Greetje den Holder — May 15, 2017 Are you struggling with your video marketing efforts? Have you not gotten the results that you were looking for? In this blog, I have some tips for you to take your company’s video marketing to the next level.
First, I will share 7 secrets that will make your video marketing successful. Some might not be a secret to you, and some might be an eye-opener. They allow you to assess whether there are points you can improve. Then, I will discuss the various places on your website where you can use video. Is the spot that you have picked the spot where the video does its magic best? Finally, I will talk about interactive video as that is the next step in video marketing and yields good results.
7 secrets that will help make your video marketing successful
Ash Read has listed 7 secrets to creating successful video content. Here, you can check whether you already do these tricks.
1. Focus on stories, not sales
With social media, branded content has to compete with entertainment, rather than interrupting it as it used to with TV or print. As a result, your video needs to create some kind of value for the viewer. This is a move away from hard sales. The better you tell stories about yourself that connect with the viewer, the more likely your viewers are going to understand what your company is offering and what it can do for them. This story should be cohesive and concise.
2. Use the first few seconds wisely
With the average attention span being 8.5 seconds, you must bring your story to life quickly, so as to instantly gather interest as people scroll through their feeds. In the opening seconds, you must give clarity to what your video is about and give the viewer confidence that what they are about to watch is work their time. Create a hook and upload an interesting thumbnail.
3. Target relevant audiences on Facebook
One of the features that make Facebook stand out from other marketing channels is the in-depth targeting you can use to select audiences for your content. Facebook post targeting allows you to segment audiences by age, gender, locations, languages, and interests. Sharing highly-targeted posts is a great way to make your content appealing to every member of your audience.
4. Tell your story with and without sound
In a recent change, videos now autoplay on Facebook with sound on. It is not yet clear exactly how this change will affect viewing habits on Facebook. Before the update, 85% percent of video views on Facebook happen with the sound off.
With this in mind, it is important to think about how you can ensure your video is engaging for viewers with the sound off as well as on. There are a few ways you can optimize videos for silent playback: beautiful visuals, text-heavy descriptions, and subtitles. Do remember that when enabled, the sound should offer additional value to viewers and further bring your story to life.
5. Include CTAs
When creating videos, be sure to optimize your content with calls to action (CTA). A CTA does not always have to lead to a sale or sign up directly. Instead, video CTA’s could include a subscribe to your channel, follow or like your page, share with your friends, comment on the video or check out other content.
There are three common positions to add calls to action within videos. A pre-roll CTA at the very start of the video ensures that every viewer sees them and has an opportunity to click. A mid-roll CTA can be placed somewhere in the middle. These target viewers when they are most engaged. Finally, a post-roll CTA ensures the viewer is highly interested before being presented with a CTA. Mid-roll CTAs appear to convert at the highest rate: a conversion rate of 16.95% while a post-roll CTA has a conversion rate of 10.98%.
6. Optimize for search
If you are not optimizing your video content for search, you could be missing out on huge numbers of views. Therefore, make sure to use keywords in your title and to add a description to your video.
7. Collaborate with other brands and influencers
Ninety-two percent of people today trust peer recommendations over company ads. When a trusted influencer recommends a product, it can feel more genuine and trustworthy than a brand telling you how great its own product or service is.
While you may already be using some of these tricks, such as optimizing for search, it may be a good idea to adopt new practices, such as adding subtitles or sound, positioning a CTA somewhere else in the video or collaborating with a YouTuber.
Where to place video on your website
Video content is great content to share on social media. Still, you probably want to use your video on your website too. Where is the best place to use it? Marcus Sheridan shares some of his thoughts.
1. Homepage background video
Although video is not always the right solution for your homepage, one great place to consider it is in the background above the fold of the screen. The key to making this work, however, is a video that gives the site visitor a true sense of the problem your company solves, or at least a unique differentiator of a certain aspect of your company. Remember that a background video should not distract from the overall message of your page, but rather aid it and help drive it home.
