Today’s topic begs the question, if a video is posted to YouTube and it gets no views, does it make an impact? Sadly the answer is NO. As we launch The Video Marketing Series, we want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to get as many viewers to your video.
For every “Viral video” there are thousands of videos with 20-25 views. And some of these are pretty well produced business videos.
As video producers, our job is to harness the unique ability of video to engage audiences and motivate them to take action. But if clients don’t implement a strategy to get eyeballs on it, nothing happens. As video marketing professionals, we must be as effective getting viewers to watch our client’s videos as we are at creating great content.
4 Ways to Get People to Watch Your Video:
#1: Share It
This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many business people don’t share their videos, or at least not enough.
- Embed it on your website.
- On Facebook: put it on your company page as a post (or several posts), and maybe on your personal profile. You may want to upload it (or a special version of it) directly to Facebook.
- On LinkedIn: post it to your company page, and maybe on your profile, as a post. Share in your groups.
- On Twitter: tweet about it many times.
- On email: send it in a mass email to your appropriate business contacts, give prospects a link to it and put a link to your latest video on your signature line.
- And on any other social media site you use. Don’t be shy.
#2: Make Your Video Searchable
Videos should be optimized for search, starting with the title of your video – though of course there’s a lot more to it. Professional marketers will probably have a keyword strategy, but if not, just think of what your customers might be searching for and use that in the name.
Here’s where we need to talk about YouTube. YouTube is currently the #2 search engine in the world. There are more searches on YouTube than Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask combined. That’s why your videos need to be on Youtube. If you’re not, then you can’t be found on the #2 search engine.
But what about Google – the #1 search engine? Forrester Research found that for any given keyword, video improve the chances of getting a page-one listing on Google by 53 TIMES! And here’s a theory as to why: first, there are still many more text web pages than videos for any result. Google knows that people like videos so they want to include videos when they can.
You’ll notice that the vast majority of videos in Google searches are from YouTube. While could be because Google owns Youtube, it’s probably more logical than that. Google would not be #1 if it returned results that sucked. Google has access to the YouTube data, so it knows how many people watch each video and for how long. That allows Google to recommend Youtube videos with a greater degree of confidence than video from other sources.
The great thing about the searchability of video is that it has lasting results. The video you post on Youtube today can be found by people who are looking for your topic for months and years in the future.
#3: Build An Audience
Let’s say you create a 3-minute video and are successful in getting people watch. What is the likelihood that they will become your customers after just 3 minutes? If you have piqued their interest enough, they’ll want to see another video. If you don’t have another video, YouTube will suggest a related video, probably from your competitor.
That’s why you NEED a series of videos. Building an audience through a series will bring even more viewers to your videos because your increasing audience will increase the exposure of your videos.
When planning a video series, it pays to think in terms of efficiency. For example, by producing your episodes in small batches of 4 videos at a time, you should be able to reduce the cost of each video by over 60%.
#4: Buy Viewers
Here we’re talking about running your video as an ad. Video ads can still be really cheap, and here are three reasons why you should do it:
- First, if you have a series, boosting one video will get added viewers to that video, and then you can guide them to your next video for free.
- Second, running a video as an ad will get more people looking at your video quicker than anything you can do organically.
- The third one is a theory, and perhaps someone can weigh in. Youtube ranks videos by a variety of factors, but mostly according to the amount of watch time they get. They artificially boost new videos to give them a chance. If you pay to promote a new video, you’re boosting view time in that critical period.
The purpose of The Video Marketing Series is to encourage you to start thinking of video the way you think of blogs. Just as planning to create a single blog post is not a winning strategy, these days, neither is creating a single video.
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