If you haven’t heard yet, video marketing is set to take over the world. Cisco predicts that by 2019, 80% of all Internet traffic will be streaming videos. It’s no surprise, then, that digital marketers are working hard to include video marketing in their overall content strategy. Nobody wants to be left behind, but for a lot of marketers, video is a brand new challenge.
There are so many things you can do when it comes to video – I’ve gathered eleven video promotion ideas and tips to get you started.
1. Tell customer success stories.
There’s nothing quite like social proof to instill confidence in a first-time buyer. Nobody wants to be the only fool who falls for the scam, and hearing from happy customers is a great way to calm those fears. Instead of adding reviews from Facebook or Google to your website, let your prospects hear a client or customer speak passionately about your product – I guarantee you’ll notice an uptick in engagement.
Pro Tip: Put these videos on your bottom-of-the-funnel landing pages.
2. Share helpful tips and how-tos.
These types of videos allow you to do three things simultaneously – you can draw in prospective customers by demonstrating that your product or service will solve their problem, you can keep your current customers happy by continuing to demonstrate the value you provide, and you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Efficient, right? You can share these videos just about anywhere – your fans and followers on social media will find them useful, but they can also be a great tool for your sales team to send to prospects.
Here’s a great video from one of our clients showing how to make a perfect Black & Tan:
3. Share product demos.
Again, these are a great way to both engage prospective clients as well as to delight your current customers. If you happen to have a software or digital product, it’s really simple to create a 30-second GIF to show the world exactly how to, say, organize their notifications or set up a new template within your product. With a bit of creativity, though, you can create a “product demo” for just about anything. Build an outfit with the clothing that you sell, make a recipe featuring your special sauce, show a new application technique with your acrylic paints – the possibilities are endless.
4. Build loyal brand followers by showcasing “A Day in the Life”.
Whether you’re showcasing an employee, a department, a mascot, or even a project, you can use social media to demonstrate a day in the life of your brand. Depending on the feel of your brand, there are two different ways you can go about this. The first one involves either your video team or a video production company – you can plan out exactly what parts of the day you’d like to showcase, and have the video work to craft the perfect message within the video. If you’re showcasing a specific employee, you can also do a “Social Media Takeover.” This works especially well with Instagram and Snapchat – on that day, the employee of choice is the only one posting on that social media platform. You’ll likely see everything from their breakfast to their evening commute. You can check out HubSpot’s Instagram page to see this in action.
Pro Tip: This works really well if you’re working to build a bigger team of employees!
5. Use video to include everyone in your events.
There’s nothing new about the concept of an event video, but social media and new video technology have provided groundbreaking ways to go about it. You can use video to share roundtable discussions or interviews with keynote speakers, or to share a recording of your live webinar after it happens. Navigating a bigger conference? Set yourself up with Periscope and live-stream your experience. That way, your fans and followers (and maybe even your coworkers!) can experience the event through your eyes.
6. Engage your fans with user-generated content.
People love a good giveaway, and you can use one to generate fantastic content from your fans (Doritos has taken this approach to their last few Super Bowl ads). Have them submit a video of them using your product, or a video about why they love your product, and then select your favorite to win an appropriate prize. (Keep in mind that the more enticing the prize, the better content you’ll receive.) The key to this type of video promotion is to showcase your favorites throughout the entry period – share the most engaging submissions on social media while the contest is rolling.
7. Expert Question & Answer videos.
People use the internet to find the answers to their questions, and not everyone learns by reading. Use video to conduct interviews with the experts – both inside of your company and out. If you sell HVAC systems, grab a technician and have him or her explain what you should do if your furnace stops working. If you’re a consultant, take a minute and explain a commonly-used phrase or concept in your industry. You can also venture outside of your company to talk to experts in different parts of your industry – in fact, we recently hosted a webinar in partnership with NordicClick. You can check out the webinar here to see a great example of working with external industry experts to produce content that your fans and followers will love.
Now that you have some great content, it’s time to figure out what exactly you should do with your videos. You might get some views by just putting them up on YouTube, but you can do so much more. Here are a few tips that we’ve learned over the years.
8. Add a CTA to your videos.
Once you’ve engaged the viewer with your awesome video, make sure you keep leading them down the buyer’s journey. By including a CTA (call-to-action link or button) either during or at the end of a video, you’re giving them the chance to continue to engage with you instead of wandering off to another page of the Internet. Don’t pass that chance up!
Pro Tip: Once you have enough views on your video, you can use the data to see where viewer engagement peaks – that’s when you want to introduce your CTA!
9. Use a video-hosting platform that directs the SEO credit back to you.
There are a lot of great things about YouTube, but SEO credit isn’t one of them. When you host a video on YouTube, you miss out on the SEO credit for all of the traffic you drive with that video. Here at StoryTeller, we’re partial to Wistia – Wistia embeds the videos in your website in a way that credits you for the traffic and views you generate. Why not get credit for all of your hard work?
10. Put your video on a landing page.
I mentioned this tip briefly up above, but it deserves a longer explanation. Not only does adding a video to your landing page make it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google, but it can also increase conversion rates by up to 80% (source here). Your best bet is to add a video that reflects the same stage in the buyer’s journey as the landing page – a Product Demo video on a Free Trial Sign-Up, a Customer Success Story video on a Pricing Download page, and so on.
11. Showcase your video anywhere where you want to increase engagement.
HubSpot recently noted that the amount of content produced last year rose by 34%, but user engagement is down by 17%. How do you fight that trend? With video.
Video in an email increases the click-through rate by 200-300%, users are 64% more likely to buy a product after watching a video, combining video with full-page ads increases engagement by 22% (data source here) – from the beginning to the end, you’ll see more engagement when you include video. And after all, isn’t that a digital marketer’s dream come true?
