Video Marketing

Brands and businesses are embracing Video Marketing as a component of their Social Media Marketing, cross promoting video marketing with a presence on Facebook and Twitter accounts, linking out to videos using URL shorting services like Bit.LY.

Video Marketing is exploding on YouTube and other platforms, as web viewers tastes for video increases, coupled with high bandwidth availability for PC and Smart Phones. According to YouTube, almost 20 hours of videos are uploaded to the site every minute, the site served over 12 Billion views in November 2009, reflecting 137% growth from the prior year.

Okay, we know Video Marketing is exploding in growth; but, how do you get your videos to standout from the pack? It’s challenging like any other search marketing process but if you follow our outline your videos should generate marketing results:

1) First and foremost, a great video that isn’t distributed and optimized isn’t going to generate good Video Marketing ROI - there are lots of sites other than YouTube to distribute your video; top tier sites include: Vimeo, Meta Cafe, Viddler, Blip.TV and a large number of other sites. Most of these sites are free.

2)  There’s no need to host your videos on your site or create a custom player, host them on YouTube or other sites and just link out to them to save your bandwidth usage.

3)  It can take a lot of time to upload your videos to a large number of sites; one of the market leaders in video distribution is TubeMogul - they have a free distribution service coupled with powerful analytics - enabling you to generate high impact Video Marketing.

4) Many videos are uploaded to YouTube, few are “found” as they aren’t optimized using good Video Marketing techniques. You want to use a clear and concise Title, Description and Keywords that accurately describe your video and use Tags that are consistent with each other, reinforcing what your video is about.

Nothing wrong with adding a link back to your site in the Description (at the start), if your videos aren’t annotated with your URL:  or, you may want to drive people to your other social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

5)  Your Settings are important on YouTube (and the other sites) - based on our analysis,  the Community Aspects of YouTube are important in terms of how YouTube ranks your videos (this is not documented though) and certainly help you build visibility. Like any Social Media Platform, Engage with your Community, turn on Comments, connect with others and build a following just like Twitter or Facebook.

6) Using the right Keywords in your Account Setting is critical to effective Video Marketing. Many don’t know that YouTube offers it’s own Video Keyword Research Capability for Advertisers that can give you valuable insight about Keyword Searches done. Use it to find the right keywords; but, again, don’t get out of bounds, use keywords that match your content.

8) Your goal is of course search engine rankings for your videos coupled with views on all sites. A new way to add more text (which search engines recognize, giving you more SEO traction) to your Video Marketing is using YouTube’s new Automatic Caption Insertion - another benefit helping hearing impaired to understand what your video is about. Be aware, this is a machine driven process and you may need to tweak these manually.

9) A cool new Video Marketing service is from Speaker Text - they have pushed the mashup of text and video further and adds some SEO sizzle by enabling you to use their Free (for now & as long as you have your own transcript) service to find, read and share what is being said inside of a video, driving some real SEO benefits.

9) Some brands/companies may want to derive more search engine ranking benefits via Video Marketing by making sure their videos are found and indexed by search engines when set up on their own sites - a Video Sitemap will help to ensure your videos are found and Google offers this as a free service.

10) Last but not least, we assume you have Google Analytics installed for web site traffic tracking and analysis but it can be beneficial to utilize YouTube’s Insight Definition (and others) to get a much more in-depth understanding of how effective your Video Marketing is, who is watching your videos, how they were discovered (search, external links, etc.) and much more.

11) Like any Social Media Marketing method, Video Marketing is much more effective when you link to your videos from other sites; these can include Social Media sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.) or via Hub Pages or Squidoo or any other “authority site” the higher the page rank the better.

So, to summarize Video Marketing best practices:  Do it, Distribute it, Text it, Optimize it and Analyze it - see you on Twitter @LinkedMedia.

Video Marketing