One of the things I always get excited about is the future of video marketing. This is a medium that is pushing the limits of marketing and the videos themselves are entertaining to consume. For a long time, though, video marketing was being talked about as the future of marketing; from my perspective, though, the future is now, and video marketing is both the present and future.
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For business owners who are not currently using video as a part of their marketing strategy, it can be tempting to believe that you can’t: either you’ve missed the train and it’s too late to have a presence in the video space or that videos are just too hard to make. Or maybe you’re here because you want to understand what video marketing is before you make that leap. Well, I’m someone who is interested in trends in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but I also quite enjoy the video production and especially the post-production process, it’s certainly not too late to start, but there are still some things you will want to know.
The first thing to know about video marketing is what exactly it is. Video marketing is strictly defined as a strategy which allows marketers to create and use video as a means of marketing products or services to a target audience. Now, to insert my own opinion, that’s too narrow a definition, especially as it relates to what video marketing can do. Sure, video marketing can show off your products and services, but I would also add that video can highlight company culture, processes, or differentiators. For example, one of our clients is a precision machining shop, and one of the simple pleasures in life is watching CNC turning. A video of this type will show off what a product and service, sure, but it also shows off a process and a capability of the shop.
So, that’s video marketing, but how can you use video marketing as part of a broader strategy? Well, not only will a great video or series of videos show off your company’s offerings, culture, and differentiators, which gives you the opportunity to brag about yourself to your customers but consider video testimonials and/or short form case studies; these give your customers an opportunity to brag about you to other potential customers. These people have walked the buyer’s journey—they’ve been in your potential customer’s shoes, and they decided to work with you—this type of video by nature appeals to your target audience because the viewer relates to the person on screen, the decision-making process that led them to you, and the reasons why they love your product/service so much that they want to get in front of a camera and talk about you.
Video marketing gives you an opportunity to share your knowledge, services, and other specialties.
Now that we’ve talked about how video appeals to your potential customers, you may be asking, “How can video help potential customers discover my company? This is where the Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization I mentioned above comes back into play. Google, as the most used search engine in the world, will use a number of sometimes nebulous metrics as part of their algorithm for search rank. No one outside of Google themselves can truly claim to know absolutely everything about the algorithm in part because Google is always tinkering, but video content can specifically appeal to the algorithm in two of these metrics:
- Click-Through Rate: If your video doesn’t automatically play (also known as “autoplay”) when your website loads, an engaging thumbnail will be all a visitor needs to click a play button and see what this video’s all about. That click registers with Google as an interaction and engagement—indicating to Google that the content on your website is interesting to visitors, which will make Google more likely to serve up your website in a search engine research page (SERP).
- Time on Page: Whether you elect to have your video autoplay or start upon being clicked, video content on your site is an easy way to instantly improve your website’s time on page. Think about it: if your website features a hero video in the header (note: an optimal hero video should be between 20 and 30 seconds, though shorter is often considered better) and a visitor decides to watch through the whole video before it loops, then they’ve given your page a minimum 20 free seconds of viewership before navigating to a different page on the site or away from the website. Even if they only watch a few seconds of the video, your website is earning more time on page. Again, this tells Google that your website’s content is interesting.
Video marketing is here to stay in the greater marketing world. It’s also pertinent to remember that Google is the top search engine, but YouTube is the second most used (yes, Google does own YouTube, and YouTube’s algorithm may be even more complicated than Google’s), so if you want to start utilizing video marketing as a core piece of your marketing strategies, there’s no time quite like the present to get strategizing, get your camera rolling, and see how video marketing can work for you.
