6 Tips For Optimizing Your Video Marketing

Video content is everywhere these days. The number of people watching video content online is growing every day, and video is an increasingly large slice of news, entertainment, and marketing material.

Why is video growing so fast? Because it works. According to Hubspot, only 20% of people will read the text on a page, but 80% will stick around for video content. 64% of viewers who watch a video are more likely to buy a product than they were before the clip, and some studies have even shown that people can recall most of what they saw in a video almost three days later.

So how do you get on this train? Make no mistake, you can’t afford to skip out on video content. Whether it’s the short, low-budget clips of Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, ort Snapchat, or the higher-production-value work that some companies put into their websites and YouTube pages, savvy marketers are hopping on board.

Here’s what you need to do to bring your video marketing game to the next level.

Don’t Take Your Time

Internet users’ attention spans are short — there’s too much content out there and too much to do to linger on something that isn’t interesting, and that includes your marketing videos.

One in five internet users will abandon a video within ten seconds, so you need a captivating hook in the first few seconds of the video. If your video isn’t funny or fascinating enough to grab viewers’ attention right away, they at least need to be able to tell what the video is about and who it’s from.

Spread Your Content Around

Creating content takes time, expertise, and usually money. Get the most out of it by publishing it to multiple channels, not just YouTube. Depending on your buyer personas and where they live on the internet, you should be considering Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat as additional homes for your video.

Length and format will vary, so you’ll need to slightly remix your videos to fit each channel, but it’s still worth the effort to get in front of a broader audience.

Don’t Forget About SEO

Google isn’t quite smart enough to see what’s in your video (yet), but that doesn’t mean you can’t use SEO best practices to attract more attention to it. Optimize for keywords that are relevant to your business and content in the title and description of the video, just as you would with a blog post or web page.

Use long-tail keywords within your descriptions to draw in viewers as well. Some longer videos even warrant a sort of table of contents — write down timestamps and descriptions of the various notable moments in your video.

Be Consistent With Your Branding

Video is a visual medium — obviously. But what that means is that your video content needs to look like your content. If you have a consistent brand image across your website, packaging, collateral, and social media — and you should — your customers have certain expectations for what that content will look like.

Stay on brand, but use the natural format of the platform you’re posting on as well. Instagram, Facebook Live, and Snapchat all have unique formats of their own, so don’t strain yourself trying to shoehorn your usual style into their videos.

Prepare for the Silent Treatment

81% of consumers watch video ads on mute, and more and more video is being mixed in with feeds — like on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter — that are a mix of photos, videos, and text. Since people are browsing on the go, they’re often in public or otherwise not able to listen to the audio that goes with your video content, and you need to be prepared.

Subtitles might be the way to go. Lots of news outlets and brands have started including subtitles on their videos to cater to people’s sound-free habits. Another option, depending on the video itself, is to include some graphical elements that highlight key info in the video without showing a word-for-word transcript.

Don’t Forget About the CTA

Videos are entertaining in themselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re still in the marketing business, so they need to do more than that. On some platforms, you can make the video itself clickable or include annotations that users can click on, but that’s not always an option. If you can’t make the video clickable, it should at least have a splash screen at the end directing customers to your website.

You can also enclose CTAs in the captions, descriptions, and comments of videos. Even if the instructions are clear, you might find people asking where to find more information. Keep an eye on the comment section and be prepared with more information to guide people down the buying funnel.