Getting the most out of your video marketing

1 Oct' 15 | By Amanda Smith

An average internet user spends just over 16 minutes watching online video a month and at least 80% of people remember the videos they see. With figures like that, it’s not hard to see why online video is becoming big in the marketing world.

Producing engaging and well edited video content gets results because it grabs your audience’s attention quickly and conveys your brand’s message at the same time, all wrapped up in a format that’s become quite easy to measure.

Here are a few techniques to ensure you produce effective video content:

How long is too long? The first 10 seconds of a video are crucial in grabbing your viewer’s attention, so first impression’s count. Failure to engage in those vital few seconds could see you lose 20% of users. By two minutes it is thought around 60% of people will move away, no matter how long the overall video is. This is important information to bear in mind when commissioning new video content, as anything longer than three minutes is unlikely to be seen. Video analytics data tools are powerful as they allow you to extract information about the viewing habits of your audience, such as where they are viewing from and how long they viewed for, which will help you to create a better video campaign next time.

Where to place your video? Finding the right channel for your content is also another important element. Marketeers are opting to use social media platforms as their first choice for video marketing, rather than those channels dedicated to video distribution. This is due to the larger exposure social media has against the likes of YouTube. Having said that, YouTube still receives more than one billion unique visitors every month, so is still worth considering using. Don’t forget to host videos on your own domain too, which will also help boost your SEO, as it draws traffic to your site, rather than encouraging viewers to the other social media sites. When embedding the content onto your site, be sure to make use of video sitemaps which enable search engine bots to access and index the content easily.

SEO benefits: Videos are a great way to boost your SEO because the more shares and likes your video receives, the higher your site will place on search engines, such as Google. The way you tag your video can really make a difference too, so try to incorporate keywords. Using catchy titles for your video which will maximise user engagement and thorough descriptions will help users and search bots understand what your video is about. The easier it is to find your video, the better chance you have of people clicking on it and creating potential new traffic to your site. Transcriptions can also be hugely beneficial for search rankings if posted straight to the HTML of the pages that the videos are hosted on. Not only is it likely the transcription will include keywords, it will also make the video more accessible to people who may not be able to listen to the audio.

What to track: Tracking your conversion can be a useful way of working out your return of investment (ROI). The most obvious way to work out your ROI is by comparing actual purchases against the cost of the video production. But conversions don’t always have to be measured in monetary values. Social interaction can be just as important as it’s helping to spread your brand message across new audiences. With some video forums, it’s possible to view how many people have liked your content or made it a favorite. You can also see how many times it was shared on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If your video is getting shared, the call to actions are being completed, and the content is being recommended online by people, then its reach and engagement is increasing, which are all positive indicators that the campaign has been successful.