A corporate video was once an eight-minute message from the CEO of a company hidden on the ‘About Us’ page of a website. Thankfully, those days are over. Videos are now the most effective way for a business to capture the attention of its audiences while enhancing brand awareness and ultimately, improving the bottom line. It is predicted that by 2019, 80 per cent of all consumer internet traffic will prompted by video content.
Facebook users can certainly testify to the impact of the moving image. The social media website generates eight billion video views on average every single day. Posts that include video also have 135 per cent greater organic reach than still image posts. And interestingly, nearly 85 per cent of videos on Facebook are watched without audio so more videos are now using subtitles.
But when a business chooses to incorporate a video component into its marketing campaign, it must have a strategic and targeted purpose if the rewards are to be reaped. And the following factors should be considered:
Business objective
Firstly, it is important to determine the business objectives. These could be to educate your audience, generate new leads, promote a certain product or service, or a combination of all three.
For example, Virgin Media Business launched its Generation IP:2025 campaign to look at what’s in store for the data economy. Their innovative film, produced by blueprint.tv, received more than 50,000 views. The interactive film achieved the objectives of presenting their brand, showcasing their services and technology, educating people on activities in their sector and using thought leadership to shape the future. The campaign was mainly focused on CTOs and CIOs but resulted in coverage from the BBC, Huffington Post and the Guardian. But this is not commonplace. Nowadays, when corporate or B2B content goes viral, it is usually not for the right reasons.
Audience
Secondly, pinpointing your target audiences from the outset is a must. The key here is to hone in on specific individuals or organisations and keep them interested rather than cast a wide net over potential viewers who may or may not give their attention. After all, 300 views from exactly the right people a business is looking to reach is better than 6000 views from irrelevant sources. It’s all about quality over quantity.
Communications objective
Next, what a business wants to say and how it wants to say it is key to a video’s success. Beyond just the messaging, this includes the tone, style and narrative, all of which should be dependent on who the company is looking to reach.
UX
The end-to-end user experience is all-important when thinking about where and how a video will be seen. This requires the user journey to be structured in a holistic way with the video as the centrepiece. Other sources of content worth integrating into overall user experience include blogs, splash images or infographics.
Duration
The length of a video you are marketing should never exceed 90 seconds. In fact, according to Animoto, nearly two-thirds of consumers prefer video under 60 seconds. A study by Wibbitz states that the ideal length is precisely 51 seconds. If you want to run a native video on Twitter, 90 seconds is the limit and the shortest videos always have the most views. LinkedIn native videos are now available too. You can argue that the video also needs subtitles so people can read the context of the film when it comes up silently in their feed.
Structured and Metadata
Once the content has been produced and is ready to use, it is vital to maximise its compatibility with internet use. This requires a combination of structured data (the format and type of information being provided), file optimisation (making it easier to read your content files) and metadata (data that describes other data). The European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (EVCA – now Invest Europe) were ranked second on Google for the term ‘Private Equity’ using these methods.
Search and Seeding
YouTube has become a highly effective way to optimise SEO on Google and YouTube itself. After all, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and its popularity is infectious – 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute and almost five billion videos are watched every single day by 30 million daily visitors. When a video appears in universal search on Google, 80 per cent of the time it is a YouTube video.
Seeding is a term that has become commonplace within the content marketing space over the past few years. This essentially entails targeting influencers, customers or certain demographics. It relates back to the idea of using a highly selective approach to reaching the right audiences – or custom audience marketing. The aim is for these audiences to distribute your video through their network with the added value of their endorsement and credibility. Coincidentally this video blueprint.tv produced on video content marketing which was optimised for search has generated nearly 8,000 views mostly from organic Google and YouTube search.
See also: How I grew my YouTube channel to over 68,000 subscribers
PPC
The pay-per-click (‘PPC’) mechanism can provide a substantial boost to your campaign. Previously, marketers chose PPC or content marketing but not both. However, combining the two adds speed and scale to generate leads and significantly ramps up your conversion rate. This can be done in a variety of ways, whether by using AdWords, Display, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook
Conversions
Conversion tracking helps reveal what happens when someone clicks on an ad; whether it led to a purchase, download, or sign-up. Each PPC channel allows conversion tracking codes to be collated. This tells you which aspects of your campaign are achieving the desired results and also helps to build audience lists for display remarketing.
Ultimately, beyond being just educational or promotional, the goal is to get as many conversions as possible. This can be more easily achieved by embedding videos on the landing pages or using calls to action to drive people to fill in sign-up forms. Each video should bear the potential for a conversion – translated into a transaction or new relationship. According to Hubspot, 90% of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision process.
Measurement
Finally, the success of a video marketing campaign should be measured in three key ways -conversions, mentions/interactions and data/audience build. Another technique is using reverse IP lookup, which is essentially looking at the IP address to identify companies who visit the video page on your site. This information can prove to be invaluable for conversions down the line or for business development.
Businesses that use video can expect to see 41 per cent more web traffic from search than those which don’t, according to research company Aberdeen. Furthermore, Forbes estimates that adding video to emails can increase click-through rates by up to 300 per cent. With the stats speaking for themselves, no business should consider themselves exempt from the benefits from a well-structured video content marketing campaign.
Mungo Park is co-founder of Blueprint.tv.
Further reading on video marketing
