How To Use Video Effectively For Your Business

Video has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and it’s spurred many business owners into investing in video. As video nuts ourselves, this is great! But we want to make sure you’re getting the best out of your investment, and not just making videos because you think you should. So today, we wanted to share with you just a few tips that will help you to use video more effectively for your business, from beginning to end.

Know What You Want To Achieve

First things first, what are you creating this video for? Presumably, you have a driving reason behind creating a video, but it’s important to pin down exactly what the aims for your video are. Do you want it to increase brand awareness, to drive sales, improve brand consideration, inspire people to take action? If you know what the outcome you’re trying to achieve is, then you are much more likely to create a video that will achieve that outcome. Are you still with us? It’s all about knowing what you want to do, so that you can put the pathway together to lead you there.

Which leads us nicely onto our next point…

Have A Strategy

You’d be amazed how many businesses embark on video production without the first idea of what they’re going to do with them when they’re done. They might have been told that they need to do video because it’s the next big thing in marketing, or they’ve just had a cool idea for a video. But without a solid strategy behind it, it’s almost useless. For a video to be truly successful, there are a few questions you need to know the answers to first:

·     What are you trying to achieve with your videos? (see above)

·     What form will your videos take?

·     Where does video fit into your broader marketing plan?

·     What platforms will you be posting your videos to?

·     How will you optimise and promote your videos?

·     How will you use video to engage viewers?

·     What keywords do you want to use?

·     How will you plan your keywords and work them into the video naturally?

And that’s just the upper-level stuff. There’s a lot more you need to think about in the gritty detail before you start filming a single thing. Now, I know that sounds like a lot to do, but by engaging in the process of planning your video strategy, you’re increasing your video’s chances of success tenfold.

Optimise Your Uploads

Your video is done – hooray! You planned it all out and you know exactly what you’re trying to do, and you’ve got a killer video to achieve it. So now what do you do? You upload it of course! But there’s more to this all-important step than just hitting upload. You need to optimise. That means looking at the platform you’re using and making sure the video is the right size, orientation and length for it. It also means taking some time to do the keyword optimisation for your videos. ‘Keywords for videos, what’s that about?’ I hear you ask. Well, keywords are important for helping your video rank highly and be found online. You will need to weave your keyword into your video script, as well as in your description, meta tags and other meta data. And if your platform gives you the ability to upload subtitles or a transcript, you should make sure this is keyword driven too. This means you will need to have put a lot of planning into what your keywords are in the pre-production stage, and put together an entire strategy behind how to work them into the video before you start filming. Once the filming is done, you then need to refer back to that strategy to optimise your uploads and promotion. All of this helps your video be more successful once it’s out in the world.

Promote Your Videos

There is nothing worse than a video that doesn’t achieve anything. We don’t mean have any effect, but doesn’t actually get seen by anyone. It’s all too common for businesses to create a video, stick it on their website and then not do anything with it – and that makes us so sad! To really see any impact from your videos, you need to be sharing them with the world. Not just in general, but using a targeted campaign that ensures the right people are seeing your videos. That means knowing who your target market is and where they hang out online – do they use Facebook more, LinkedIn, or Twitter? Are they avid YouTube viewers, or do they hang out on message boards? Once you know that, you can promote your videos online focussing on those places, and see much better results than if it was just left abandoned on your website!

Track And Measure Effectiveness

But tracing the effectiveness of your video is actually surprisingly easy. Most video platforms have a built-in analytics tool, so you can see how many people have viewed your video in platform, how many have clicked on it to actively watch it, and how many people have clicked through to your website. As well as the individual analytics tools, you have Google Analytics, which can measure where people went on your website after watching your video. This helps you see how engaged people became after your videos, and you can even measure leads through this. Tracking and measuring your videos also helps you learn for next time. When was the best time to post them? Did some platforms work better than others? Did a certain type of video get a great response, and another not so much? All of this information helps you refine your video strategy for the future.

At Ginger Video, we work with businesses across the UK and abroad to provide outstanding video marketing materials. But we don’t stop there. We want to make sure your videos really succeed, which is why our video packages are backed by research and strategy planning sessions, before filming is even discussed. And after we create a stunning video for you, we can help you promote it too with our video campaign management service, which takes care of running your paid and organic video campaigns on any platform. If you’d like to find out more, just get in touch with us today.