Thirty-seven percent of consumers say they turn to product videos to inform decision-making at either the research or buying phase of their purchase journey.
SOURCE: GARTNER, Create Video Content That Resonates With Customers.
EXPLORE CHAPTERS
1.
It’s imperative that your distribution strategy places video content where it is going to be most impactful. So, it’s important to evaluate your tech stack.
Video hosting and publishing platforms can help push your content in front of the right audiences through their favorite channels, optimizing video effectiveness and ROI with centralized management and a wide range of smart integrations.
An advanced video platform, like Brightcove, will allow you to connect your social media accounts, CRM, e-commerce platform, and marketing automation platforms (MAPs). This is the starting point for future success, setting the foundations for increasing the effectiveness of your video content across the B2C customer journey.
For example, using social media integrations, you can more easily reach your audiences where they spend a large amount of their time – and where 55% of consumers learn about new brands. From there, integrating with your e-commerce platform creates a direct link between your video assets and the actionable information buyers need about a specific product that may solve their problem.
An integration with your e-commerce platform also allows seamless data transfer back to your MAP, enabling video insights and viewing metrics to help inform more targeted outreach and nurturing in the future.
Following that, serve your content through other owned marketing channels such as your website, blog, email, or apps offering target audiences better accessibility and seamless viewing experiences.
Now you’ve set the foundations, let’s look at four practical steps to boost the visibility of your videos.
Publish content on social media
This is essential to introduce your brand and product experience to new audiences and distribute your videos where your customers are. Over 59% of the world population – or 4.76 billion people worldwide – are active social media users. Pick the platforms whose user base matches your desired target audience, considering demographic factors such as the average age of users, their interests and behaviors.
Stay in touch after publishing to answer questions, react to comments, and engage. Social media is a two-way channel; engagement is key for moving customers down the funnel and encouraging them to interact with your brand regularly.
Use paid advertising
Paid advertising allows you to target your videos to specific audience segments with desired attributes (as opposed to relying exclusively on organic reach of non-sponsored content). Experiment with several ad creatives (play around with headlines, descriptions, and CTAs, etc.) to A/B test for best results.
Distribute videos across other destinations
Promote videos in your newsletter, embed them in your homepage, and make them available for sharing by your teams and users.
Share them with the members of communities or groups you manage, too, such as an online forum you created on your website to be there for your customers who purchased any of your products and seek help or guidance with setting them up or encounter issues with the product.
Measure and optimize
Brand awareness is typically measured through metrics like the number of views, reach (how many unique users have watched your content), and watch time. To answer the question of how well your video content is resonating with your audiences, you can use metrics like Attention Index – the percentage of viewers watching more than 75% of a video minus the percent watching less than 10%. You can also check the volume of social media shares or track brand mentions through social media listening tools like Sprout Social.
Pairing video metrics with other tools allows for more advanced analytics. For example, if you integrate your video platform with Google Analytics, you can track user behavior on your website after they interact with video content.
You might discover that one content format is outperforming others for a particular audience. This will enable you to adjust your editorial strategy for video content going forward, including targeting, descriptions, and CTAs to give potential customers more of what moves the needle for them. Don’t forget to monitor analytics over time after launching a video asset.
2.
Discoverability and user experience have a huge impact on business results with video across the customer journey, especially at the initial stages. Paying attention to factors such as SEO are important for maximizing the reach of your video content, helping your brand to get ahead of the competition.
Video content and SEO are closely linked. In fact, video can drive a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engine result pages (SERPs). Embedding accessibility features is industry best practice and brings videos within the reach of those with visual or auditory impediments. It is rewarded in search, too.
Leverage the tactics below to bring your stories closer to your audiences with desired impact.
Pick the right keywords
Use tools like Google keyword planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to conduct keyword research. Identify what keywords are trending for search volume and emerging topics and work them into your video title, description, and tags to boost discoverability.
Pick engaging thumbnails
90% of the top performing videos on YouTube use custom thumbnails.
Make your videos irresistible to viewers with thumbnails that follow these best practices:
Ensure high-quality video viewing experiences
Buffering loses viewers. If the video does not load within 3 seconds, 40% of viewers will abandon it. Check your player settings, playback quality, loading times and streaming speed.
Getting video delivery right – which the right video hosting platform can enable – is also important for the upcoming stages of your B2C customer journey. Especially when you consider that for each additional second of load time, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42%.
Creating a positive viewing experience and growing engagement is also a great indicator for a search engine to rank videos higher as it leads to viewers spending more time on the page.
Optimize for multiple platforms
Use video formats that popular players support (like MP4) and are compatible with the majority of devices. Ensure you optimize aspect ratios, length, and file sizes of your videos for each platform that you publish on.
Bear accessibility in mind
Localize for global audiences and add accessibility elements in your videos like captioning, transcription, and audio descriptions. Implementing these elements will help you expand audience reach, stay compliant (for example, with the Americans with Disabilities Act) and build positive brand image positioning as an inclusive brand. This all contributes to a better user experience, further increasing engagement.
Brightcove is a reliable, scalable, and secure platform for video delivery. See how it can work for you.
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