Video marketing is one of the most effective tools at your disposal because statistics show that consumers respond incredibly well to visual content.
In fact, 54% of consumers say that they want to see more video content from brands and businesses that they support, and video marketers generate 66% more leads per year.
Visual content is particularly effective on social media because it catches the attention of users and people are more likely to share videos than simple text posts.
Hopefully, you already understand the amazing benefits of video marketing, and you are creating brilliant video content of your own. But a lot of marketers forget one very important thing; your video is only effective if people actually watch it.
Even though creating the perfect video is important, it’s vital that you know how to distribute it and boost the number of views if you want to see a return on your investment.
This article will give you some great insights on how to improve your videos and, most importantly, marketing a video on a budget once it’s finished, so it has a real impact.
How to Get The Most Out of a Piece of Video
Marketing your video in the right way so you can maximise views and capitalise on the benefits of video marketing is essential. These are the best methods for marketing your new video.
Link to Video Landing Pages in Email Signatures
Email marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy, and it offers a great opportunity for promoting your video content. Creating email signatures is a brilliant way to increase sales from existing customers that are already on your email list, and you should use them as a way of driving views on your video marketing content.
If you provide a link to your video landing pages on your email signature, you should see an increase in your click through rate.
However, it’s also important to consider your landing page bounce rate and the impact that video marketing can have. If you have a high bounce rate, this means that people are clicking through to the landing page but there is nothing there to convince them to stick around and continue exploring your site.
A well crafted video will help to reduce the bounce rate and hopefully, encourage more sales.
Linking your video in your email signature doesn’t cost you a thing and you are already interacting with customers via email anyway, so you may as well use it as an opportunity to boost your video marketing.
Release a Part of The Video On Instagram
Leveraging your social media presence to boost engagement with your video marketing is a simple, cost-effective way to get more views. Instagram Stories is a great feature for marketers and it’s the perfect place to post a short teaser of your video.
If you already have a strong Instagram presence, posting a clip of the video on your stories is a good way to get people excited about it and encourage them to click through to your site and watch the full video.
Statistics show that 15-20% of users will swipe up on a link in a branded story to view their website, so it’s an effective way to boost your views. It’s particularly good if you are trying to reach a millennial audience because 60% of them watch and post Instagram Stories.
You can also use paid ads on Instagram to increase your reach. This is particularly effective if you don’t already have a strong presence on the platform.
Add Share Buttons to the Video Player
Engagement is very important in video marketing. A well crafted video encourages users to share with their followers, and this is a great way for you to get your video seen by more people.
However, if you want people to share your video, you need to make it easy for them, which is why you should always add a share button to the video player. You can also increase the likelihood of sharing if you add a second share button to the page itself.
Create a Word-of-Mouth Network
Word-of-mouth marketing is an effective strategy that relies on consumers sharing content and information about your company voluntarily.
Although it can be tricky to generate an effective word-of-mouth strategy, if you can create a network, you can push things in the right direction.
Instead of paying sites to promote your video, try to build a network of other marketers. Then, you can ask them to promote your video marketing content in exchange for promoting theirs in the future.
Just make sure that you are only emailing other marketers if your video is actually relevant to their audience.
Optimise Your Video For SEO
When writing content for your website, you always use keywords and tags to optimise it for SEO. It is important to take the same approach to your video marketing as well, but this is often overlooked.
Hosting the video on your own domain is one of the simplest ways to optimise for SEO. You also need to make sure that you enable embedding because this will increase the number of inbound links that the video generates.
Your video description is incredibly important too. When Google is scanning content, it needs to understand what it is about and how relevant it is to the search term. This is relatively simple with written content but not so much so with videos. So, make sure that your video description is detailed and contains the right keywords so Google can find your content.
Once you optimise your video for SEO, you will generate far more organic traffic and see a big increase in views.
Pin Your Video At The Top Of Your Twitter Feed
When you pin a tweet at the top of your feed, it stays there permanently, until you unpin it, of course. Ordinarily, your tweets are only visible for a short period of time because they are replaced with the new content that you post.
If you post your video content on Twitter and don’t pin it, this seriously limits the number of impressions and after a few days, it’s unlikely that many people will see it at all.
