When it comes to marketing your video online, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on your unique goals, audience, budget, and network. Following these steps, you can create, implement, and evaluate your own video marketing plan.
1. Determine what success means
What would success look like for this particular project? Who is your audience? Are they a specific group, or a broad swath of society? What action do you want them to take? And how will you measure success?
Once you can visualize a successful outcome, and know how you will measure it, you are ready to make your plan. If the answers to the above questions are still hazy, take some time to get as specific as possible.
2. Formulate your marketing strategy
Where is your audience most likely to see your video? Are they subscribed to your online newsletter? Are they followers on social media? Are they folks with a particular need who don’t even know who you are yet? These questions will point you to where you should focus your online marketing efforts. These might include:
- Posting on your social media and encouraging followers to share, perhaps incorporating an incentive for sharing.
- Sending out to your loyal subscribers through your newsletter.
- Using AdWords to create a youtube pre-roll ad to target a specific demographic.
- Placing on your product landing page (above the fold of course) to hook potential customers.
Now is also the time to make sure there is a simple pathway for them to perform your desired action. Online videos don’t exist in a vacuum, they are supported (or hindered)by your other online marketing. Whether you want your viewer to buy a product, sign up for a demo, or make a donation, make sure it’s easy and streamlined for them to do so.
3. Create a video optimized for online sharing
People are busy, and the internet is full of stuff to look at. It’s important to keep your video short and sweet to make the most of your time with your audience. For social media videos in particular, you don’t want folks to scroll past your video – think about how to make it stand out and invite someone to stop and watch. Including subtitles also helps people who may not have volume, and makes your video accessible to a wider audience. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to keep in mind for online videos – make sure to include keywords your audience will be searching for in your video script.
4. Implement your marketing plan
So now you have the final files and it’s time to do the things! If you followed step 2, this shouldn’t be too difficult – the framework is there, you just need to implement.
5. Evaluate
Remember in step 1 when we talked about measurable success? Now is when that will come in handy. If you can’t measure impact, there’s no way to know if your video marketing campaign was a success or not. These measurables may include dollars donated, sales made, or new leads generated. Many systems can help you track actions that were a result of watching the video. You can also add a question to your web form that asks how folks found you, or create a separate form/landing page that is only linked to from the video.
6. Tweak and Repeat
Hopefully, step 5 left you with some good data and insights. Use these findings to determine if it’s worth doing a similar campaign in the future. If you felt like it was a success with some room to grow, use that insight to tweak and improve the project. And if you totally knocked it out of the park, there’s your evidence that you should do it again, until it stops working.
So there you have it: 6 simple-ish steps to pulling off a stellar online video marketing campaign. Need help getting started? Give us a ring and we’ll walk you through it!
