When it comes to your marketing strategies, how much of it is dedicated to producing video content?
If you’re struggling to reach your target audience or to make the required sales; then there’s a simple yet highly effective solution to spike that customer base: Double down on your video content!
As per a study by MWP, 55% of people watch online videos every day. Yes, videos are currently what the world is mostly glued to and are highly likely to be the future of marketing. The HubSpot Content Trends Survey, 2017 estimates that 53% of people want to see more video content from marketers and almost 52% of marketing professionals globally are embracing video content, to deliver the best ROI.
And according to Dr. McQuivey’s Forester study, How Video Will Take Over The World - The value of a 1-minute video is worth 1.8 million words!
Courtesy: idea rocket
Here are a few more reasons why ‘video content’ is gaining the momentum and making all the ruckus in the marketing world:
- Video boosts your SEO - Adding a video to your website can increase the chance of a front page Google result by 53 times!
- Audiences are about 10 times more likely to engage, embed, share, and comment on video content than blogs or related social posts.
- Videos have higher retention rates – When images are paired with information, people retain 65% of the information 3 days later, as opposed with 10% with text alone.
Now that we’ve sorted out the importance of videos in the content marketing world, let’s explore some powerful ways you can win customers with video content:
1. Jump On The YouTube Bandwagon
If you’re not already on YouTube creating tons of videos for your brand, please go ahead and create a YouTube channel. YouTube, as of now is the 2nd largest Search Engine, after its parent platform, Google. With more than 3 billion searches in a month, it is bigger than Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL combined.
And one great thing about YouTube is, once you make a video you can always share the same in multiple platforms. Whether you’re embedding the video onto your website or linking it in your emails and newsletters; or sharing it across other social media sites – with YouTube you can accomplish this effortlessly.
A quick checklist on creating YouTube videos that are more discoverable and bring more value to your audience:|
- Don’t forget to add captions as YouTube videos get 40% more views with captions/subtitles.
- Use robust video descriptions and tagging in addition to meta data as it helps with SEO rankings.
- Make sure the first 3-10 seconds count as 20-25% viewers will watch less than 10 seconds.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by thinking you don’t have hundreds of videos to make the impact; but the trick is to start one at a time and soon you’ll have enough viewers and subscribers to get the ball rolling – After all YouTube is only second to Facebook when it comes to the number of active monthly users:
2. Going ‘Live’ On Facebook
One of the best ways to engage and interact with your audience and followers is to stream live videos though your Facebook account.
However, you need to make sure that you schedule your live streams to run at specific times each week, so that your audience can anticipate and prepare for the session. Just like your favourite TV shows, you can expect people to turn up and engage at a particular time and build an army of regular viewers/followers.
Take for instance, influencers and serial entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk – he has built a huge following for himself and for his brand by investing his efforts on Facebook Live and other social media channels.
Gary is frequently seen conversing with his audience through his #AskGaryVee Show on Facebook. Below he’s hosting a Q & A on Facebook Live:
Facebook Live is clearly the ‘go to’ platform for every aspiring and seasoned marketer; because you wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity this popular live video streaming platform can offer you: 
3. Emailing Videos To Your Subscribers List
This is the quickest way to make the most of your YouTube videos. Not everyone in your subscribers list will follow you on social media; so embedding/sharing your videos in your emails or newsletters can add more value to your customers and essentially your chances of more exposure and engagement.
When you don’t need to come up with any new content, it makes a lot of sense to ‘repurpose’ your video content to get more mileage from your marketing efforts.
Emails with video content are known to increase your leads, improve CTRs, increase conversion rates and minimise subscriber opt-outs:
4. Creating Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories can either be made with images or videos. The catch here is, the video content will expire in 24 hours. That means you also have the opportunity to entice your followers with fresh new videos every day.
The stories you send will pop up at the top of everyone’s homepage, as your photo icon. Once they click on the photo, your video will start to play:
These stories are great tools to amplify your brand exposure. Besides this, Instagram also has a live video feature, which you can embed in the stories. It can be used to highlight many aspects of your brand, such as; giving your followers a tour of your new office/production facility; or showcasing the performance of your new product; or simply sharing what you’re experiencing at that moment or letting your audience feel special by allowing them into your day-to-day grind.
5. Using UGC - Invite Audience To Make Their Own Videos
Here’s yet another way to ‘repurpose’ content, albeit this time it is not your YouTube videos, but it actually belongs to your audience and followers – It’s the User Generated Content.
The benefits of using a UGC are many: you don’t have to spend any time creating it, and it’s absolutely free; it will greatly enhance the customer experience; it acts authenticity and ‘social proof’ as it’s not something you developed with your team through the ‘marketing/selling’ lens. And you’re most like to get more shares and eventually good brand exposure, out of thin air.
Take a look at how GoPro has encouraged their customers – they even award the audience who get in the best submission in their websites:
Here’s another one from Nextel, a Brazilian telecom company; taking UGC video of people bungee jumping and base jumping to support and drive their message, “if you’re unhappy with something, change it”
Their campaign #1minutdecoragem (1 minute of courage) was viewed over 7 million times on YouTube:
To Sum It Up
There’s no doubt that people love video and whether it’s through your emails, social media campaigns or by tapping User Generated Content videos – for those driven to make the most of their marketing budget, video content is definitely the way to go!
If you'd like further assistance or would like to discuss anything covered today, we'd love to hear from you.
Call Andy Fox (me) on (03) 5249 5570 or email andy@element7digital.com.au
Our Website is www.element7digital.com.au
