Thinking Outside the Box with Video Marketing
In 2016 it’s hard to imagine a digital and social media marketing strategy that doesn’t involve videos, but at the same time, just creating videos in no way means that you’ll increase your brand visibility or improve your site traffic. Following our previous post on how to best optimize a video that you upload to YouTube, this week we’re going to review the best fundamental practices for video marketing.
Before you create a video, you first need a topic. That topic should relate back to your brand in some way, whether it’s a home supply store doing a video on how to install a shower or a band making a video to promote a song (this is arguably one of the oldest methods of video marketing, but for the purpose of this article, we are looking purely at how you would market a music video online.)
After you’ve settled on a topic and gotten the props and equipment you need, it’s time to shoot the sucker! However, a quick note on equipment: people often think they need to get the latest and greatest equipment but unless you’re shooting an extremely high production project, buying or renting a 4K RED Digital Camera is likely overkill. Even just a well-made DSLR camera can do the trick.
After you’ve filmed your video, now it’s time to decide where and how to upload it. Firstly, if you’re posting it on your site, you need to decide whether or not your site should host the video. If you do not have many or even any videos on your site, than embedding the YouTube version is more ideal as that will add to your overall views; coming from both your channel and site. However, if you are producing a lot of videos for your site and looking to establish it as something of a video hub–or at least boast a lot of such content–then you should host them on your domain as they will in turn be associated with your brand and drive traffic to your site. In addition, by hosting them on your site, you will get to alter the meta data instead of simply copying over the meta data from YouTube (more on this in the next paragraph). Also, if you have made a high-production video, Vimeo might also be a good choice as they have a better quality of video player.
Finally, when uploading the video, be sure to include keyword-rich metadata on your site using SCHEMA markup or ensure your descriptions contain keywords that will attract searchers to your YouTube channel. And when you’re filling in your description, be sure to include links to all of your relevant domains so that your site and content are seamlessly connected. Simply put, by carefully planning your video rollout strategy–from forming the video through production to distribution–and following the above steps, your chances of truly making an impact through your video marketing are greatly improved.
