The Hero's Guide to Video Marketing

Tired of being stuck with average results for your video marketing efforts? Have no fear...the Hero’s Guide to Video Marketing is here to help!

The Hero’s Guide will cover the core pillars of a successful video marketing strategy, from strategic planning to content development and distribution.

In the first chapter, we take a look at how organizations like yours can use video as a part of your marketing efforts to better connect with your audience, including the “gadgets” that you can take advantage of in your Video Marketing Hero’s Utility Belt.

So get ready, it’s time to supercharge your content marketing and drive better results!

THE UTILITY BELT

Your Brand & Voice

Developing and maintaining brand is a core tool for modern marketers. Without a consistent brand, identity and voice, marketing efforts become disjointed and disorganized.

Video is a powerful way to make a human connection and tell your company story in a way that helps customers understand who you are and how you can help them.

1. Make sure you have a corporate brand guideline that all marketing efforts are aligned around.
2. Develop a framework for how to fit your brand/voice into your video strategy.
   1. What is your goal for the video and does that align with your brand?
   2. What are the emotions you want to evoke, the personas you are targeting, or the actions you want them to take? And are those consistent with your brand?
3. Make sure your story includes great visuals, not just talking heads but also creative ways to illustrate points with a combination of live action, graphics and animations.
4. Once you have developed brand-centric video content, think about how you showcase it, as this will help drive home your brand message:
   1. Put it on your homepage
   2. Use video to convey product messaging or for customer support resources

Distribution

As marketers, we have the responsibility to distribute content to a target audience to drive interest and engagement. Video content is no different. There are a number of distribution tools and channels you can take advantage of.

EMAIL

Emails that contain video generate a 55% increase in click-through rates.

1. Put the word “video” in the email subject line
2. Put an engaging thumbnail image of the video in the email body with a play button which is hyperlinked to a landing page or website page with a continuation of the message/theme of the email.
3. Think about A/B testing with different email subject lines, different thumbnail images or varying copy to ensure you are putting your best foot forward.
4. Use calls to action like “watch now” and “play” buttons

SOCIAL

Social channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all have video at the core of their services, and the future of these services is focused largely on users sharing video. Posting videos to these channels helps your content get discovered and helps bring people back to your own website. Still not convinced? Well, videos are shared 1200% more than links and text combined.

1. Do an audit of your social media channels to figure out the ones that are the most impactful or are generating the best results to date. Focus your efforts on those channels.
2. Think about your video strategy for each channel differently. There is no one size fits all. Content should be adapted and personalized for the style and viewing habits of that channel.
3. Focus on distributing content across social channels that is inherently shareable, and short-form content that is engaging and includes calls to action back to your own website.
4. Closely monitor clicks, views and engagement across each channel to determine which content is most effective and which channels you should invest more in. Also, track how many visitors come back to your site from these channels.

BLOGGING

Spice up your blog content with video posts, such as short case studies, interviews, product announcements/demos, event highlight reels and videos of company leadership.

1. Use teaser videos in blog posts to drive traffic to other content assets or campaigns.
2. You can also embed full video assets in blog posts to help drive blog engagement.
3. Use the word “video” in the blog headline.

Discovery

As marketers, we need to provide ways for our target audience to discover us. Fortunately, video can help with this.

SEO/SEM

As a piece of high quality, rich, immersive content, video helps to increase your search engine rankings. In fact, pages with video are 53x more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results. Keep in mind the following tips when trying to optimize your video content.

1. Create unique URLs for each video that play inline on the page. Videos help you get good quality, organic backlinks.
2. Think about grouping together your video assets into a userfriendly video portal with categories and tags so it’s easy for viewers to find what they are looking for. And make sure you have a separate landing page for each video so search engines can find and index assets individually.
3. Make sure you have a video XML sitemap
4. Use rich metadata and smart content organization to get the most from your video library. And populate hidden tags in the HTML code of your video landing pages, such as Facebook’s OpenGraph tags, Schema.org’s microdata tags and Twitter Card tags.
5. Transcriptions can also be useful in driving video SEO. Add video transcriptions directly to the HTML of each of the pages where your videos are hosted, which gives viewers the option to read through the content in the video while also helping drive search engine discoverability.

