What’s keeping you from doing video content marketing?

Market studies have shown that our video consumption is growing year on year. There’s just no stopping Australians from bingeing on videos all day, everyday using all types of internet-connected devices. Whilst most want it for free, others are willing to pay a small fee.

This is why video content marketing is the next big step for every business when it comes to digital marketing. It’s a strategy every business must carefully plan if they want to stay relevant in their industry.

Why video is an effective marketing tool

Although video content marketing requires more time and resources to produce, it has been proven to be far more effective in engaging an audience especially those who are mobile – which, by the way, happens to be 75% of our population according to the latest Opera Mediaworks State of Mobile Advertising report.

In a time when everyone is connected and attention spans are getting shorter, videos are deemed more effective because they’re better for recall, they’re more persuasive and search engines love them.

 1.     Video is more persuasive.

A video can appeal to emotions – and we all know that eliciting an emotional response from the audience is an essential part of marketing. Emotions influence a person’s choices and actions such as sharing the content, buying the product, or returning for more. In recent studies, people say they are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.

 2.     Video builds credibility and trust for your brand.

There’s no more effective or efficient way to build instant credibility and trust online than with video. You can use it to speak to your target audience in a language they understand, communicate your brand’s promise and answer frequently asked questions. You can use video marketing to build an honest and authentic reputation.

3.     Video is peerless.

YouTube and Facebook receive millions if not billions of unique visitors every month. Video can give you access to all this. If your objective is to reach a global market, video content marketing will definitely help you with that.

 4.     SEO loves video content

Search engines are looking for signs that your content is engaging to determine if it is worth a high ranking. Video content can help put your business in the first page of search results.

In fact, based on a Forrester research, the presence of video on a web page makes it 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google. And, while those percentages are always changing, the principal remains consistent: video increases the searchability of your content.

Different ideas for video content

Marketing experts say you’ll have to do more than just make one video to realise the full potential of video content. This means you can’t expect too much if you’ve only created a few videos. If you are going to do it, do it right. In video content marketing, creativity is important and so is consistency. And, it doesn’t have to be costly.

Here are 10 video marketing ideas you can explore:

1. rich snippets (used by Google to display information about the video embedded in the page)
2. customer testimonials
3. videos from live events
4. how-to information or quick tips
5. product videos/unboxing
6. explainer videos or FAQs
7. corporate training videos
8. webinars/hangouts
9. expert Q&As
10. viral (entertainment) videos

Marketing Angels client, Frontline Recruitment uses videos to creatively announce job postings all over Australia:

Depending on your marketing objectives, you can upload your videos on YouTube, on Facebook or on your website. If your video is on YouTube/Facebook, you can increase your brand’s visibility in search pretty quickly, but the traffic will go to YouTube/Facebook.

But if your video lives on your website, the traffic goes to your site, but it takes longer to build up your rankings and traffic.

How to measure success

Just like your other content marketing, you also need to measure the performance of your video content marketing to ensure your investment is indeed paying off.

Here are four metrics you should be watching as soon as you start distributing your video content:

1. “Watch time”  or how long viewers are engaged with your video. YouTube, for instance, will now feature videos in related sections and search with the highest watch times rather than the most views. This makes watch time a critical metric for your video marketing efforts.
2. Subscribers. Obviously, this is important to know who is watching. If you have created channel in YouTube and/or other video content sharing sites, they provide this data. Subscriber reports usually tell you how you gained and lost subscribers (bounce and exit rates), their geographic locations, and more. You can use this to identify which videos you need to do more or do less of.
3. Engagement. Measuring engagement is understanding whether or not people are enjoying your content, asking questions or commenting, sharing your content, making comments about it elsewhere, or are spending more time on your site/channel over time.
4. Social shares. Whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or any other social network, are important to help increase a brand’s exposure. It’s the reason why some videos go viral, and it has also become an important ranking factor for search engines.
5. Conversions. This is one of the most important video metrics, especially for e-commerce websites. This metric will tell you how videos impact on your website conversion rate. Measuring this allows you to understand the real value and ROI that their videos have.

By leveraging these critical video marketing metrics, you are going to be well-equipped to optimise your video content and more importantly, increase overall watch time. This way you’ll have greater opportunity to funnel those viewers back to our website or channel and into your conversion funnel.

Since starting her outsourced national marketing consultancy Marketing Angels in 2000, Michelle Gamble has helped hundreds of SMEs get smarter marketing. Michelle helps businesses find more effective ways to grow their brands and businesses.