How to Use Video to Market your Business

Video became an important component of SEO when relevant videos started showing up in the search engine results pages (SERP). Video marketing is also quite popular because it encourages social shares. Internet users want to share what they find with friends and family. Your videos should be among the ones that go viral.

YouTube is the most popular video platform on the World Wide Web. According to Alexa.com, YouTube ranks 2^nd globally, looking at the average visits in a day and page views in about three months. YouTube ranks between position 2 and 4 in the top internet consuming countries like the United States of America, India, Japan, Russia and Germany. Additionally, YouTube has become a search engine of sorts, with more people using YouTube to search the web. Therefore, for an effective video marketing campaign, YouTube should be one of your platforms.

What Video Content is Ideal?

The type of video you make for your brand depends on the overall goal of your video marketing campaign. However, the most popular videos are how to pieces, entertaining/funny clips, news clips and personal videos mostly produced by vloggers.

To boost your brand marketing campaigns, videos you can make include

• Videos to demonstrate how to use your product/service. A major benefit of such videos is the fact that you can use them in your video marketing channel, and link them from your home page or from the specific product/service page.
• Create short testimonials. Elicit emotions from your visitors by creating video confessions from customers who have used your products or services.
• A virtual tour of your stores, offices or manufacturing plants. Let visitors connect with you virtually. You can also introduce visitors to your customer service or crisis management team; give a face to the team that interacts with clients.
• Show off your products. Sometimes, images do not do justice to the size of products. However, with a video, you can show the actual size, colour, 3D shape, etc.
• If you think you can pull it off, organise reality shows like contests and upload videos after every event.

Video Marketing Tips

• Your videos should always have a call to action. A call to action helps you measure the effectiveness of your campaign, as well as the return on investment. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of subscribers or to boost traffic to the website, insert such a call to action and see how many visitors actually help you achieve that goal.
• The message as well as the method of presentation should be appealing to your target audience. For example, if you are targeting children and teens, you might opt for animations.
• Upload videos often. Make your audience come back for more. You can even ask for followership by requesting your audience to subscribe. On the same note, you must respond to viewers’ reactions. Answer questions and reply comments left below your videos.
• If you host live events often, embrace live streaming. Broadcast real time activities to your online audience.
• Optimise videos as you upload them. Find and use the right keywords in the title, in the description as well as in the video tags.

How to Start Video Marketing

First, create a channel. The name, the banner as well as the icon visible to visitors should increase brand awareness. To get a custom url (a personalised web address with the name of your brand), your channel must have at least 100 subscribers, the channel must be about a month old, you must have a customised channel icon and channel art.

You should also add keywords relevant to your industry, and the countries you would like to target. Additionally, link your channel with your website and social media accounts, and link to your channel from your social media pages and from the website.

How to Market your Videos

As soon as you upload a video, distribute it to your audience. The reactions (shares, likes and views) affect your rank. Therefore, you have to reach your audience near and far to get more views and reactions. To do that:

• Include videos in your email marketing campaigns and in newsletters.
• Get links to your videos from relevant sections of your products/services pages. If you have published a how to video, link to it from the specific product.
• Share your videos on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
• Find and share videos on social bookmarking sites to draw more traffic to them.

Video marketing is the present, and the future, of digital marketing for brands that wish to go beyond text and images.