In 2021, an average customer is expected to spend 100 or more minutes per day watching videos online. This fact perfectly explains why 92% of modern marketers consider video marketing to be one of the most lucrative and effective promotional instruments in their portfolios.
This tool is not limited to traditional commercial advertisements or interviews. In addition to branded videos, reviews or other pre-recorded materials, marketers can use Instagram Stories, Facebook live broadcasts, and other real-time streaming instruments.
These options offer a more direct form of follower engagement contributing to more genuine and sincere communication with brands. Below, you will find 7 ways to increase the effectiveness of your video marketing.
1. Add Some Text
As counter-intuitive as this recommendation may seem, many marketers forget that thousands of customers are unable to or unwilling to watch their videos at their workplace. Make sure that all of your recorded materials are accompanied by subtitles for silent viewing as well as an in-depth text version covering their main points.
This also helps you reach international audiences as some international viewers experience problems when watching your videos in English. If you find it difficult to maintain a YouTube channel, multiple social media, and a website at the same time, you may need to delegate some of these functions to third-party professionals.
If you can produce interesting and convincing videos, you can always recruit an external agency to provide blog writing services. These writing experts can transform your visual materials into extended articles containing additional reference materials and links to other pages of your company website.
2. Use Internal Links
The constantly decreasing attention span of modern viewers means that no one is going to watch 15-minute-long YouTube videos. This does not mean that you need to get rid of some interesting and valuable content. Break down your larger videos into shorter ones lasting 3-5 minutes each.
Integrate internal links to other materials into them for those viewers who want to learn more. These practices can also be combined with any link building tactics that you use to increase your rankings in search engine outputs.
3. Avoid Autoplay Videos
There is nothing more annoying than opening an official company website and instantly hearing a video playing in the background at full volume. Some brands get bonus points for hiding the ‘mute’ and ‘stop’ buttons for these automated playback windows to ‘be better remembered by the viewers’.
Using this tactic makes you look like an annoying beggar jumping at people out of nowhere and shouting at them to capture their attention. Always make sure that your materials follow the ‘pull’ marketing approach by being non-intrusive and only show them to your prospective customers upon their explicit request.
4. Be Careful with Live Streams
As simple as they may seem, live streams from experienced online marketers and Instagram influencers usually represent years of hard work and competence. Before you choose to add this instrument to your video marketing toolbox, record at least 10 sample videos covering the selected topics or settings. This may show you that you need better equipment such as a high-quality lavalier microphone or additional training on being confident in front of the camera.
Your setting is equally important if you are planning to stream from your company office or facilities. With thousands of people watching your live videos, you must make sure that there are no faulty equipment, dusty shelves or disturbances in the background that could disrupt your broadcast and affect your brand image.
5. Diversify Your Engagement Platforms
Instagram Stories and Facebook live videos are extremely effective for seizing the attention of new customers via newsfeed marketing. YouTube promotion is substantially lagging behind in this aspect since it is getting more and more difficult to promote your videos to prospective subscribers via their recommendations.
However, this platform is more suitable for long-term engagement since new visitors can watch multiple materials sorted by specific topics to learn more about your brand and its offerings. Hence, a combination of short-term and long-term marketing tactics may be viewed as the most optimal video marketing strategy.
6. Offer Multiple Formats
In addition to the aforementioned texts and blog articles, you can also upload audio files from your video materials as podcasts. This format can be especially interesting for interviews, long influencer reviews, and other materials that do not require a visual image to grasp their key contents.
Keep in mind that your primary goal is to engage your audiences and make them interested in your ‘pull’ marketing message. If they become captivated by the materials while listening to them on a subway trip home, they will most certainly find your website and YouTube channel from your home PC and watch the ‘full’ version afterwards when they have time.
7. Have a Meta-Theme
Similar to any form of marketing communication, video marketing has a cumulative effect when it is integrated with some core brand message and brand vision. To achieve this goal, you need to develop a meta-theme for a series of videos or a promotional campaign.
If you are willing to launch a new product, you can start with a live stream hinting at this genuine offering followed by several short newsfeed advertisements posted on Facebook and Instagram. Before the sales start, you can upload longer video reviews from bloggers to maintain interest. Finally, official videos and post-purchase user evaluations reposted to your page can stimulate some late majority customers to overcome their scepticism.
Time to Get Started
The instruments described earlier allow you to quickly pinpoint potential problems and boost your video marketing effectiveness in the short-term perspective. However, a quantum leap in performance is not achievable without strategic thinking and in-depth analysis of your traffic composition and key engagement trends.
We would advise you to pay great attention to such elements as viewer demographics, playback locations, and redirect sources. Effectively, you need to understand who is watching your videos, what locations and time zones provide the greatest number of repeating followers, and which search engine queries or third-party resources attract the greatest amount of traffic to your website. This information will allow you to tailor your video topics and format to the tastes of your key audiences and maximise your coverage.
