It’s becoming harder and harder to reach a broad base of consumers with any form of media, even if you’ve already created a really compelling brand video. With the quantity of content uploaded each day to the internet, finding new creative outlets to reach your niche consumers has become a necessity.
As a business using corporate video and commercial video as part for your marketing strategies, how can you creatively stand out to consumers? How do you ensure your brand voice isn’t lost in the deluge of businesses bawling for consumer attention?
1. Pay-per-click Landing Page
Pay per click (PPC) is defined as, “…an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a search engine, such as Google, or a website host) when the ad is clicked.”
Many businesses turn to PPC advertising as a way to increase sales and brand awareness and give them an edge over their competitors. Others use it to supplement organic search traffic while marketing initiatives are getting off the ground.
A study by eyeviewdigital.com proves that using video on paid search landing pages can increase conversion by an average of 80%. Product videos, product demos, brand videos, or other marketing video content can significantly help to engage your viewers and increase your overall lead volume.
Oddly enough, despite many convincing statistics on the success of landing pages with corporate video content, a shockingly low number of marketing departments use video when creating these pages for their paid search campaigns. If you’re looking for an edge on your competition and are already running paid search campaigns, adding video to your content may be your secret weapon.
2. Social Media
The topic on every marketer’s tongue these days? Social media marketing. An aspect of this increasingly popular marketing strategy that many marketers tend to forget is the social video. Social video is digital video designed to be shared through social networks. Social videos feature:
- Short duration with shareable content.
- Teasers for your main video.
- A strong emotional hook.
Effective social video doesn’t need to tell the whole story. It just needs to grab attention to lead the viewer to navigate to your business site. Wallpaper videos, snippets taken from your full-length video, are often useful and simple ways to push video content out through your social channels.
Creative Social Sharing
Besides sharing your videos on your brand social profiles, work on finding unique groups to connect with. There are specific Facebook groups, LinkedIn discussion boards, and Google+ groups that you can join. This broadens your overall brand exposure, helping you reach target personas that otherwise wouldn’t be reached through your business profiles.
And don’t forget to take the time to research new social groups that fit your niche consumers as well. There are far more social platforms out there than just Facebook and Twitter. Take a look at this list of the 40 most popular social networking sites and see if it may be advantageous for you to consider joining some new, lesser known groups.
3. YouTube
YouTube is one of the biggest search engines out there, with more than 300 hours of video added every minute, and over 200 million hours of video content watched every day.
Despite these staggering numbers, only 9% of U.S. small businesses use YouTube.
When creating a YouTube business channel, there are few things you must do to get the most out of your videos.
- Complete your YouTube business account profile. Add images, ‘about us’ content, and multiple channels if desired.
- Optimize your YouTube profile. Use the correct business keywords in your descriptions.
- Include your website URL in the beginning of every video description and within the ‘About Us’ section.
- Make sure that your URL includes the https:// in the front so that it is a clickable link.
- Once you’ve uploaded several videos to your business channel, select a few as “featured” videos. This will prompt users to view those selected videos after viewing others.
- Make sure your videos are set to public in the privacy settings.
- Maintain and manage your account. YouTube is just like any other online community, and it is important to maintain and build relationships with your audience.
4. Email Marketing
Have a sizeable email list? Use it!
According to Forrester’s research, adding video to emails can increase conversion rates by 200 – 300 percent. Segment your contacts into unique email lists based on their expressed interests (purchases made on site, traffic path across your website, pages viewed, social activities, etc). Then, choose the videos that you believe would be of the most interest to each of those unique lists and begin sending out emails that include those selected videos.
5. Guest Posting
Have connections in your industry or a related industry where your consumers might hang out? Leverage those connections by guest posting on their blogs. Augment the effects of the blog by adding in a video to help increase engagement, social sharing, and conversion rates.
Generally, it’s best to use a video that a) ties into the content of the blog post itself and b) does not have a strong call to action or brand emphasis. Most other brands will, understandably, not appreciate an aggressive sales pitch on their blog. Keep your video (and blog content) light, informative, and useful for their consumers.
If your connection is willing, have them share your blog or article to their social networks while you do the same. This can double, triple, quadruple the amount of consumers that see your brand.
6. Buy Video Ad Space
Ad space on relevant websites or Google can actually help drive additional traffic and increase brand awareness. You can typically buy ad space online via an Ad Network. The largest of these is Adwords and Bingads. This allows your business to target their consumers psychographically (age, interests, gender, region, etc) or by remarketing (this person has already been to your business website and you are showing your ads to them to draw them back into your site).
Video ad space can help your brand reach a broad, targeted audience, but it also pays to be cautious. Be careful that you do not show ads on sites with sensitive or offensive topics, as this can cause consumers to associate your brand with those topics. Also, be careful not to be spammy. Seeing the same company video time after time can cause users to dislike you.
For all the cautions, however, video ad space on relevant, legitimate sites can offer huge wins for your business. Additional traffic to pages that are converting well can translate into a lot of leads for your company very quickly.
7. Create Videos as TV Commercials
Running TV commercials can reach large audience for brand awareness. The key here is repetition. Run your commercial video ads consistently for a week or a few days several times over a month to increase your brand awareness. Typically, it will be two to three months before you begin to feel an impact from this form of video advertising.
Monitor the results closely to see if the commercials affected your lead volume. Try various channels that are as closely targeted to your buyer persona as possible. Don’t feel restricted to local cable, either. Hulu, Pandora, and other entertainment outlets can be perfect (and sometimes cheaper) places to advertise your business.
One thing to keep in mind when creating TV commercial videos is that they will be a bigger investment that most other forms of video production. Remember, your video has to stand up to the production value of the entertainment that your viewer is consuming next to your video ad space. Take the time to work with an experienced Seattle video production company like ours to ensure that you’re creating a high-quality video project that will produce great benefits for your business.
If you’d like to learn more about our video production and video marketing ideas, we’d love to talk to you. Give us a call and we’ll see if we might be a great fit as your business’ new video production team.