2. Social proof sections of the website
Does your website have a case study section or a customer testimonials area? Reading a case study or testimonial is nice, but nothing compares to being able to see and hear a satisfied customer tell their story. It’s authentic and more tangible than text alone.
3. A video resource library
Did you know that 64% of people are more likely to buy an item online after watching a video? That is why you need to have a video library: a place where video content is organized, searchable, and displayed in such a way that the visitor can immediately find what one are looking for.
4. Product/services pages
Do your company product and services pages have one or two photos plus a few hundred words of explanatory text? That needs to change. If you truly want your customers to see what makes you special and different, a quality video on each of these pages is necessary to provide the ideal shopping experience.
5. Homepage explainer video
Different than the homepage background video, an explainer video is generally found further down the page and allows the viewer to get an immediate sense of the problem the company solves as well as the thing that makes them unique.
6. About page
Traditionally, about pages lack any type of video to give the viewer a true sense of what makes up the organization. At this point, if we really want to show our company culture and team, video content is a must.
7. Employee/team pages
Personal employee videos are critical in terms of helping visitors “know” the types of people that make up the organization.
Sheridan thinks that just the fact that you have this type of content on your website immediately separates you from the competition and can give you a major leg up when trying to win the trust of today’s digital buyer.
Use interactive video to differentiate yourself
Nevertheless, if you truly want to stand out, interactive video is the way to go. As Adam Hayes describes it, videos give brands incredible results, yet everybody knows this by now. Interactive video allows you to differentiate yourself from the companies that do not use video content and the companies that use normal video content.
Interactive videos are videos that your audience can interact with. Instead of your video taking viewers on a linear journey, your video will have many different paths that users can navigate at their choosing. This new, active way to enjoy videos will make your brand more memorable and help you compete for attention in an ever-crowded marketplace.
Early adopters of interactive video are happy with the results: only 24% of marketers interviewed by Wyzowl have used interactive video, but of these, 92% of those who had used it said it was an effective tool.
Ways to use interactive video
How can your company use interactive video? There are multiple ways and goals:
- Create a story. Perfect for giving an overview of your brand, product or service
- Sell products. Perfect for online stores
- Demo software. Perfect for software with a variety of tools
- Tailor content. Perfect for increasing user engagement
- Gamify a quiz. Perfect for collecting data
Benefits of interactive video
What makes interactive video stand out as a marketing tool? With interactive video, you can achieve the following:
- Turn passive viewers into active ones
Video marketing is very engaging in comparison to other marketing mediums. The combination of moving images, sound, and a story is much more interesting than a static ad. Still, the act of watching a traditional video is passive. Interactive video changes the attitude of viewers from sitting back to sitting up.
- Gamification
Gamification is the process of using typical elements of gameplay to make boring tasks fun. With the rise of wearable tech and lifestyle management apps, people are gamifying everything they can. Gamification in video can create an engaging experience that viewers will want to play again and again.
- Trackability
The problem with non-interactive video is not a lack of data; it is a lack of useful data. The number of views and average watch time are certainly nice to have, but it is practically impossible to link them to ROI. With interactive video, you can track each decision that a viewer makes and use this insight to create actionable reports based on user interactions. Interactive video allows you to track click-through rates, submission rates, engagement, dwell time, skipped sections, re-watched sections, and navigation, with which you can track the ROI of each of your video campaigns and build a clearer picture of what your audience best responds to, informing future campaigns.
Video marketing mistakes to avoid
I hope that these tips and tricks have helped you discover where you and your company can improve the (video) marketing strategy that you have. If you are still not sure, I have written a blog about video marketing mistakes that you can make as an entrepreneur or marketer and that you need to avoid at all times. Maybe you can find a hint in there as to why your video content is not yielding the results that you are hoping for. It is called Video Marketing Mistakes to Avoid This Year and it includes an infographic, 6 video marketing options, and 8 video marketing mistakes.
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