9 Video Marketing Tips and Tricks To Boost Leads and Sales

9 Video Marketing Tips Your Business Can’t Afford To Avoid

What can you do to make a real connection with your audience?

It’s a difficult question to answer.

We live in an era of information overload. Consumers are constantly bombarded with advertisements and information making it difficult for you to stand out from the crowd.

Some take the spam route and simply overwhelm their prospects with content. A tactic which is far more likely to turn your prospects away from your business instead of convincing them to buy.

The smart marketers out there try to produce the most useful content around.

It’s a step in the right direction, but most internet users skim information and don’t take everything in. You can’t be sure that your prospects are really going to pick out the points you want them to.

What you need is a method to quickly communicate as much useful information possible yet also establishes a more personal relationship with your prospect.

What you need, is video marketing.

Why Video Marketing is the Smart Choice

It doesn’t take a genius to understand the potential benefits of video marketing.

The popularity of online video has skyrocketed in recent years. Jefferies estimates Youtube will generate $8.9 billion dollars in 2016 and has valued the popular video service at $26-$40 billion.

The numbers speak for themselves. People love watching videos on the internet.

With predictions like Cisco’s that video will account for 69% of all consumer traffic by 2017 and the studies showing how video can increase conversions by up to 80%, it’s a real no brainer.

Whether you’re an established multinational or brand new startup, video is the smart choice for those who want to increase their leads and sales.

But simply knowing how useful video can be is only half the battle, you need to know what steps to take to make your video marketing efforts as effective as possible.

1. Make it Useful

Making useful and accessible videos should be a staple in your video marketing strategy.

• What are you trying to achieve with your video?
• What is it you want to say and how is it going to benefit your prospects?

These are the first two important questions you need to ask yourself before producing any video content.

Whether you’re creating a promotional short for a fast food joint or explaining the benefits of your SaaS business, the primary underlying concern is always the same.

Make it useful

No one wants to watch a video that doesn’t benefit them. Always look at how you can help your audience. We’ve come a long way from the days of the hard sell and honestly, it just doesn’t work anymore. People buy from who they trust.

Make your video informative, useful and engaging. You’ll build the trust your audience needs to make the decision to buy from you.

The good news is that making a video useful is no different than making your content useful. If you’ve already got a good understanding of your prospect’s needs and how your product can help them you’re more than half way there.

The next step is how you’re going to build trust whilst addressing the pain point you’ve identified. One great way to do this is through the classic case study, a method that’s been used to great effect by the team at Citrix.

2. Keep it Short

When it comes to marketing your business through video, short and sweet achieves the best results.

The medium allows you to put across vast amounts of information in a very short period of time, but that doesn’t mean you should try to communicate every single aspect of your company in one video.

Focus your attention and highlight specific benefits.

The longer your video, the higher the risk of losing viewers and missing your opportunity to fully sell the service.

Check out this audience engagement to time graph created by Wistia.

Keep your videos short, or if that’s not an option, keep the most useful and persuasive information at the start of your video.

3. Show Off Your Brand’s Personality

Every brand out there knows the importance of establishing a solid brand identity and voice, something that can be a quite difficult to achieve and maintain through text alone.

Everybody reads text in their own way. When you rely solely on the written word you run the risk of multiple interpretations and potential misunderstandings of your message.

Hiring a skilled copywriter to establish and maintain your brand’s messaging can drastically reduce this from happening, but the risk is never truly eliminated.

The smart brands out there go to great efforts with their video marketing to create a brand image that’s not only unique but memorable. Personality is far easier to express when you’ve got an audible tone of voice and visual cues to help out.

Now of course your tone needs to accurately represent your brand. There’s no one size fits all here.

As is true with everything in marketing the first step is to know your audience.

When you understand your prospect’s preferences you can craft a message that resonates with them and converts at a higher rate.

For a serious accountancy firm an over the top, comical video wouldn’t work well. Just as a serious, business like video wouldn’t attract the right audience for a kids party planning company.

One of the best examples of a personality filled promotional piece is the below from Michael Dubin of DollarShaveClub.com. It would really appeal to his target market of young men who hate having to buy new razors.

4. Bridge the Educational and Promotional Gap

Video is an incredible medium for education and can really help with the promotion of your business. Think of it as advanced content marketing.

The idea behind content marketing is to offer free information that establishes your authority or highlights the value of your product. Once you’ve established authority or value making a sale should be a cinch.

For complicated services or products it’s always a good idea to create some explainer videos that demystify and explain the more complicated features. These explainer vids also act as great promotional material.

If you optimise the videos properly for keywords you’ll bring in traffic that’s looking for that particular solution.

The video, although being aimed at those who have bought the product, acts as a great promotional piece for the product.

You’re basically showing exactly how you can solve the problem your prospect is experiencing.

One of the best examples of this I’ve seen is by Scrivener, a writing program that makes life easier for serious writers and novelists. The program has a multitude of very advanced features, features which most wouldn’t understand.

Below you’ll find one of the videos that explains one of the more complicated features of the service. Its a great piece of content for existing customers and works to attract those who would benefit from the program.

5. Choose Your Platform

If I asked what platform you should use most would answer Youtube. It’s unsurprisingly the most popular choice and comes with a wide variety of benefits.

