Over the past few years we’ve seen probably the biggest changes in digital marketing since it’s very beginning. Things that used to work so well and ‘get the job done’ suddenly became less and less reliable and in some cases started becoming a liability.
With Google trying hard to prevent spam and preach the creation of unique, quality content, the idea of content marketing started getting real traction. Suddenly, content became the king. This has resulted in a huge increase in the numbers of content being published every single day. Making your content stand out is now probably the most difficult part.
One of the ways to stand out is to produce content that is unique and difficult to reproduce by your competition. You can achieve this with video content.
Good videos require both, expertise and budget. In order to succeed , you or your team will need to know your Ingest from your B-roll and you’ll need a decent budget.
Although it’s possible to produce video on a budget, especially using platforms like Vine or Instagram, you have to be aware that the vast majority of viral videos are produced by professionals and with a significant budget.
Why video?
People have been naturally drawn to a moving picture since it’s very beginning, this is also very true today in the online world flooded with all sorts of content. The average attention span of a person browsing the net is very short and long blocks of text are not something that will easily catch our attention. The numbers of people consuming video online are huge, YouTube alone gets over a billion unique user visits each month.
What can be achieved with video content?
1) Ranking, traffic & conversions on your site
Ranking with video snippets can significantly increase click through rates and traffic to your site. You’ve probably seen video snippets showing up in SERPs, most of these are from YouTube but some link back to the respective websites they’ve been published on. If you want to drive traffic to your website make sure your result is the latter.
In order to do that you will need to host the videos on your own site or paid video hosting solution that enables you to implement video XML sitemaps. Services like Wistia make both hosting and video sitemaps very easy, you can get a free account here.
2) Links & shares
If you can produce and promote truly amazing video content, people will link and share it. It’s easier said than done but trust me, I’d be much more likely to link or share some exciting video content than another boring block of text. Again, as in the point above, make sure you host the video yourself or use a platform like Wistia. You want all the shares and links for yourself and not for YouTube.
3) Branding and popularity
This is where you can take advantage of the massive audience of social platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and Vine.
Each of these platforms is different and will require you to produce different types of content.
YouTube
YouTube has the largest audience of all the video sharing platforms and is in fact the 2nd most popular search engine after Google.
YouTube is great for viral videos and if used correctly it can give your brand some serious notoriety. Dollar Shave Club video is a great example.
Actionable Tips – optimize your YouTube channel to give your videos a head start. Transcribe your videos – it helps search engines understand the contents of your video.
Vine – 40 million users.
Vine is a great mobile video sharing platform where you create and share content directly from your mobile. Big brands quickly jumped on this platform, some with a video really does seem to be taking over the world a success.
Instagram – over 150 million users.
Unlike vine, Instagram wasn’t designed with video in mind. It started as a photo sharing network. This has changed and Instagram users can now share 15 second long videos. Many brands successfully use Instagram as part of their marketing.
As you can see, video can be a great, engaging medium for your content marketing campaigns. There is a cost and certain level of expertise needed but you can use it to your advantage as it creates an entry barrier which some of your low budget competitors may struggle with.