One digital marketing trend that's been steadily building for years is the incredible popularity of videos. People are consuming more videos every year, whether on their social media pages, emails, or on sites such as YouTube. There is no longer any question of whether video marketing is beneficial. Let's explore the best techniques and strategies for getting the most out of video marketing.

Make Video Marketing a Priority

There are many benefits to using video marketing in your business.

• Helps you build credibility and authority.
• Boosts your SEO and drives traffic to your website.
• Lets you engage more effectively with leads and customers.
• Videos are an excellent teaching tool for explaining products and services.

Videos Increase Engagement

Engagement such as shares and comments are one of the most important indicators of success in marketing. Videos are proven to boost engagement. According to one study, videos get 1200% more shares on social media than text posts or static images combined. Every marketer dreams of creating a viral video that gets shared millions of times. You seldom see that kind of engagement with other types of content such as blog posts.

Video Marketing Provides a Strong ROI

When planning your marketing strategy, you need to consider how to allocate your budget. Video marketing is one of the best investments you can make. According to a study by Animoto, 88% of video marketers were satisfied with their ROI. One reason for this is that you can get a great deal of leverage out of videos that cost little or nothing to make and publish. Of course, you can also use paid video ads as well. Either way, the benefits can help you get an impressive return for your marketing dollars.

Create a Video Marketing Strategy

As powerful as videos can be, you have to do more than simply create a bunch of videos that have some connection to your business and hope for the best. You need a strategy so that each video has a purpose.

Identify Your Audience

Who is the audience for your video? Some businesses have multiple audiences, so it's important to target your viewers for each video.

What is the Purpose of Your Video?

Videos can have many purposes. Each video should have at least one main goal. This may include:

• Explainer videos — These are videos to describe a product or service.
• Brand awareness videos — Rather than focusing on a specific product, this type of video is about building familiarity with your business. You may talk about your history, values, and purpose.
• Reviews and testimonials — Video reviews and testimonials from customers are extremely valuable for social proof.
• Stories on Facebook and Instagram — This type of short, ephemeral content is useful for checking in with your audience and calling attention to a certain product, promotion, or event.
• Live videos — Engage with your audience in real-time on Facebook or other platforms.

These are some of the most popular types of videos. In some cases, they overlap as when you create a Story to quickly explain a product.

Video Formats

You also have to decide what format your video is going to take. Today's technology gives you more and more choices.

• Webcam videos — With this popular type of video, you (or a spokesperson for your business) speaks directly into the camera. This is a good way to connect directly with viewers.
• Animation — Animated videos are useful for entertaining the audience with humor and visually interesting scenes.
• Whiteboard videos — While whiteboard is actually a type of animation, it's a distinct category of video that's especially good for explaining material that might otherwise be dry or technical. 
• Live action — These are basically short films where you can film people, events, locations, or anything that's relevant.
• Screencasts — When you want to display content on a screen, such as web pages, screencast videos are useful.

There are other types of videos as well but these are some of the most popular. In some cases, you may combine two or more methods, such as live action, webcam, and screencast.

Where to Upload Your Videos

You have to decide where to post your videos. One of the advantages of video marketing is that you can get a great deal of leverage from a single video. The following are some possibilities.

• Your website.
• Social media sites. You can upload videos to any social media platform on which you're active such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
• Send videos via email. Embedding videos in email isn't quite the same as uploading them to a website but it's another way to get more reach. Neil Patel provides a thorough guide on how to include videos in email. One thing to keep in mind is that not all subscribers can see your videos. Therefore, be sure to include essential information in text form as well.
• YouTube. YouTube is one of the most popular sites in the world, and the second-largest search engine after Google (which owns YouTube). You can rank videos on both Google and YouTube. It's also easy to embed YouTube videos elsewhere.

While deciding where to upload your videos, consider your goals. If you mainly want to drive traffic to your website, you can post all of your videos there. On the other hand, if you optimize your YouTube videos, you can drive traffic to your YouTube channel and your website (e.g. someone watches your video on YouTube and is directed to your website in the description, or using a card).

Optimize Your Videos

Video optimization is essential if you want to get as much traffic as possible to them. Just as you need to optimize articles and blog posts using keywords and popular titles, you need to do the same for your videos.

• Choose a keyword-rich title and description. The title along with the description makes it easier for viewers to find your video. YouTube provides a great deal of space for the description so you can use this opportunity to include as many keywords as possible. At the same time, write for humans and don't just stuff in a long string of keywords.
• Create a custom thumbnail. The thumbnail is what potential viewers on YouTube see before they decide whether to watch or not. Using a custom thumbnail rather than the default one selected by YouTube can get you more views. Choose an image that's striking and relevant to catch people's attention.
• Use YouTube Cards to create a strong call-to-action.
• Make a transcript of your video. Transcribing your videos may sound like hard work but it can really pay off in terms of video SEO. Search engines still crawl text rather than images and a transcription provides you with lots of additional content for the search engines to crawl. You can outsource the transcription process or handle it in-house by using software such as Google Speech to Text. 

Additional Video Marketing Tips to Boost Traffic

Here are some additional ways to get more traffic and engagement from your videos.

• Track your results. It's important to perform thorough analytics for your videos. Track essential metrics such as views, retention (whether viewers watch a video to the end or abandon it), and viewer demographics.
• Study your competition. Research the top videos in your niche and take note of the topics they cover and other features of their videos such as the style, format, and length. You always want to stay true to your own brand but you can get valuable clues by noticing what is working for others.
• Determine the ideal length for your videos. As a rule, keep them short. Many social media platforms are geared to short videos of between 15 and 60 seconds. The longer a video is, the more challenging it is to keep the viewers' attention. There are exceptions, though, such as in-depth interviews or tutorials.
• Boost your videos with advertising. While video SEO can work, it can take time. For extremely competitive topics, you may still not be able to outrank the competition. Paid advertising, such as Facebook ads or promoting your videos on YouTube is the fastest way to generate traffic.

Video Marketing Will Continue to Grow

Cisco predicts that by 2022, 82% of all consumer internet traffic will be video. If videos aren't a significant part of your marketing strategy, this is a good time to change that. There are so many ways to reach any audience with videos, whether you're making a 15-second Story on Instagram, a spontaneous live video on Facebook, or a longer instructional video for your website or YouTube.

About Eniture Technology

Eniture Technology specializes in helping e-Commerce merchants grow by providing useful information, digital marketing services, off-the-shelf apps that solve common problems, and custom programming services. If you're interested in accelerating the growth of your online sales, please contact us. You might also enjoy this free information on the 10 reasons why you should be using HubSpot to grow your e-commerce business.