Whilst Youtube can be a great choice for your video under the right circumstances, it’s not always the best option.

If you’re creating a purely promotional video Youtube is the way to go. Youtube is actually one of the world’s largest search engines and hosting your video there gives you the potential to attract a much larger audience.

Work out your keywords and link correctly and your main site will likely gain a boost to its SERP ranking.

For those with a little budget to spend you can also further your Youtube reach by taking advantage of their AdWords for video. Do a good enough job and there’s the chance you could even earn that back through AdSense commissions.

However, there are times when you might want to steer clear of Youtube.

Youtube’s not a bad option if you’re aiming to create promotional content to generate leads. But using a professional service such as Wistia adds a professional gleam to your content which will help you to stand out from the other company’s using Youtube because it’s a free option.

In a world where appearances can really make a difference, having that extra professional finish to your videos could be the difference between a sale/sign up or a missed opportunity.

If you’re creating and distributing information products that include video lessons, these should 100% not go on Youtube. Not even if you make them private and restrict access, the last thing you need is for even locked videos to start showing up in the SERPs.

People have paid for this content and they need to feel as though it’s only for them. I’m sorry to say that hosting on Youtube can lower the perceived value of your course. People want to feel like they’ve bought in to a premium service, hosting your videos on a free platform flies on the face of that desire.

Use a service like Wistia and embed paid content videos within your site’s member areas. This way your prospects will feel as though they’re getting what they paid for.

6. Monitor Performance

Whilst we’re on the topic of platform we should talk about using a service that provides a comprehensive analytics suite. I’m not talking about simply knowing how many views you’re getting, but something with a rather more robust and comprehensive report.

As with anything related to sales and conversions you need to be able to easily identify exactly where your sales efforts are falling short and which areas you need to improve.

The aforementioned Wistia is one of the most popular options and it’s easy to see why. The analytics suite is pretty comprehensive and includes heat maps, viewing trend breakdowns and the ability to include time coded comments and feedback resources.

At the risk of sounding overly promotional, it’s one of the best video production software around and is incredibly popular for a reason.

7. Embed It On Your Own Domain

When you’ve created your video don’t just throw it up on Youtube and forget about it.

Sure you’ve put a few links in the ‘information’ section, included some annotations and link back to your main site but you’re missing out on so many other conversion opportunities.

When you watch a Youtube video what pops up on the right hand side?

A long list of other videos you might be interested in. These recommendations are based on the video you’re now watching and your viewing history.

If you’re only hosting on Youtube you risk losing your prospect to the latest Katy Perry video or, even worse, one of your competitors.

Embed the video on your own site, reduce distractions and increase your conversion opportunities.

See the opt-in form on the right in the image. Customise the opt-in form to further promote the product that’s advertised in your video. This way your prospects don’t need to wait for a time coded sign up link or annotation and can even sign up or purchase without stopping the video.

You need to offer an easy sign up or purchase, something which is more difficult when you’re playing by the rules of Youtube.

On top of this there’s a host of potential SEO benefits you could be missing out on.

One of the most obvious benefits is how many backlinks a good video can provide. If you’ve taken he steps outlined in this article and really done your homework, there’s a good chance you’ll receive a large number of backlinks which will raise your position in the SERPs.

By embedding on your own site you’re also creating a multimedia page which not only ranks higher, but also produces a rich snippet in the SERPs which will bring a higher CTR.

8. Using Video to Capture Leads

This is one of those areas that, when done well can be incredibly beneficial, but done poorly can lose you a lot of business.

You’ll probably already have discovered that a large number of business sometimes gate their videos. These gates require you to enter your email address to watch them.

A lot of the time the plan is poorly thought through and ends up driving prospects away from your business because these gates are including on videos that offer little value.

If you want to add an email gate you need to make the video insanely useful. You need to think along the lines of producing a video version of a useful white paper or a trade secret that few people are aware of.

I’d also recommend not just producing a ‘white paper video’ and asking for an email. You need to explain why it’s worth their email address with either a solid sales pitch or even a separate two minute intro.

This two minute intro should explain what the main video is and highlight it’s benefits. At the end of the intro ask for an email to ‘unlock’ the primary video.

Simply creating a video and requiring an email address to unlock isn’t going to get you very far.

Remember, quality of information and a thorough explanation are key here.

9. Ignore the View Count

One of the most annoying elements of conversion optimisation has always been convincing business owners that traffic levels aren’t your primary metric to worry about.

If you’ve not taken the time to optimise for conversions then it doesn’t matter how many people view your website or video. 0% of 100 is the same as 0% of 100,000.

Traffic without conversions is a waste of money.

Before you start thinking of going all gung ho on your promotion look at your conversion metrics. Find the week points and optimise them before rolling it out to tens of thousands of people.

Don’t forget that view counts are secondary to the effectiveness of your marketing. With the tools that have already been mentioned in this piece picking out the weak spots to optimise your conversions shouldn’t be a difficult task.

Video marketing can be an incredibly powerful tool when used in the right ways. We’d love to hear of any video marketing tips and tricks you’ve discovered for success or whether there’s any tools you’d recommend for the budding entrepreneur.