Why You Should Adopt Video Marketing in Your Company's Digital Strategy
This article was originally published by Click & Mortar, which has since become part of Tink.
Since its invention, video has been a medium that never stops evolving—whether in the content it delivers or the production techniques behind it. And that’s perfectly normal: by combining sound, images, and text into a single medium, video offers unprecedented communication potential compared to anything that came before it.
The internet has certainly embraced video, and its presence continues to grow each year. Both the consumption and production of online video have become democratized, and the variety of users, platforms, and content available has grown exponentially. Brands have also leveraged these new communication platforms, which are now an integral part of the essential digital marketing toolkit.
Why Video?
To understand the value of video, just look at a few examples of brands like GoPro, Shave Dollar Club or Old Spice, which have thrived thanks to YouTube. 65% of people are classified as "visual" learners, and what better way to get a message across than through video? Moreover, the variety of possible content is limitless. You can create content based on product demonstrations, brand storytelling, customer spotlights, humour, inspirational videos, and more.
Additionally, marketing videos have become more relevant than ever on mobile devices, thanks to increased data allowances on mobile plans and the near-ubiquitous presence of WiFi hotspots in cities (which used to be the main barrier to consuming video outside the home). This makes video a perfect tool for the new challenge that smartphones represent.
But Which Platform Should You Use?
That depends on your goals and video needs! Let's consider the three largest current sharing platforms: Vimeo, Facebook and YouTube.
Vimeo is a more "professional" platform designed for hosting high-quality videos. It offers paid accounts with better performance, no ads, and strong control over content and privacy. It should therefore be considered as pure storage for displaying video elsewhere.
YouTube, on the other hand, should be seen as a social network in its own right. The platform now hosts millions of hours of content and just as many users. There are several ways to leverage the platform: publish your content to build your own community, or advertise on it (videos must be hosted on the platform). For a brand, the ideal approach is obviously a mix of both. In terms of advertising, there are 3 main formats:
Niveau publicité, il existe 3 formules principales :
- InStream ads, which are video ads that play before the content the user is watching.
- Standard Display ads, which are images or GIFs placed around the site's content.
- Rich Display ads, which are more complex interactive media, such as YouTube's homepage banner.
Facebook has also become a high-performing video marketing platform thanks to its "autoplay" videos. This system plays videos without sound directly in users' news feeds. Whether for advertising or community engagement, this type of content is a very effective tool. Keep in mind that content should be kept short and subtitles should be added in case the viewer doesn't click and therefore doesn't have access to sound.
Video SEO
SEO isn’t limited to websites—the battle is heating up again with videos! If you want your content to perform, it's important to optimize it for search. This is especially true for YouTube. Not only is it the largest platform offering the most options for improving content discoverability, but YouTube belongs to Google, which loves to promote its own tools. But why properly optimize your videos, you might ask? Isn't sharing enough? Well, no. First, you need to focus on video SEO to earn a top spot in YouTube's internal keyword search results. Second, because people are increasingly searching for things that can be easily answered by a video, and YouTube videos are indexed there just like websites.
So you won't be done with metadata, tags, backlinks, and all those SEO-related elements. Furthermore, for a new website, a solid YouTube presence can even help with domain authority on Google, since the social network benefits from strong authority with its parent company.
A Few Basic Tips
As the previous section explains, optimizing your video for search will be essential for gaining visibility. As with a website, this will depend on the quality of your content, data, descriptions, backlinks, etc. But those aren't the only factors to consider on YouTube. Here are 5 basic tips to maximize your chances of success.
1. Take Care of Your Profile Page
Optimize your YouTube page with a proper description: use a good profile picture and cover image, build a network of relevant "related channels" and "featured channels," create a strong welcome video, etc.
2. Use Relevant Metadata
You can research the most searched keywords related to your topic using the YouTube search bar and make sure they appear in your titles, data, descriptions, and related keywords.
3. Build Backlinks
Just like with a website, the more your video is shared across authoritative domains, the better it will rank. Make sure to get your partners to share your content on their sites or through blog posts to optimize your videos.
4. Use YouTube's Tools
Take advantage of the tools Google provides. For example, group thematically related videos into playlists. This will keep viewers on a roll, generating strong "watch time"—which is the main ranking criterion for your videos in terms of performance. It also helps YouTube better contextualize your content.
5. Watch Over Your Content
Make sure to create appropriate, relevant content that isn't sales-driven. YouTube is a platform that will allow you to get much closer to your consumers through strong storytelling. To keep the viewer's attention, the first 15 seconds must be unforgettable and the video shouldn't be too long (1 to 5 minutes).
In conclusion, video holds an increasingly dominant place in the world of digital marketing. As the type of content most preferred by internet users, video consumption will soon represent 90% of time spent on the web. So it's time to pay attention! Moreover, with platforms enabling live streaming like Twitch or Facebook Live, the variety of shareable content and the ways to leverage video only keep expanding. Have you thought about it?
