If you haven't heard, video is the most engaging type of online content available today.
In recent years we've seen brands like Red Bull, Netflix, GoPro, and Cisco achieve massive success with video, using the medium to build awareness, create emotional connection and develop loyalty among their customers.
Those businesses that aren't taking advantage of videos are missing out on a big opportunity. Consider these stats:
- 90% of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision-making process - HubSpot
- 100 million users watch online videos every day - Video Brewery
- 80% of all Internet traffic will be streaming video content by 2019 - Cisco
- Online video now accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic - business2community
But where video content is seeing the most success is in social media, with all the major players, including Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn, all introducing new tools to tap into the video trend. Even on Instagram, where video has not traditionally been the primary emphasis, the time users spend watching video on the platform has increased 150% in the last six months.
It's clear that video is rising in importance, but there are also other benefits to video marketing which are not as immediately obvious.
Video Marketing and SEO
Can video content help improve your SEO efforts?
Well, this is an interesting question, and my answer is: yes.
So how exactly does video impact on SEO practices?
Take a look at this example.
Here, the searcher has entered the query "how to do a parkour roll" into Google, which has provided the following results:
Every one of these results is either a video or has a video embedded on the page. This underlines the importance of video content, and the preference Google puts on it - based on user behavior, Google has obviously determined that video results best match this query, so they, in turn, rank higher in related searches.
Video Strategy
If you haven't yet included video as a part of your content marketing strategy, then it's worth taking action before you get left behind. Infographics, eBooks, customer case studies, blog posts, guest outreach, email campaigning, slideshares - these are all effective elements of any content marketing strategy. But right now, nothing beats the impact of video when it comes to educating buyers, building trust, and improving customer satisfaction.
That said, every business, whether small or large, has a pre-defined budget to allocate to different resources. It's therefore very important to consider every aspect of your efforts to get the most out of your investment.
Before implementing any video strategy, you first need to:
- Analyze the audience persona for whom you will create the video
- Research the stats of your business related to the types of content your target customers are more likely to watch, pain points of your business, etc.
- Track the success rate of your competitors who are using video-based marketing
- Analyze available opportunities based on your business' nature and specifications
Analysis of these important points will help you derive the best results out of your investment.
Video Content Options
Here are some examples of possible video options to consider.
- Business Intro Video - This kind of video generally includes a brief greeting or an introductory message on the home page for the visitors. In short, it tells visitors about who you are, what you do, and why customers should consider you.
- Product Demonstration Video - An explainer video that demonstrates your product or service and how users can avail the value and benefits associated with the product or services being offered.
- Customer Testimonials - Show a real person who has already used your product to add life and authenticity to your business, thus being more convincing than text alone.
- Events and On-Demand Webinar Videos - If you're conducting webinars or hosting any business based events, then you can record and export the sessions to your website with transcribed text. This also provides SEO benefits.
- Video Blogs - Video blog (vlog) is basically a form of blog which consists of video content (either self-host, or use free services like YouTube and Vimeo, etc. to publish the content). Mostly, bloggers or businesses use this technique in a sequence covering a particular topic and publish it on the web depending upon the desired frequency (weekly, monthly or a stipulated time format).
- Interview Based video - Interview videos are a great way to showcase your business proficiency with expert interactive session. The best thing about this format is that a certain amount of authority and trust (being an expert) already gets applied when we see someone being interviewed.
- Company Spotlight - Each business has their unique stories, in terms of achievements, successes, or failures. You can create video content around such events to showcase on your website, which can help build connections and drive brand awareness and interest among the consumers.
- Tutorial or Explainer Video - The primary objective of this video format is to show a customer or viewer how to do something more efficiently.
12 Optimization Techniques for Video Marketing
Here are twelve key video promotion tips to help you get the most from your video efforts.
1. Embedding video on your website - Integration of the video on your website itself can make a significant SEO impact. With the increase in consumption and production of videos, search engines will continue to favor results based on good customer experience. According to the report of tubularinsights, 73% of all consumers are more likely to make a purchase after watching videos explaining a product or service.
2. Use keyword labels and customize description - Including keyword labels and descriptive content helps search engines to identify your content and match it relevant search queries.
3. Try to keep Your Video Short - Different video formats require difference lengths - ask yourself, would you watch a 30 minute video on this subject? Obviously, when it's a tutorial or the like, you might consider it, but many people prefer shorter video content.
4. Add transcript to the video - Adding a transcript enables search engines to index the information of your video while also giving your visitors another consumption option
5. Host video on YouTube and get back link - To get a larger audience for your content and brand recognition, it's a good idea to host your video on YouTube as well. Because YouTube is the second largest search engine, and is owned by Google, earning backlinks from the platform can work well for your website. In the "Add card" category, there's an option to include a link to an approved website to drive traffic. You can also paste your website link in the descriptions of the videos.
6. Share video on different social media channels - After adding the video to YouTube, you can more easily share it on different social media channels. According to insivia, 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter every minute.
7. Try video promotion via email campaigns - An email campaign is another great way to boost your video's success, and e-mail is still the best choice to interact with and retain customers personally. Including videos to your email strategy can provide outstanding results if used correctly.
8. Add video schema markup for every video - To cope with the crawling, analyzing and indexing problems of video asset, Google launched the standard schema markup for VideoObject to assist publishers in providing appropriate information about the video, so that search engines can easily locate and index the visual content.
9. Use a customized graphic as the rich snippet for video - Rich snippet is the result that displays in Google SERP when someone types a particular query. Adding a customized thumbnail for your video helps in catching the attention of your audience when they're scrolling through search results. Check out this example:
Among all the results based on the query term "how to cook pasta", this rich snippet provides additional information about the webpage, making it stand out from the other results.
10. Focus your video on a single topic - When creating a video, you should definitely focus on a single topic rather than mixing two or more. It can distract user from paying attention to your core objective.
11. Optimize for load times - Search engines, especially Google, include page performance in their algorithms metric to rank a particular webpage. Load time can adversely affect user experience and can thus affect your SEO activity as well. Don't include the <no script> tags, as this may slow the loading time of the page.
12. Embed Video "Above the Fold" - This will help users to easily find the piece of content they're looking for. If a user has to scroll down to see the video (for what they came to your site to see), that can impact on their experience.
Conclusion
The explosive growth of videos on the web has seen businesses quickly adopting creative marketing strategies and including more video content at every step of the buyers' journey.
Making a video that's enticing, one that captivates customer attention, is becoming increasingly important. The above notes can help you incorporate videos content into your marketing strategy, which can improve customer experience and increase the power of your brand's online presence.