With content marketing taking up prime space in marketing efforts, the value add derived from distributing and linking to content like webinars, newsletters, white papers, and sponsored content is now well known. Video marketing has been on somewhat of a parallel track for many years with the predominance of video content and advertising on YouTube.
While YouTube remains the preeminent platform for video, other platforms like Facebook Live and Twitter Periscope are fast catching on.
Companies generally tap the power of online video in a couple of different ways. One, by placing interstitial ads within popular videos with a mutual audience. Two, by putting out content relating to reviews, servicing, and usage of services or products offered by the business.
However, the same challenges in ensuring high rankings in text based search also extend to video. Awareness of some tools and tricks can help to significantly increase the effectiveness of your video marketing efforts. Here are some hacks that could help.
Create video for the specific platform
When you are planning a video marketing campaign, do spend some time to think about how the objectives behind your campaign tie into the capabilities of the target platforms. Popular channels on Facebook Live and Twitter Periscope work very much like TV ads and you should tailor the video to cater to a live audience there. On the other hand, YouTube is a platform for both live streaming and for a vast archive. So your video marketing content for YouTube will often need to be vastly different in nature.
Focus on YouTube
Video marketing efforts for YouTube tend to give you a long tail effect. Once you put out high quality content on YouTube, it tends to accumulate referrals and repeat views long into the future. This gives you the advantage of attaining low RoIs on a multiple year basis.
The other significant advantage with YouTube video is that even if you are not able to put out video on a regular basis due to staffing and budget limitations, your existing video archive continues to reel in followers and prospects.
Headlines, tags, and descriptions
The fundamental description elements for a video are the description, headlines and tags. It is very important to utilize these fields in a manner to describe your video clearly, completely and accurately. These fields are used by search engines in ranking your content and are also the first point of reference for viewers. The use of appropriate meta descriptions, keywords and tags get your video be seen in as many user suggestions or search results as possible.
It is vital to come up with a list of all possible keywords and include them in the list of tags. There are fantastic tools available such as vidIQ from Google which can give you information on what tags are being used by other video content on the web. Other tools such as those available with AdWords can also help you determine which keywords to tag and effectively target for your content.
Use custom thumbnails
As far as YouTube videos go, one area which is available to catch the user’s attention and often underutilized, is the thumbnail picture showing up next to the listing. Use large sized text, bold logos, and images overlaying your thumbnail. These can help your video hook in many more people than otherwise would not watch it.
