Videos work wonders when it comes to expressing and narrating an idea. People find it convenient to connect with video content than any other form of content. Businesses use it as a promotional tool to boost their products and services. While independent video content creators use it for personal blogging, sharing reviews, parodying something popular, showing tutorials, Q&A sessions, unboxing videos, and more.
The video content success hugely depends on the approaches you adopt while creating, distributing, and promoting the video content. Some of you might be missing out on one part or the other. A perfect video content strategy can curate videos that entertain, inform, educate, and inspire your viewers to take action.
We can help you if you are struggling with your video content marketing strategy. We have a team of expert content creators to help you out! Otherwise, simply read this article. Here, we’ll be discussing 10 new tips to create a killer video content strategy for your business. Read on to find them out.
1. Set Your Video (Marketing & Content) Goals Right. Establish Your KPIs
Identify the goals and mission for making the video content. Now, set a foolproof plan that aligns with them. Come up with a script that explains the videos, the content that will be shown in the video, and the major points that would be conveyed to the audience through the video.
Maintaining a content marketing mission statement makes it easier to focus on what’s important and what’s not while creating your content so your content marketing strategy never goes out of track. Other than the content that you’re going to use to reach people, the goals can also be about the audience that you aim to target and the benefit that they’ll get out of it. That’s not the end, you’ll also need to think about what your business will get from it. Set goals for improving revenue, boosting SEO, generating traffic & sales, reducing marketing cost, and more.
The goals have been set. Now, the next step is to make them specific and measurable. It means that you need to set key performance indicators
(KPIs) for your content marketing strategy. KPIs come with goals with specific numbers attached to them. This could be hitting a certain revenue in a particular span of time or get a certain number of new email subscribers, etc.
2. Maintain a Proper Video SEO Strategy
SEO is not just for blogs and websites, it applies to video channels as well. Video hosting platforms like YouTube is itself a large search engine online. Just like using the Google search engine to find broad information, people use YouTube to search for consuming such content (instead of just watching specific videos).
And that is the reason why you should be having a proper SEO strategy for your video uploaded on content hosting platforms like YouTube. Keep the video title informative and short. And include keywords to them just like the way you do with your blog post (you can use any keyword suggestion tool or the YouTube keyword tool to find relevant keywords). The same goes for the video description as well, include relevant keywords, and helps the viewers understand what your video is about.
Use tags with keywords and their different variations so that your video gets delivered to the people who are looking for the type of content that you provide. Also, build links for your video content and include an eye-catchy thumbnail image to the video. Since smartphones are used the most for using the internet these days, optimizing your videos for mobile viewing would be a good idea. Finally, provide all the details about your video content to search engines.
3. Tell them What the Video is All About
While you create content, give your viewers more reasons to choose you over others. Provide your viewers with additional information so that it becomes easier for them to decide whether they want to watch it or not. Most people skim through the titles of the video at first before watching it because they want to ensure that it doesn’t waste their time. But there is a limit to which you can include finer details about the video in the title and description. People are not going to spend 5 or 10-minute for checking if the content is worth their time. They’d rather choose to scan a piece of text or image that gets done in seconds.
Thumbnail images can be used for highlighting key points contained inside the video. The description box can be utilized to its fullest by including 3-4 benefits that viewers will get after watching the video. The videos that use a storytelling format can highlight the main points of the video in the description box.
Another great way to provide additional information for your potential viewers is to transcribe your video. It is much easier for your viewers to understand the video content in a text format (so that they can skim read) and then decide whether to watch it or not. Other than this, transcribing has the advantage of helping search engines crawl your video content since they can’t crawl videos as such.
4. Optimize Video for Conversions
Once you’ve managed to get people to view your content, then it’s time to focus on conversions. And the conversion can be anything from leads, sales, or just a dialogue; it’s just that it varies from business to business. The very first approach to adapt is to include a clear call to action. Depending on the objective, the video speaker can give a direct message to call the viewers to take action, add a link at the end of the video leading to your landing page, add share buttons, and more. All you need to do is to ensure that the CTA easily engages with your video.
Identify and choose the right time to share your video content. Further, get the most views in the first 48 hours of posting. The more views your video gets, the more will YouTube recognize the significance of your video content to other viewers.
You can offer immediate incentives to watch and engage with your videos (like discounts, giveaway, or links to a free course). Aim at helping your users with some quality content. Finally, it goes without saying, create videos that are interactive and entertaining.
5. Decide the Type of Video Content that Build Interest in Your Viewers
You should decide on the content that matters to the niche or business you deal with. Suppose if you are doing content marketing as a part of your business, identify the part of the business that would benefit from video marketing, such as new products, events, sales, HR, internal communications. Further, you can work on the types of video content that work best for each of these.
Do your research. Spend some quality time researching what’s already popular online. You can post a quirky behind the scenes video, genuine customer testimonials, product review videos, hobby vlogs, how-to-dos tutorials, videos featuring influencers, webinars, and more.
