If you’re not already producing video content, you may be missing out on a lot. There are many reasons for this:
- Visitors spend 88% more time on a website that has video than they spend on a website without it. Think of the wonders this does in reducing bounce rate.
- Video attracts 3x more monthly visitors to a website than any other content format.
- Search engines love video. Organic traffic from search engines increases by 157% with video.
- Consumers are 85% more likely to buy after watching a product video.
- Consumers are 46% more likely to seek information about a service or a product after seeing it in a video online.
- Video gives consumers 57% more confidence in their online purchase.
The advantages of video content marketing are many and well documented—which is why everybody seems to be leaping unto this lucrative bandwagon.
Over YouTube alone, there are 72 hours of video content uploaded every minute of every day. Then there is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Wistia, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and every other social sharing site that has enabled video sharing.
Standing out and making an impact in such a crowded milieu can be hard, but not impossible.
If you were wondering how to use video to get closer to your audience, add value to your brand, and increase conversions, here are 5 quick tips to get you started:
1. Listen to Your Audience
Your audience should be your number one source for your content ideas, and this remains true with video content. What is your target audience saying? What do they want to see? What are those things which are important to your audience?
You can get answers to these questions and more by:
- Listening in on social media conversations and replies
- Sending surveys to your followers
- Reading through the Frequently Asked Questions in your inbox
- Carrying out a Twitter hashtag search for terms that are meaningful to your brand
- Looking through popular question headlines in a BuzzSumo search of keywords relevant to your brand.
2. Align With Your Brand Goals
Once you are able to come up with a handful of ideas that are important to your audience, the next step is to go with those that align with your brand goals and message.
The sort of content that you want to put out should meet three crucial criteria:
· It aligns with your brand objective.
· It is relevant to your audience.
· It lies within your realm of possibility as far as production is concerned.
Content ideas that tick these three boxes can be considered ‘Perfect’.
3. Create Content that Resonates
When you transform your perfect idea to video content, make sure it is content that resonates with your audience. You want to create a connection.
What motivation, change in thinking or behavior are your trying to get across with your video? The answer to this should be at the back of your mind when you create any sort of content.
There is a lot that can be said about the emotions and psychology behind video content, but at the end of the day these are the emotions you want to aim for:
- Happiness
- Exhilaration
- Amazement
- Inspiration
- Hilarity
- Contempt
- Disgust
- Sadness
- Warmth
- Pride
- Nostalgia
- Surprise
- Knowledge
- Shock
- Confusion
- Arousal
- Fear
- Anger
The positive emotions are most effective at inspiring social shares.
4. Share!
Now that your video is polished and ready, it needs an audience. Treat your video content like you would treat your other pieces of content: share them over a long period of time over all your content distribution channels.
That way nobody gets to miss all the great content you’re sharing.
5. Measure, Analyze, Understand
Like all pieces of content, you have to measure your ROI.
- How many views is your video generating?
- How many shares?
- Better yet, what is the percentage of shares to views?
- Did your video get you any new subscribers?
- What is the percentage of subscriptions to views?
All these can help you know just how well your video content is doing and whether you are hitting your set content marketing targets or not.