But if you pin your video at the top of your video feed, you continue to make impressions and get more views. Having video content in a pinned tweet also makes your Twitter profile far more attractive because users are immediately presented with interesting visual content.
How To Market Your Video On A Budget
Creating professional video marketing content is expensive, so if you want to stay on top of your budget, you need to find ways to promote the video without spending too much. These are some of the best ways of marketing your video on a budget.
Use Video Thumbnails On Your Email Newsletter
People that are already engaging with your brand are more likely to watch your video, so targeting them is the easiest way to get views on your video and encourage people to share it.
Sending out an email newsletter to people on your subscriber list is a great way to keep them up to date with all of the latest news about your business. It’s also a brilliant opportunity to tease your video and get them to click through to your video landing page.
Embedding the video in your newsletter makes the content more interesting and should improve your open rate. A good average open rate for emails is 15-20% and if your open rate is lower than this, video content is a good way to boost it.
You should also see a significant increase in your click through rate from newsletters at the same time. This is a very cost-effective strategy because you already have an email list that you are building for free.
Run Targeted Paid Ad Campaigns
If you are working on a tight budget, you might avoid paid ads. However, as long as you run targeted campaigns, you can get a lot of exposure with a very small budget.
Facebook and Twitter are both great platforms for paid ads, provided that you think carefully about who you are trying to reach.
These platforms collect a huge amount of data about consumer behaviour to build detailed profiles about their users. You can leverage this data to target your ad campaigns at a very specific subsection of your audience.
As long as you set daily spending limits and maintain a narrow focus, you will see a big increase in video views with a relatively small investment.
Put Your Videos Above The Fold
The way that you place your videos on your site is so important if you want to boost views. It is important that you understand scrolling and attention behaviors when designing your landing pages.
Studies show that 57% of their viewing time looking at content above the fold before scrolling any further. 74% of viewing time was spent on the first two screenfuls of content.
This means that content towards the bottom of the page is far less likely to get viewed than content that is above the fold.
Whenever you are embedding your video on your website, always make sure that it appears above the fold to increase the number of views. You can boost views even further by adding your video to other high-traffic pages, like the ‘contact us’ or ‘about us’ pages.
Use Tweet Threads To Promote Your Video
The character limit on a single tweet is quite limiting when trying to convince users why they should watch your video. In some cases, a short teaser tweet can be effective but it is often best to use a tweet thread instead.
This is a series of connected tweets that allow you to tell a longer story. Using threads gives you the opportunity to present some of the information that appears in the video and show users why it is worth their time.
Link The Video In Your Social Media Bio
Another simple way to increase your video’s visibility on social media is to put a link in your bio. Users look at your bio when they want to know more about your business, which means that they’re likely to click a link and watch a video about you.
You can update your bio whenever you like, free of charge, so it’s a great place to promote your latest video marketing content. If you do this across multiple social media platforms, you should notice a big increase in your video views in a short space of time.
Connect With Relevant Online Communities
Looking for online communities is a great way to find thousands of people that are likely to be interested in your videos. There are some great groups on sites like Reddit and Facebook that are dedicated to specific niches.
For example, if you sell online security software, why not look for a group for IT professionals? Your video is likely to be viewed a lot of times if you post it in the right community and many of those viewers will also be encouraged to share it on their own social media profiles.
Share Your Video At An Event
Event marketing is just as relevant as ever and 79% of marketers in the US use event marketing to generate sales. Events are also the perfect place to promote your new video content.
You have an engaged audience that is there because they are interested in your business, so they are very likely to be interested in your video content. It’s also an effective way to make the event more varied and interesting for your attendees.
Virtual events can be just as effective as in-person ones, so even if you don’t have the budget for a large business event, you can still host one online.
The exclusivity of an online event draws people in and should increase video views by a long way. After the event has concluded, viewers who enjoyed it are likely to share it with others who did not attend.
If you want your video marketing campaigns to succeed, creating the perfect video is just the start. It is vital that you use these strategies to promote the video and make sure that your audience engages with it.
Only then will you see the true benefits of video marketing.
