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.
