How To: Promote Your Video
From choosing the right song to thinking about what message you want to convey, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time and effort pulling together your marketing videos. But now what? In the final installment of our how-to guides for small business marketing videos, we’ll cover one of the most important aspects of your videos: getting them seen. Here, we discuss the five best places for sharing your video to get maximum views, each with different best practices for promotion.
If you’re putting your video on your website, you’re signalling to visitors that it’s an important part of your message. So make sure to give your video a prominent place on your homepage or wherever it’ll be most relevant to your audience. If the video is an overview of your business or a short term promotion, we recommend placing it up at the top of the page, so that it’ll be one of the first things visitors will see and view. If you’re demonstrating a product, the video should be clearly displayed next to the image or description of the product.
Where do you engage with your customers today? If it’s on Facebook or on other social channels, consider posting your videos there. For social, you’ve probably already thought about the length and formatting to encourage the most shares in that network. But it’s important to also consider the timing and promotional activities surrounding the video. Give people clear directions, like “Share this!”, or invite them to ask questions. When you invite engagement, you might also find fodder for future content or at least get some valuable feedback.
If you’re investing in video, a YouTube channel for your company is right up your alley. Why? YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and placing a video there only has the opportunity to get you more eyeballs; even if you have only one video, you can benefit from search by placing it on YouTube. Ideally, however, you’ll want to have more than one video to keep viewers coming back to your channel for continued engagement.
Video is a great way to engage customers in your emails, especially through newsletters, and it’s been shown to boost click-through rates. They can also be a great way to support one-off emails — say, for a product launch or a special event. But don’t just send an email announcing your video; your video should be the way you deliver your message, and not the whole message.
You’ve created a digital video, but that doesn’t mean it needs to exist solely on the internet. There are plenty of successful uses for video offline. If you have a captive audience, such as customers visiting your store or coming to a trade show booth, consider displaying your video there. It’s great to show video where your customers will be, especially when it’s in an environment with limited distractions. Or, you could create DVDs and include it with a sales proposal or product sample when meeting with customers.
A photo posted by animoto (@animoto) on Mar 13, 2013 at 9:43am PDT
We’d be remiss not to mention a very important means of getting your videos seen — and that’s paid promotion. What do we mean by that? The concept of paying for eyeballs on your video may be a slightly advanced concept for most small businesses (and budgets), but if you do have the marketing means, consider the following channels:
Facebook targeting: Target the right audience for your videos by location, relevancy, demographics, and so on with Facebook Advertising.
Twitter promoted video: Similar to Facebook advertising, Promoted tweets help you reach the right customers at the right time with custom targeting.
Paid media: Invest in paid traffic to your website through online advertising, including banner ads on third-party websites and search engine marketing ads (i.e. Google AdWords).
And there you have it: Five places to promote your video and more than enough opportunities to make your videos seen and have an impact. As we’ve been saying all along in our How-To guides, video is a powerful medium, and it’s here to stay. What’s more, its importance will only increase with time. So whether you’re just starting out with marketing videos or you’ve been experimenting here and there for some time, it’s not too late to leverage the power of video to give your business a boost.
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