This is a guest post by Adria Saracino.
With over 500,000 new WordPress posts made each day, it’s important that your blog is the highest quality it can be in order to maintain your readership. But don’t worry, maintaining and attracting a strong readership is not impossible. It’s actually very doable.
One of the best ways to interest readers in your blog is by using video, and specifically video marketing. Why will video and video marketing make a difference to your blog? Simply put, people love video. Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube, and in 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views, or about 140 views for every person on Earth. YouTube is the second largest search engine, just behind Google.
People are obviously watching a lot of video around the world, and if you’re in the marketing or blogging space, learning how to use video will help you get your content out to a captive audience. Distilled has created a thorough video marketing guide that will help you rock video marketing whether you’re a video veteran or a newbie.
So what’s the deal with video marketing? Let’s break it down…
How to Create Awesome Marketing Videos
Don’t find yourself using video just for the sake of using video. There are certain types of content that work best in video format:
- Promotion of a physical product or service
- News releases
- Placement ads
- Instructional videos/tutorials
- Short and long form informational content
- Creative imagery
- Live event recording
- Performative content
If you have decided on your content type, the next step is the creative process. No matter what content you’ll share in your video, the creative process and questions to be answered are generally the same. Below is a rigorous creative process that will allow you to create a video relevant to your readers, while maintaining your blogging, marketing, or business goals.
- Content gap analysis: This step identifies the content gaps in your market/niche that you can fill by answering questions like what do people care about, what might work in your niche, and what have other people done in different verticals?
- Define what success looks like. What do you want to achieve?
- Form gap analysis: This step identifies the gaps in the form video is taking in your market/niche by answering questions like what style of content do you need and what kind of form should the content idea take?
- Define the technical implementation: Hosting, embedding, integration etc.
- Define subject and theme
- Pre-production: Determine level and style of the product. Script your video
- Production: Make your video
The Benefits of Video Marketing
There are multiple benefits of using video marketing, but three key benefits are improved user engagement, personable branding, and search engine optimization (SEO) perks.
Improved user engagement
Improving user engagement requires strategically placed video content and design to encourage people to watch and respond to the video. The content itself will need to be thought-provoking, create viewer anticipation, and invite further action and engagement from the user. In the implementation phase, strategy such as social responses and comments will be critical to ensuring you achieve your goal.
Personable branding
To improve branding, you either need to create an engaging ad for your company/service/blog, build several creative pieces that will generate buzz as a consequence of the creative value, or create informational content valuable to your target community, such as tutorials.
Video allows the viewer to experience a simulated face-to-face interaction much more than through audio, image, or text. Video allows the communication of body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, and personal characteristics. For branding, this is extremely important, as it allows companies to display a personable side much better than through image, audio, and text.
SEO benefits
There are two main SEO benefits to using video: link building and conversion improvement.
Link building
Links continue to be the main metric that search engines use to determine the authority of a piece of content. Search engines count links to a site as “votes” in favor of that site’s credibility and authority. Search result rankings are then based on a combination of relevancy (determined by the content and terms used on the page) and authority (determined by the number of referring inks and social shares).
Conversion improvement
Through increasing engagement and trust, video content can be a great way of driving greater conversions, particularly on commercial pages. Simply put, video sells product and service.
Video is a valuable tool that can help you engage millions of viewers. Engaging your blogging audience is not as easy as throwing together a shoddy video, however; so make sure you know the specific process of creating a video and the benefits you can reap from it. For more information and resources, download the PDF video marketing guide.
About Adria Saracino
Kikolani covers blog marketing and blogging tips for personal, professional, and business bloggers to succeed in search and social media marketing. Kristi Hines is a 
Hi,
I think creating marketing videos is not an easy task to do. All you need to do is to follow the video formats that you have suggested. These are truly great. Thanks for the share!!
No problem Aditi, glad to be of help!
Video marketing is a very big risk/reward investment. You are correct people these days love more visual marketing, but the quality must be there. Low quality audio or video will drive people IMMEDIATELY away from your message. If you chose to take the video approach (which will be essential soon enough), you will need to make sure that you invest in the highest quality videos you can. High production value is greatly rewarded.
I agree to an extent, Paul. High quality video in general is key to success. However, there are times when a brand would want a “shaky hand, lower quality production” to give off a certain tone and to help deliver a certain message. Just like knowing what type of content you should put into the video, the artistic direction will vary depending on the goal of the piece. For example, think how much different Paranormal Activity would have been as a movie if it didn’t have that “real life” vibe. So sometimes, it’s a creative decision to make a video appear lesser “quality” – but I think the key is “was it done on purpose?”
I have recently started with video content marketing. In the beginning I thought it would be a huge adjustment getting used to showing your face on camera.
I have to admit that I am far more comfortable in doing screencasts and Powerpoint presentation-like videos. That is until I am able to invest in better quality equipment (those cameras that reduce the yellow faces etc) to use.
So far I have done my intro videos to my new site as well as my newly launched eBook. The response has been great. People have interacted with me even more on a personal level, which I love!
Thanks for sharing this with us!
Ruan | FreelanceWritingTactics recently posted New Release: “The Best Website Traffic Generation Strategies By 10 Top Bloggers | A Tribute”
That’s great to hear Ruan! I like the relationships video can help you form, it really helps you brand yourself and come out from behind the “just another name on the Internet” curtain. Looks like it’s done wonders for connecting with your audience!
Adria Saracino recently posted Reinclusion Afterlife
I am looking to get into video marketing myself!
I will look into what you are offering here.
Thanks!
Samuel recently posted How To Drive Traffic To Your Website!
This is a very timely article for me as I have just purchased a webcam. Video marketing here I come! Thanks for the good pointers. I will be using them. And, I am certainly happy to see that video sells product!
Suzanne recently posted A Financial Advisor Business Plan Template You’ll Want to Use
Great to hear Suzanne! Best of luck!
Video is more appealing to customers especially when demonstrating how a product is used or when the actual business owner is in the video.
Researchers have understood that people take in information better when it’s presented in a visual format than just a plain text format. Little wonder that YouTube gets over 3 billion video views per day. So video marketing creates more user engagement and understanding about your business.
Thanks for this post. Will check out the download.
Shamelle recently posted How To Choose A Good YouTube Channel Name You Won’t Regret Later!
Very true! It’s a lot easier to digest information, especially when it’s complex, if you are shown versus having to read and comprehend ourselves. Glad you found this helpful!
It may sound really simple but video marketing is not an easy task. I have been editing videos before and it’s very time consuming. It’s good if you have money to outsource but then again having a great quality video is expensive too.
I’m checking the video now and see what’s cooking.
Jeff recently posted Fairy Tail 304 Spoiler and Prediction: Daimatou Enbu
Agreed, video marketing (or any marketing for that matter) isn’t easy. However, it’s all about ROI. If you have measurements in place to track efficiency and results, you can learn from your mistakes and become better over time.
I just start video marketing recently via YouTube, and have a good experience with it. The visitors are more targeted, and a sharply increment in the referral traffic.
Shadab recently posted How to Embed Facebook Videos in WordPress
Great Adria,
I am agree with you Video marketing is the nice way to engage users to your blog and get repeat visitors, in the case of video marketing visitors get engage easily.
Brainpulse recently posted Be Prepared Before Going Global