11 Hacks to Optimize Your Video Marketing Results In this post, I will share practical tips on how you can improve your results from video marketing. Video drives more engagement than text or photos. It captures people’s attention and helps get your message across in a short time. People react to this medium so well because it’s relatable – it helps convey the emotion and personality of you and your brand. And it’s becoming increasingly popular. According to a study by Content Marketing Institute, 60% of both B2B and B2C marketers use video for marketing. I know what you must be thinking now… Video is too time-consuming and hard to get good results. This is not necessarily the case! If you have the right tools and processes in place, you can get great results in a relatively short timeframe. So let’s get started. 1. Start by Creating a Storyboard for Your Marketing Video Facts tell but stories sell. You need to map out your story before you start creating your video. This will help you plan your video from start to finish, making your video creation process smooth. Not to mention the decrease in production costs storyboarding brings! Facts tell but stories sell. A storyboard is a graphic representation of how your video will look, and it includes the script for each scene. It helps visualize your ideas. Sometimes, marketers rely only on the script for creating videos and that’s ok, too! Here’s one example. I’m currently volunteering for a local school to help raise the funds for building a new school. We’re running out of room for the students and a new building could solve this problem. I decided to create a video to draw attention to the problem and drive people to action! The first thing I did was create a storyboard which outlines the text that appears on the screen and the associated image/video clip. After I’m sure I created a compelling story, I can start thinking about how to produce it. Here’s how the storyboarding looked like for this video. Later in the process, I’ll add images to better visualize how to video will unfold. At the Social Media Marketing conference in 2017, I learned a very simple but really effective storytelling framework from Park Howell (the master of storytelling). If you want to create a short story, use the ‘And, But, Therefore’ formula. Here’s how it works… Make your statement And – increase the importance But – Add contradiction or conflict Therefore – Provide the resolution Here’s an example of the formula in practice using the school video as an example. We are struggling to find enough room for our students. In 2019 there were 220 applications and only 100 spaces. And this problem is only going to get worse. Your kids may not get a place in the school in 2020, 2021, and onward. But we know our kids will get educated somewhere…and it may not be in your local town. Therefore we have created a campaign to build a new school. The future can be bright if we shine the light on what is our right. 2. Do your keyword research If you’re creating videos, you’ll naturally want them to rank on Google or YouTube for your chosen keywords. However, to make this happen, you need to do some research first. Let’s look at some key areas to consider: a) Do videos appear on the 1st page of Google search results? When you search on Google for the topics you want to write about, do videos appear on page 1 of the search results? The answer is – in some cases, they do! Here are some of the most popular type of searches that will include videos: How to Tutorials Reviews For example, if I run a search for ‘how to run faster’ I know I’ll see videos in the search results. If there’s no video in search results for a particular keyword, then it’s unlikely that your video will appear. Google decides which types of searches warrant a video result and which don’t. No point in fighting an uphill battle. b) Is it easy to rank on YouTube? TubeBuddy is a YouTube channel management tool with some great functionality. One of the functionalities it offers is the help with YouTube keyword research. You simply download their Chrome plugin and, when you are on YouTube, you can figure out how easy or difficult it is to rank for specific keywords. For example, I’m currently doing a lot of work around artificial intelligence and marketing and it looks like there’s a good opportunity to rank/get good traffic for this search phrase: Alternatively, you can use Keywordtool.io for SEO research when creating videos for YouTube. 3. Use tools to quickly make engaging videos If you can produce quality, engaging videos quickly you’ll be able to push out more video content and drive better results. Finding content to include in a video, doing all the recording, and then all the editing can be extremely time-consuming and using the right tools can make the whole process drastically faster. Finding content to include in a video, doing all the recording, and then all the editing can be extremely time-consuming and using the right tools can make the whole process drastically faster. Sometimes you’ll need to do all the heavy lifting yourself. For example, I recently built a content marketing course and there was no way around it, I had to record and edit the videos for the course… But, if you want to get a quick promotional video up and running to promote a piece of content, a course you’re running, etc., then you can use a tool like Wave.video. What I love about Wave.video is that it gives me access to over 200 million stock video clips that I can use and it makes editing very easy. The process goes like this: I pick a stock video clip I edit the text overlay on parts of the video I drag and drop clips, lengthen or shorten them I click a button and my video is ready! You can also automatically produce the video in different dimensions for different platforms (16:9 horizontal for YouTube, 1:1 square for Twitter, 4:5 vertical for Facebook and 9:16 for Instagram) which is really helpful for promoting videos on social! 4. Add transcriptions/captions to your marketing videos On Facebook, 85% of people watch videos with no sound. It’s similar on other social platforms also. So adding in text to the video which is an alternative to sound is essential. Tools like Wave.video make it very easy to add text to each part of your video. However, if you’re creating longer videos, adding text to every screen becomes time-consuming. Unless you use Rev. I have used this tool for several years and the service is excellent. You send them your video and they charge you $1 a minute for transcription. The only downside is that you’ll need to check the transcription once you get your video back because they won’t always understand your accent or the slang terms you use. But it still saves a lot of time! Yes, it is an extra expense, but spending that time on promoting the video instead of transcribing it is going to yield much better results. 