LANDING PAGES & MICROSITES

Once you have your audience’s attention, you need to direct them somewhere. Landing pages, microsites and video portals are a great way to keep your audience engaged. Using videos on landing pages can actually increase conversions by 86%5. While public video sites like YouTube and Vimeo can be useful from an SEO perspective, the real power comes from branded, immersive landing pages and microsites. These are crucial in your ability to engage with your audience and convert them to customers.

1. Make video a prominent feature on your landing page, but also use directional cues within the video to point viewers to your landing page’s conversion goal, whether that’s a contact form or something else. And add other obvious calls to action to your video that guide viewers to the next step you’d like them to take.
2. Experiment with short and long versions of videos to see which perform better. You can also experiment with auto-playing videos versus making the viewer press the play button. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches, but it’s worthwhile to test them out for your organization and make the decision after you’ve seen the data.

Portals

When you start racking up a good library of video content, you are going to need a central place to showcase that content while also making it easy for your audience to discover it, watch it and engage further. Video portals are a great way to achieve this. Whether you want a portal geared toward customers and prospects or to showcase on-demand content for live events, portals are the best way to organize and promote your video content. Make sure your portals are easy to use, easy to maintain and are built with a long-term vision in mind.

1. Gather your video content into logical collections of videos. A collection of videos has some kind of unified theme that makes it clear to viewers what they are looking through.
2. Make sure your portal is brand compliant so it seamlessly fits into your overall Web presence.
3. Make sure your portal plugs into your other systems, like Google Analytics or your marketing automation system.
4. Develop as many portals as you need, such as for different verticals, use cases, goals, etc.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a little more on the advanced side of the hero’s utility belt, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool to engage your prospects and customers in real-time with relevant content. It’s also a good way to score your leads to help get a better understanding of how engaged they are and when you should contact them. It is beneficial to make sure your video campaigns are integrated with your marketing automation system. As your viewers work through your site and watch video content, you want to be able to track the videos they are watching and make sure all of this important data is plugged into your marketing automation system. This will help you deliver relevant content and properly track lead engagement.

1. Integrate metrics into your video players
2. Integrate your video platform into your marketing automation system so you can pass video view metrics to your marketing automation system
3. For those that are more advanced, connecting your video platform with your Web analytics, marketing automation system and CRM will help to:
   1. Allow sales to see the type of content the prospect has seen, optimizing the sales process
   2. Allow marketing to see opportunities, and the $ value, that resulted from your video marketing efforts. This will help to demonstrate ROI.
   3. More effectively “tune” your content to your viewers

Analytics

If you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it, improve upon it and achieve better results. That’s true of everything in life, in marketing, and especially with video! Make sure you are tracking the performance of your video marketing strategy. Understand your most popular videos and which channels and tools are performing best so you can appropriately shape your overall video marketing strategy. Video content analytics are also important so you can track the performance of each individual video with metrics like play rates and engagement scores. This helps marketers learn what types of content works with their audiences so you can better “tune” it going forward to deliver better results. And, perhaps most importantly, make sure all of this video analytics data fits into your overall marketing analytics data to ensure you have a full view on your audience’s behavior.

1. Make sure you are tracking macro level analytics about total views, engagement scores, impressions, play rates, device types, geographic and referral sources. This helps you understand the overall performance of your video marketing by assets, channel and geography.
2. Micro level analytics about engagement rates over the course of a video are also extremely beneficial. This data helps you understand the individual performance of your content to help you make decisions about this piece of content, and others, going forward.

CONCLUSION

Seize the day and start taking advantage of all of your video marketing gadgets to supercharge your content marketing strategy and become a video marketing hero! And stay tuned for the next installment of the Video Marketing Hero’s Guide in the near future