Using Video In Your Marketing Strategy
In our last post, we discussed how images play a key role in your content marketing strategy as well as SEO campaign. Content doesn’t merely mean text, images and video are wonderful approaches to encourage more traffic to your website. Video is a great opportunity to showcase your products and/or services. You can post how-to videos, product visualization, entertainment, and so on. It’s much easier for your customers to actually see how your products work rather than just reading about it. And let’s face it, video can be a lot more entertaining than reading an article.
Video should definitely be a part of your media content strategy and we have a few tips to share on how to optimize your video to best effect.
Video Content Strategy
Just as you would map out your content, you need to have a strategy for your video content. What kind of questions will you be answering via video? Will you put your video on your own website or on platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo? Usually businesses will do a mix of both, uploading video to their own site as a way to include additional information about the content on a page, and upload video to YouTube as a branding tool.
Optimize Your Videos
The goal is to have your video show up in search engines, but that won’t happen if it isn’t properly optimized. Make sure you aren’t using complicated JavaScript and Flash. Also, be particular about your thumbnails for video images - the more eye catching and attractive, the more likely they will be clicked on. And never let your videos slow down the load time on your web page - be mindful to keep an eye out that your videos load efficiently.
Video Sitemap
It’s helpful to have a video sitemap in order to help Google know more about the video content on your page.
Don’t Forget the Descriptions
Even though you’ve gone the extra mile to create video, you still need to have text to go with it. Not only will it help Googlebot understand what your video is about, it can also help the hearing impaired access the content too.
Video Length
In our society today, people are looking for quick answers and quick demonstrations. People don’t have time to sit and read lengthy articles and they sure don’t have time for videos that go on and on. As a rule of thumb, shorter is better. Your video should be informative, but to the point, explaining your product/service in the first 30 seconds.
Content may still be the king on your site, but don’t forget about options like images and video. Not only are they visually stimulating and interesting, but they can enhance the likelihood of more clicks coming from the organic search results to your brand. You have nothing to lose, so get that camera rolling.