BackIncrease Engagement & Leads with Video
By 2021, video will represent 80% of all online traffic. Here are 5 tips for video marketing around ideal length, type of content, and tracking
Author: Todd Patton
In 2018, video is no longer an afterthought to a marketers overall strategy. It’s a full-funnel tactic that should be fully integrated into nearly every marketing campaign. Video helps to tell a brand story, explain the product, and increase awareness. Driving more viewers and keeping them engaged is the key to a successful video marketing campaign.
With video becoming the most preferred medium among consumers and the fact that by 2021, video will represent 80% of all online traffic, businesses are quickly pivoting to video marketing; yet many still struggle to create and use video content in a way that it would help increase engagement, generate leads, and hit important KPI’s.
1. Create content relevant to your audience
Focus on creating video content that adds value to your target customers and their needs. Consumers are overwhelmed by information (there are 8 billion video plays a day on Facebook!) and lack of time. If you want to get their attention and get them interested in your products/services, first, you need to find out who they are, where they engage with video, how they interact with the different platforms, and the topics that they care about. And afterwards, you need to “go from telling to showing” your business in a way that would relate to the problems they are facing.
2. Pick an ideal length — half of video engagement from videos 15 min or longer
There are various opinions about the length of the video that would result in the best engagement. But being targeted and relevant for your customers is the key to hooking the right people into watching long-form content. In fact, people do watch long content.
Research conducted by TwentyThree found that half of all video engagement comes from videos that are 15 minutes and longer. And even though only 8% of the videos were longer than 15 minutes, they accounted for 50% of engagement. This fact may vary based on the business or industry, and it’s important to note, that if marketers aren’t measuring the engagement of their videos, they won’t know which videos produce the best results. Marketers can’t rely on views or impressions alone when it comes to video.
3. Fit video content across the entire customer journey & marketing funnel
Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, video marketing can help in each stage of the customer journey. You should think about where your customer is and what they are looking to accomplish. Map out your customer journey and then adjust and place the different video content strategically.
For example, if a person is at the awareness stage in your funnel, a short explainer video or statement on social would entice them to learn more. Provide a link with your video to send them to your website where they can engage with longer-form video content and properly measure their activity. Social channels are great for awareness but are just the beginning of the buyers journey. With video processed 60,000x faster than text, it’s the perfect opportunity to quickly capture someone’s attention while they are in the awareness stage.
In the interest stage, a person probably already knows what they’re looking for, and that your product could be a solution to their problem. If a prospect is visiting a certain product page on your website, you could set up automated video emails with more information that are triggered when they watch part of a video but eventually leave the page.
4. Repurpose video content into many forms
People consume media in different ways. It’s vital for marketers to provide various options and choices for their prospects to use the content. SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin used to create and embed Whiteboard Friday videos to the Moz blog, but then also, to create more awareness, increase engagement and attract more people organically, he included an entire transcript.
He even found that “only half of the people watch the whole video, the other half – read the transcript.” Then, after 90 days, the Whiteboard Friday videos are uploaded to YouTube to create even more top of the funnel awareness, while still maintaining important video data by embedding it on a native blog.
5. Track video data properly to generate more leads
Simply measuring likes, comments, or views on videos would be the equivalent of measuring only visits for a landing page. To move beyond vanity metrics, marketers must start looking atengagement, play time of a video, and conversions that come from a video.
If 100,000 people watched your video, liked and commented on it, it may seem like a roaring success. But what if your average engagement play time is only thirty seconds of a ten-minute-long video? Adding forms to the beginning, middle, or end of a video can also paint a picture for marketers looking to increase leads, but also measure the real impact of their video content.
According to the TwentyThree study, only 38% of marketers are currently measuring engagement and only 18% collect leads from their video marketing content.
Marketers not only need to increase engagement and generate leads with video, they simply need to start. It will help marketers be more data-driven with their video content, finding out what works and what doesn’t.
Todd Patton is Head of Comms and Story at TwentyThree.
Ref: www.clickz.com