So you’ve made a video…… Now what?

You’ve realised that video marketing is a great way to increase brand visibility and expand your reach. You’ve put time and effort into pinpointing your audience, defining your strategy and then creating amazing video content that speaks to your potential customers. Well, now it’s time to share your videos with the world… or those you have targeted to view it.

We call this term distribution in video marketing and it’s little more than releasing your content to the platforms that will get it seen and engaged with the most and thus providing you with some valuable KPI’s and return on investment.

Simply put if you’re not releasing your videos where your customers are spending their time online or if you don’t make it easy for them to find, they’re not going to see it.

During your time working on your strategy, you should have spent some time thinking about your customers and the platforms that suit them best to release your content but really the more places you embed, upload and distribute your videos the more likely they are to be seen.

So where can or should you distribute them? 

Your website is a great start. Either a blog page or a specific page that relates to your video content that you can direct web traffic to.  Embedding videos on your website helps SEO but it also increases the amount of time spent on a page. 

This means that if your viewers click and watch a two-minute video, those two minutes will end up making your site content more relevant to your potential customers in googles eyes, all good things.

You can embed videos on relevant pages, like your homepage, about section, product pages, pricing section, and support channel.

Your own site is a particularly good destination for evergreen content that will remain accurate, informative, and interesting over time (meaning less frequent updates and changes for you). 

You can use your Youtube or Video channels to host and embed your videos into your website and pull in some great analytics that can help define your video strategy moving forward. Or if you are going to go all-in with video maybe think of using a tool such as Wistia, Vidyard or Brightcove (no affiliation) to host your videos and dig a little deeper with those all-important analytics that we love.

A follow on from your website would be to embed your videos into landing pages in your current or future marketing campaigns, guiding your potential customers through your sales funnel and helping increase conversions up to 80%.  By a/b testing your page with video and without you can gauge from results how effective video is on those pages. 

Some advice though….make the video content relevant to your landing page.

Nothing sinks a landing page harder than a 15-minute promotional video that has nothing to do with your page or its ultimate goal.

If it is a landing page for a product, create a video specifically answering questions and providing the benefits of the product to sit on that page.

If you are promoting an event, create a video telling everyone what will happen at your event and build some much-needed excitement and anticipation around the event.  So you get my point, relevant content produced especially for your landing page will convert much higher than random video assets with no intention behind them.

Place your video above the fold and as the main attraction to the page and make sure you’ve remembered to create a call to action that tells the viewer exactly what action to take on the page. Let’s not leave this up to chance, talk the viewer what link to click what details to fill out and where they can buy what your selling. 

As part of your marketing, you should be in regular contact with your potential and current customers through email….Well, I hope you are anyway.

Some research has shown that adding the word video to your subject can increase your open rate by as much as 19% improve your click through rate by 24%. Just by adding the word!

We have seen clients increase their click-through rate when using video in their body of their email by almost 60% in nurture and sales campaigns. 

These stats alone would mean including video in your emails broadcasts would be a no-brainer but like the guidelines with landing pages make sure your video is relevant to your audience and the intention of the email. Like before if your email is about getting the latest cosmetic product today and the video is 10-minute meet the team video you will not see the results mentioned above and will see a large spike in unsubs.

And now onto social media in all it’s glory.

Social media platforms are possibly the most popular channels for the distribution of your video content. And while YouTube is probably the first thing that comes to mind, the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and increasingly so LinkedIn has a huge role in getting your content seen by a wider audience.  Working on your audience persona will best determine which channel your targeted audience will engage with most but i’ll lay out a few guidelines that will help in getting you started. 

1. Up to 90% of video consumed on these social channels are done so on a mobile device so take that into consideration when creating your content and what ratio and orientation you choose.  By this I mean square and vertical ratios instead of the horizontal widescreen norm you would see on your tv.  Each platform has a desired ratio for optimal performance so make this [part of your strategy and not an afterthought as some videos will be compromised if not formatted correctly for say an Instagram post.
2. Grab peoples attention in the first 3 seconds. You’re competing with fast thumbs nowadays and if like on Facebook you’re trying to stand out from informative text posts and interesting imagery you have to create thumb-stopping content that will catch your audiences attention and encourage them to watch the remainder of the video.
3. Keep it short, keep it simple and keep it interesting.  Attention spans are dwindling and with ALOT of competition out there keeping your videos short, sweet and informative is essential.  Channels like Instagram limit video posts to around 60 seconds and Twitter limiting videos a little over 2 minutes having a concise message is important and creating content with a duration intent will help in terms of copy and scripting in the preparation stages.
4. Have captions created as most content is viewed without sound. People view in workplaces and public transport and being able to convey your message without a voiceover and soundtrack is important. Upload your captions or embed them in your edit to cover all bases but make sure all your important information is easy to read and easy to understand.
5. Consider tagging those who feature in your content or you wish to view your content.  Platforms like Linkedin have a heavy networking focus and so spreading the love for those who took part in say an interview or testimonial will result in a wider audience base and a digital handshake.  The use of popular hashtags will also increase the visibility of your videos however the audience may not be your particular target customer but my view is the more eyeballs watching the video a larger possibility of engagement and opportunities that could potentially arise.
6. Video ads! Creating video content specifically for a sponsored ad on these platforms will increase your brand visibility and possibly bring you in more data to market to.  But beware, click-happy consumers with no intent on buying will eat up that advertising budget and leave a sour taste when considering ads in the future so proper targeting is a must.  
7. Take cues from the big guys. Have a look at what the big brands are doing with video online. No need to copy or regurgitate but see how they structure, target and distribute their content and see if there are ways you can implement similar strategies without spending as much money of course. 

Distributing your videos is just as important as creating them so make sure you plan and prepare correctly, target the right audience and make sure your are making it easy for them to find your videos online or wherever you choose to place them.

If you would like to discuss implementing video into your marketing in the future please contact us today.