Why is it important that marketers have a strategy for the use of their videos? What are the elements of video marketing strategy? What makes a marketing video effective?

As mentioned in a previous blog, video marketing is where the future of content marketing is heading. It can assist in creating brand awareness and favourability for businesses in the business-to-consumer, business-to-business and not-for-profit sectors.

Like anything a business implements, a strategy needs to be formed to ensure business initiatives are carried out appropriately and effectively. The strategy must align with the remainder of the company’s integrated marketing strategy in order to be fully successful.

Video marketing strategy

Publish

Your business’s video must contain compelling, engaging and customer relevant material. It should be the focal point of your video otherwise viewers will not stick around for longer than two seconds to watch it. Your video needs to tell a story, show the benefits of your business’s products and/or services and resonate with the audience.

Optimise

If no one sees your video, even if it’s the greatest video ever made, it has no value! There are two strategies for optimising your video:

1. Optimising the video for search purposes
• Identify relevant keywords to your video
• Include text containing these keywords because videos are not visible to search engines. Include them wherever possible -  on your website, YouTube or Vimeo for example. Posting a transcript of the video can be useful for search engine optimisation purposes
• Include keywords within the meta tags and description of the video
• Use a short, catchy title
• Optimise the page URL by making it short
• Encourage user ratings
• Upload the video channels such as YouTube  and Vimeo . Video platforms can be used to upload your video to many channels such as Limelight and Ooyala.
2. Optimise the video for Sharing
• On your website, ensure appropriate social media and email badges and emblems are properly placed to allow viewers to share content as they please
• Websites such as YouTube have excellent sharing functionality and options. If your social media accounts are synced with your YouTube account, your videos can be automatically distributed through to these platforms

Promote

Once optimised, your video needs to be promoted to increase its visibility. Here are a variety of ways that the video can be promoted:

• Through your own channels and other employees' business and personal social media channels
• Through other employees' personal channels
• Encouraging your friends and family to share your videos is also useful
• The video can be embedded on the homepage of your business’s website
• A blog could be written with the video embedded inside
• The video could be promoted through your business partners’ websites
• Reaching out to influential bloggers, social media personnel and companies is a great way to promote your video and increase your video’s reach
• Keep an eye out on groups and pages on social media and video sharing sites, such as LinkedIn YouTube and Vimeo, where you can engage with and join in on conversations. They may be discussing topics that pertain to your video.

Analyse

Measuring and analysing your business’s video is extremely important. Measuring the video’s results is necessary for not only evaluating its effectiveness, but to discover what didn’t work for the purpose of future video creation.

Metrics for your video can be obtained from the video sharing sites that your video has been published on, or via a third party metric supplier. Some useful metrics your business may want to measure include the number of views the video has received, average time spent watching the video, the completion rate of the video and the number of views per country.

An effective video

• It’s creative
• Keep it short
• Learn from past successful video marketing campaigns
• A little humour never hurts
• Give your videos a call-to-action
• Make sure your customer knows how to find you
• There are no hard and fast rules for making an effective video

We hope this strategy helps with creating effective videos for your small business. Check out our next blog of our three blog series about the battle between YouTube and Vimeo.

Here is a link to 15 services and apps to helpmake YouTube videos for your business.