5. Add clickable calls to action to your video A call to action (CTA) is exactly that. You want people to watch your video but you also want to encourage them to take an action. You can place a CTA at the start of the video (less likely), during the video, or at the end of the video. Here’s an example of a set of CTAs at the end of one of my videos. This is known as a YouTube end screen. You can add clickable elements, such as the option to go to your website, subscribe to your channel, or view related videos. According to a study by KissMetrics, a CTA in a video gets 380% more clicks than a CTA in the sidebar next to the video! Read this post on Wave.video blog on the topic: the Top 10 Best Video Calls to Action to Use within a Blog Post. Wistia has a cool video player that allows you to add CTA’s in your video. You can even include an opt-in to your email list within the video. 6. Use a better video player Wistia provides a great video player that you can use on your website. It integrates with Wave.video so you can produce a video with Wave.video and send it directly to Wistia. The benefits of using Wistia are: Adaptable – viewers can change the speed of playback or quality of playing and adjust quality right up to 4k. Optimized for mobile to ensure your viewers have the best viewing experience The player is highly customizable so you can add or remove controls on the video, add CTA’s, or even password protect the video Built-in social sharing so your viewers can click on a button to share Analytics – see the next section! 7. Use your analytics I can’t stress enough the importance of investing more time in analytics across all areas of digital marketing, video included!! You can create an amazing video and get 10,000 views but… …are these just views that last a couple of seconds? This could mean that your video is not engaging your audience. Facebook counts a view if it’s more than 3 seconds long which is great for Facebook (because of inflated numbers) but it’s not that great for you. The Wistia player that I mentioned earlier provides the advanced analytics on your videos, including: Wistia heatmaps – see which part of the video the viewer watched, skipped over, or rewatched. Complete viewer data – shows individual breakdown of each of the viewers. If it recognizes the user from previous interactions it shows this in a separate tab. Google Analytics integration – You can automatically sync events to Google Analytics based on video views. 8. Use Agorapulse to manage your comments more efficiently If you’re managing multiple social media accounts you’re probably using a tool to automate some of the social media management tasks. And if video is a part of your marketing mix, it’s very important that you have the ability to track YouTube comments within your social media management tool. Agorapulse supports this. With this tool you can: Reply to comments directly within Agorapulse Assign to a team member to review Click on a link to go directly to YouTube to see the video Assign a label to the video to make it easier to find later 9. Create a promotional plan for your videos When you create a video you need to think about all the different channels you can use to effectively promote it. For example: a) Create the video in different formats using Wave.video and share it regularly across social media channels. b) Create blog content that covers the same topic as your video. The content is already there, you just need to translate it to another format. You can then embed the video in the blog post. This helps promote the video but it also keeps people on your blog post longer which helps with ranking. How to promote your blog like a social media guru 🎬Watch the fantastic interview with Donna Moritz, social media strategist, blogger and speaker. Text version & Materials: https://wave.video/blog/how-to-promote-your-blog/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=social_blog Donna will share her best practices on how to promote blog posts like a social media guru! In this interview you will find best tools and tricks to repurpose your blog content, turn your blog posts into videos and benefit from every social media platform c) Use paid advertising – It’s typically cheap to pay for views on Facebook and other channels. But before you start paying for the views share the video on your social accounts first. If you start getting organic traction then consider boosting it with paid ads. There’s no point in promoting a video that has not been proven to drive engagement! d) Make multiple versions of the video – If you’re using a tool that allows you to easily create videos you can start changing the messaging, replacing some of the video content, and changing your CTA’s. You can then test to see which version of the video works best. 10. Add influencers to your video content Adding influencer quotes/feedback adds authority to the content you write and helps drive more attention and engagement. But… We often forget to do this with video content. Example of inserting expert’s quote in the Wave.video marketing roundup So, make sure to find a way to include content from an expert/influencer in the area you are promoting to your videos. Even if it’s just a quote it can still add weight to your video. 11. Create personalized videos The technology for videos is getting better and it’s making it easier to create personalized videos. A personalized video could be something as simple as mentioning a person’s name in the video. This, of course, drives up the engagement! Lemlist is an email outreach tool that supports personalized videos. You can display the person’s name within the video so it’s different for every person. Another tool called Vintom supports a whole new level of automated personalization: Imagine watching a video where the person mentions your name and the data on the screen is directly related to you and no one else. You can automatically create thousands of highly personalized videos! Summary Marketers typically associate producing videos with something extremely laborious and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Video has the potential to achieve incredible engagement levels, but it generally doesn’t. Both of these challenges can be solved with the right tools and the right process. And if you follow at least some of the tips from this article, I am 100% certain you’ll achieve more success with video marketing! Topics:marketingThe Insider’s Guide to Social Media Video Marketing Join our newsletter — it’s free!We only post the good stuff Subscribe now