Video is a powerful content medium for storytelling. It can have a big impact on the success of your content marketing efforts and promotional campaigns. It also serves as an effective way to connect with people and establish deep relationships with your target audience. And if you want to succeed with it, you need to promote video content from the start.
Adding video to your marketing mix can help you keep your content fresh, repurpose old assets, and reach new audiences. Owing to video’s high engagement rates across all social channels, most marketers are planning to increase their investment in video.
Source: https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-113388
How to Promote Video Content to Get More Views
If you want to step up your video marketing game, here are four effective ways to promote video content and increase their viewership.
Go Social
Social media platforms have acted as a catalyst, making video into the most popular of all content formats. In fact, a majority of customers claim that they have been influenced by a brand video on social media.
Because videos deliver the highest engagement rate of all content mediums, several brands are shifting to video posts for product launches, important announcements, and weekly or monthly contests. Thus, brands going social can make a more prominent impact on their customers using videos, as opposed to text and visuals.
Source: https://wearesocial.com/digital-2020
No matter whether you intend to promote a giveaway, or guide users on how to use your app, video content is your best bet.
You should absolutely aim to promote video content on social media platforms, if you want to get the word out to a large audience quickly. Videos get more views than other forms of content, thus getting qualified traffic to your landing page.
Look at how HITN Learning used a video to announce their holiday giveaway contest.
Instagram ranks fifth among the most popular social media apps, because it consistently stays ahead of the curve and offers innovative features for video marketers. Instagram Stories is one of its most engaging features, where brands can post a video of their latest offering and observe how their audience responds to it in real-time.
Facebook is also an effective platform for promoting brand videos. Look at how Vans used Facebook to live stream the Vans Park Series.
If your brand doesn’t enjoy a prominent presence on social networks, go for targeted ads on Instagram or Facebook. Use the Facebook Ads manager that offers promotional packages for advertisers with modest budgets.
Twitter is another social channel that offers innovative features for video promotion. Users can pin their desired tweet to ensure that their content stays on top of the channel page, providing it with maximum exposure.
Look at how H&R Block pinned a video tweet to give their contest more entries:
This report from Buffer highlights that pinned tweets lead to a 10X increase in conversions. This simple yet effective hack can boost your viewership and shares.
Merge Videos with Email Marketing Campaigns
One of the easiest ways to gain exposure for your videos is to feed them to your email audience.
Recent statistics by Campaign Monitor reveal that videos with emails can increase click rates by 65 percent and open rates by 19 percent. It can also reduce the count of unsubscribers by 26 percent.
Thus, video email marketing is a valuable strategy to increase your video’s viewership as well as your email open rate.
To improve the effectiveness of your video email campaigns, invest in tools like Wistia and BombBomb. These can help you combine your videos and emails with ease.
Source: https://bombbomb.com/
These tools let you efficiently use the email merge tag in your videos in the email provider list. Thus, you can display the video thumbnail and drive viewers to your video landing page. It makes the approach more meaningful for marketers who are looking to expand their customer base.
This is how WestJet, a Canadian airline, effectively uses the video email strategy.
Source: https://www.vidyard.com/blog/video-email-marketing/#video-in-email-marketing-examples
If you do not want to invest in paid advertising, video email marketing is a great alternative to increase exposure for your videos.
Invest in Video SEO
It might seem like an exhausting task, but it’s crucial to invest time in optimizing your video content for the search engines.
This means working with your search marketing team or SEO agency to chalk out video titles, appropriate tags, and meta descriptions for your videos.
Doing so will ensure that your videos perform well in the SERPs for the targeted keywords.
Google favors videos over other forms of content. Hence, you’ll find videos at the top of the SERPs.
Here’s a search result for the query ‘How to optimize videos for YouTube’. See how video content is the first to feature?
The thumbnail is an essential element of video SEO. Treat it like the cover of a book. It should be compelling, relevant, and beautiful, thus persuading viewers to click on your video.
Video transcripts are another important component of video SEO. They not only make your videos relevant to widee audiences, but full text transcripts also help Google’s search bots to easily crawl your video content. So, make sure you invest resources in creating video transcripts.
If you want to drive traffic to your YouTube channel rather than your official website, consider uploading your content on the platform. You can always use CTAs to drive viewers back to the desired landing page.
See how HubSpot promotes its 30-second videos on their YouTube channel. They focus on actionable guides, weekly podcasts, tutorials for SaaS marketing, business tips, social media, and a bunch of other topics. The content is a treat for digital marketers and SME owners.
Finally, remember that Google indexes only one video per page. So, if you have multiple videos on a webpage, it’s wise to include your most relevant video at the top of the page.
We are witnessing an astounding volume of new video content being generated and uploaded to the internet on a daily basis.
On YouTube alone, users upload 500 hours of video every single minute! So as you can tell, it’s challenging to get people to view your video.
If you want to improve your video’s viewership, allow your audience to share it. This will significantly improve your organic views. Make sure you add social share buttons in your videos.
Check out how Wired, a US-based publication, uses social sharing buttons to make it easier for their readers to share the content and boost brand awareness.
Source: https://www.wired.com/video/watch/a-clip-from-a-glitch-in-the-matrix
In this era when people begin and end their day on social channels like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter, the value of including social sharing buttons should not be underestimated. Hence, be sure that all of your videos have a ‘share’ option to gain you more views.
Conclusion
Most marketers find it tough to create high-performing videos, but rest assured that the task is very much possible.
Once you become a regular video content creator, you will master the art of catering to new and returning audiences.
You will also enjoy the benefits of video marketing, namely an increase in customer base and revenue.
Follow these tips mentioned above to step up your video marketing game.
All images taken from public domain via screenshots, from the author him or herself.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
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Tim Ferguson
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