You may not be able to predict the audiences’ tastes accurately. But you still can make the best out of the data that you’ve got (the customer demographics like the age, interests, where and when they like to hang out online). Start experimenting with the help of the data you’ve got in hand and see what gets successful (the one which receives high levels of engagement, and lots of shares indicates high levels of viewer interest).
6. The Shorter the Better Strategy
The shorter the video length, the better it becomes while people view it. Everybody needs content to consume but doesn’t have the patience and time to dedicate to it. And that is why short videos have a huge viewership. Also, it can be easy to remember if you say less rather than stuffing the video with too many important points.
It is true that some of you would have a lot to tell your viewers, but expressing it all at once confuses and bores your viewer. Rather, it is better to express that in short videos. You can break long content into small parts so that it doesn’t feel complicated to the viewers. The longer your video is, the lesser people pay attention to it. So, cut down your script and be very concise with your videos.
Having said that, the video length also depends on the niche you chose to create content for. Various types of content obviously require a certain length of time (some requiring longer lengths of time) to be expressed in the video format, and sticking to a shorter video length strategy is impossible for some. In such cases, find the length that suits your video content and stick to it. For instance, a video dealing with educational content cannot be limited to a 5-minute length.
7. Figure Out the Best Content Channels & Assess Your Current Position
You are definitely not the first person to create content in the category you focus on. Many content creators and businesses have already put content out there to the public. You need to figure out where your potential audience is hanging out and take note of the strategies they use. You can get this information from the content shared by your competitors in their video channel, blog post, guest posts, and so on. Assess their usefulness from their success rates and look at how your content compares with that of theirs. Further, see how any new content (that you offer) will fit in the market.
8. Responsible Content Production Strategy
The next important step is to allocate the right roles in the content production team. Decide on the person who will deal with the overall charge and the ones who’ll deal with delivering individual content items. (Although this greatly depends on the size of your company and content team, whether the creation is done in-house or if certain services are outsourced.)
You can set a CEO or chief marketing officer for having a check on the overall content strategy and for giving final approval over the content that is about to be shared. A content manager can be put in charge for delivering your content marketing strategy on a day-to-day basis and coordinate with the content team for the same. You can also assign individuals to create content based on their expertise.
9. Maintain a Content Calendar
You need to come up with compelling videos consistently. All through this article, we’ve indirectly emphasized the importance of quality content; there is no compromise when it comes to content quality. But, quality is just not enough, the frequency at which you post content also matters.
Your usual set of audiences will forget you if they don’t get to see you more often. The people who were interested in the video content you offered will start to forget you just because they see you less often. Also, offering new content frequently will further develop their interest and liking towards your content.
So, you need to constantly remind your prospects that you always have content to offer them on the topic of their liking. To ensure that you post regularly, you can create a plan or a schedule. Maintaining a content calendar helps you plan on the content you plan to create the video, and the dates you plan to put them out for the public.
You can use the Google calendar and make a simple plan with the dates & the content type. This works well for small scale content publishers. On the other hand, if you publish a lot of content, and manage a content team for this, you can use productivity and task management tools to plan. Additional details like some initial research findings on how the audience will respond can be included in the calendar, the doubts that could possibly arise in the viewers’ minds can be predicted and its answers can be included in the video, and more.
10. Distribute & Market. Gauge its Success to Improve
Once your video content gets ready, then it’s time for distributing and marketing your content. With the help of a content calendar, you’d have already planned on the dates for sharing your content on various platforms. You can use email marketing to distribute the content you’ve created, you can notify any influencers mentioned in your content to spread the word even wider. Other than content hosting platforms, you can distribute your video content across the various social media platforms. You can cross-promote the video posted on one platform on the other, for instance, a video posted on the website can be promoted by mentioning it (or reposting it) across social media accounts.
Creating content, distributing, and promoting them doesn’t end your responsibilities. You need to assess your content marketing strategy’s effectiveness now. Remember the targets you set initially? Now it’s time to check if your video hit that target. Use tools like Google Analytics and YouTube Analytics to see how your content is performing. You can use Google Alerts and Mention to track and identify if your content is being mentioned and shared. Tools like SEMRush will help you track email signups through the analytics in your email marketing software.
Conclusion
Collect as much as resources as you can, prior to creating the video. Use them to clearly explain the service or product you support, and convince them why it could be valuable to them.
Repurpose your blog, guest post, ebooks, guides, podcast content into useful and interactive videos. Allocate a separate time for reviewing your video content through Analytics and upgrade your video content strategy.
Including social proof such as customer testimonial videos greatly increases the trust and credibility quotient surrounding your videos even more.
Make your viewers feel good by giving them more choices like contact forms, options to receive text or phone calls. Offering multiple options makes it convenient for them to choose a CTA of their preference. Another thing you can do is to say a simple thank you to your viewers at the end of the video.
You may not find initial videos to be rewarding, but that is okay. It becomes rewarding in the long run only if you use it to build lasting relationships between your organization and your viewers. And, you would gradually get to see your video views and engagement rise with time.
Still, confused? We’ve got you covered. Connect with our team of content creators and curate engaging content for your business!
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