask, then you know your call to action needs to be more compelling.
- If a lot of people click through to the video but don’t watch it all the way through then you need to understand what is putting them off.
By understanding your numbers and adjusting the content and style accordingly then over time you will see a marked improvement in the results of your work.
Just posting any old video will not do you any favours. It will waste your time and resources and could even reflect badly on your overall business reputation. By thinking carefully about your strategy and planning what you want to achieve you will see that video marketing really is worth the effort.
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