Welcome back! It’s time for your 7th installment on ‘Video Marketing Revealed’ series. Hopefully my last blog gave you good clarity on how to drive video for inbound marketing efforts. As promised let’s understand about the youtube.
Enter the YouTube nation
As more businesses turn to video content marketing as the best solution for expansion and growth, quite a number of large and small businesses continue to make mistakes with their YouTube channels, resulting in fewer views for their videos. Interbrand's Top 100 - shows exponential growth in YouTube ad video production in just about every industry, and companies are spending more money to make quality video ads, raising the aggregate production value to billions of dollars.
In addition to creating more effective YouTube channels, brands such as Toyota and Coca-cola are also embedding their YouTube videos on their websites. In fact, over 80% of the top 100 brands now embed their YouTube videos on their websites; which perhaps blurs the line between digital channels, but remains an effective strategy.
As online video evolves, more diverse video methods and styles arise. Intel for instance employs both professionally produced videos and user generated content for a more powerful effect. So why is it that brands are investing so much money into video marketing but are getting so few views? The entire YouTube ecosystem- everyone from large brands to little start-ups- could use more followers and one of the ways to get this sorted is to focus more on video content marketing.
Video content marketing and YouTube
A lot of entrepreneurs assume they can get away with assigning a couple of tags and brief description to a YouTube video and then add to their company name “we do online video content marketing'. It's not always that simple: you need to work out an angle for your videos if you want to grow more followers.
5 Elements of viral videos
Instead of starting with the common -and impossible -question what makes a video viral, let's begin by exploring several elements that play a role in turning a video viral:
1. Human Connection
Find out if your video elicits a strong emotional response. When a video elicits strong emotions it creates a strong urge to share. A perfect example is FirstKiss, a campaign created by Wren Clothing, in which the video features 20 strangers kissing. The video had over 2 million views the morning it was posted and had over 70 million views in two weeks!
2. Cuteness
Humans are wired to gawk at cuteness. Ben Huh knows this best and exploits this tendency by including on on their ads cute photos of cats and adding some witty and/or silly captions to make surefire content. But it's not just cats that do well in ads, dogs work too, as well as adorable babies, and a colony of waddling penguins.
3. Newsworthy Content
Seemingly anything these world leaders do or say is newsworthy, and because we're in a time when social media is prevalent and partisanship at an all-time high, even political opponents engage and share content about their leaders. This fuels emotions like anger, outrage and disgust; and these types of videos spread virally.
4. Humor
Humor has for a long time helped people deal with pain and physical adversity. It is also one of the biggest drivers of video virality. The pop culture is riddled with viral comedy and this can be observed with Jimmy Fallon, who makes viral videos 100 percent of the time.
5. The No-Linear/ Or The Unexpected
Here's one way to look at this; diversity of content is very essential, and people always want the unexpected. An unedited video depicting people in their natural state, responding or reacting strangely to a situation, tends to draw a lot of views. Us humans are actually pretty strange, so if you keep thinking linearly you will definitely miss out.
These five elements can be observed in many of the viral videos posted on YouTube and as a marketer you can learn how to implement some of the features in your own videos. It should be noted however, that in order to increase the chances of the video going viral, you might have to combine several elements.
There really isn't a limit to what you can present in terms of piquing people's curiosity about the unexpected. Anything from flying saucers or missing Malaysian airplanes; anything you think will get people rattled, could be useful. Find a way to keep people engaged on different topics but when you're done with these five elements, you may need to look at a few other issues you may not have thought of.
6. SEO
For most marketers SEO is a tricky beast, mainly due to the frequent Google algorithm updates, but in order for your videos to get views by the thousands, you have to make them more search-friendly. Here's how:
You can use Google's Adwords Planner for this but start by doing some research on the words you want to rank for, in your specific industry and when making a tittle and meta description, use those words clearly in a phrase format. People are more likely to search for something like “best payments and invoicing software”, than say, “payments for pals!”.
Multi-platform promotion: After embedding your video, upload it to YouTube and different distribution outlets under a different name. Keep in mind YouTube and Google are the two main search engines so try not to cannibalize your rankings, and make only minor adjustments in order to take advantage of both.
Use transcripts. Both Google and YouTube don't extract all the words on your videos so sometimes the search engines have a problem deciphering your video to find the subject matter. One way you can help boost your video SEO is to transcribe the video and turn the accompanying text into a relevant blog post. The blog will alert the search engines about the context and as a result Google will qualify your content.
Now that you know all this, the next time you upload a video on YouTube or other destinations, ensure you've implemented these steps. They are all important elements in any successful video marketing campaign and they've worked for other brands so they should work for yours as well. When you streamline the process of making effective content for sales, lead capture and SEO, you will notice a huge difference in how the videos perform throughout the cycle.
So that’s it for today’s installment of knowledge in ‘Video Marketing Revealed Series’. In the next blog will discuss about valuable video marketing metrics.
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Until then If you have any questions, just let me know. I help Small Business with Big Dreams to achieve their true potential & much awaited growth. If this is useful for you and you’d like some help to leverage the unmatched benefits of video marketing, or just need to put in place predictive client generating strategy using videos - just send me a message with the subject ‘VIDEO’ at mithun@mithunnarkar.com, and perhaps we can help you put together a strategy to achieve your dreams & targets as well.
Hope this has been helpful.
Talk to you soon.
Mithun Narkar
P.S. Don’t forget, I’m here to help, so if you have questions just ask!
The fastest way to reach me is here: "www.mithunnarkar.com"
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