Jay LeonardSome marketing videos are a great success and some aren’t. The later cases usually happen when the video is not well-integrated or not driven by a wise marketing campaign and that’s a huge problem.
Today, you’ll learn the basics on how to use your marketing video for what it really is: a great online marketing tool!
- Make the best explainer video ever!
At first glance this may seem a bit exaggerated, but the truth is video quality directly affects your marketing results. If your animated marketing video doesn’t stand out among the competition, it’s badly animated or has a lousy story, you won’t get the desired results in your audience reception. A bad-quality marketing video can do great damage to your brand image.
Remember that your video doesn’t just promote your product; it also stands for your company. Watch how the brand sticks out in this one:
It’s always useful to have a great team of professionals to craft an animated video.
Aim your video to your marketing goals.
Not all marketing videos are created equally. Some marketing video styles are perfect for certain marketing goals and some are better for other objectives, so you need to find out which video style is better to use to fulfill your goals.
For example, whiteboard videos (those black-and-white animations that explain things on a digital whiteboard) are highly educational: they can explain the most complex things in an entertaining way, so they’re great to use to disclose new web services. Cartoon animated videos on the other hand, can be awesome for social media promotion because they’re short, fun and engaging.
Here’s a fun animated video that shows the most popular animated explainer video styles for businesses:
- Enhance your blogging.
It’s proven that a marketing video helps your SEO (search engine optimization) campaigns by making people find your company when searching through your brand’s keywords on Google. But are you actually running a wise SEO campaign?
One of the backbones of any SEO strategy is to generate steady and regular content by using your keywords. If you just publish an article or two every month, Google won’t consider your website as updated or relevant and will place it down on the last pages of the search rank, where no one will ever find it.
The antidote is simple: post to your blog as much as you can, at least two or three times a week. Don’t forget to place your main keywords in the headline, and a few within the article itself. Embed your marketing video within your posts as well; it’ll make visitors stay longer on your site as watching the video and that amount of time is one of the things search engines look for when deciding if a website is of interest or not. This combined SEO action will lead more and more potential customers to find your brand organically, and grow trust within your audience on a purchase decision.
Make sure to optimize your website as well: assure it loads fast and has a responsive design (one that suits any desktop and mobile device). Then get professional advice with SEO experts (we just hand over the basics) and look around for tips and tricks to help you out. Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch are great websites to start with.
- Place your video in the right spot.
Animated marketing videos have the ability to call for attention quickly, but if yours is embedded below the fold in your homepage or hidden under a lonesome landing page, no one will watch it.
Marketing videos are meant to be placed above the fold and be the first thing people notice when visiting your site. Visitors have become accustomed to short animated explanations instead of written disclosures, so they expect to watch an animated video before reading about your product or service. If they can’t find a video that makes things easier for them, they’ll leave the site right away: that makes you miss the chance to explain your business idea and eventually damages your SEO rank.
- Run a video SEO campaign on YouTube.
Once you have a great animated marketing video completed it’s vital for you to host it on YouTube. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine (above Yahoo! and Bing) and 3rd social network in the world, so having a neat place there is a great source for visitors and potential customers.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to rank #1 on YouTube. Check the piece in order to get essential tips and advice on video SEO.
- Use your video to boost your email marketing.
Well, read for yourself. Click-through rates on e-mails sent with video content are increased by 100% and the mere word “video” in the e-mail subject line increases the open rate from 7 to 13%.
Then why not include your marketing video in your email marketing campaign also?
- To ad or not to ad.
Ads always help, but encouraging paid promotion is a delicate subject, because it depends on any particular case. On YouTube, for example, it’s always good to invest some of your budget on video promotion at first. Besides, you can get advantage from YouTube’s calls-to-action and also from the brand-new new “cards” feature:
Paid promotion will make your video climb up a few steps and encourage more people to share it. After a few weeks or months (depending on your marketing objectives), your video will begin to show organically and you can even stop paying for advertising if you want.
- Be social about it!
Video is one of the most shared pieces of content on social media; Twitter and Facebook are quite aware of that. In order to seize this advantage, it’s vital for you to place call-to-action buttons next to your video in your website. Those buttons will encourage viewers to share the video and/or the whole piece through their social media channels.
Also use your video in your Facebook posts, Tweets and Pins and remember to keep your brand’s social media profiles updated and running. Be informed and ready to answer potential customers right away. As usual, paid promotion can always help you out.
- Use your video everywhere.
As a final piece of advice, be sure to place your video anywhere you can on the Internet. Use it in guest articles, discussion forums and other social networks. The more it shows the better!
Remember that if your video stands alone, no one will ever watch it and your efforts would be worthless.
- Expand your video reach to new markets… and beyond!
Despite making a custom marketing video for a particular audience, many times there’s no need to make it all over again if you need to expand your target location; you just need to translate your video to the native language of the new market, adapt it to a new voice-over and modify all of the on-screen text. This is way less expensive and faster than re-making the whole thing; these changes result in a more effective video, focused on a specific audience.
Besides, you can try specific calls-to-action in different versions of the same video to enhance the response of different audiences. As we recommended before, YouTube has now greater call-to-action options, so take advantage of them!
This has been our advice on how to make your marketing video succeed by integrating it on your marketing campaigns. We hope it has been useful!
Now, if you want to learn more about the benefits of these animated marketing videos, download Yum Yum Videos’ free guide “Explainer Videos: The Ultimate Marketing Tool.”
Read more:
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Yay! I’m grateful that I’m doing the right way. Got to do more. Thanks for sharing!
Very informative article. I can certainly say since I have making videos on YouTube and Vimeo that using these tips ahve increased my conversion significantly.
Thank you Donald! Video marketing is the way to go indeed. Please check our quality portfolio and give us your thoughts on it. Have a great weekend!
All great tips! Animated video is a cross channel medium that has so many uses for improving communication. Also worth noting that businesses have lots of online tools and resources for creating their own content. I’m a freelancer that uses Wideo (wideo.co/blog/animated-video-makers/) for short social video