25 Tips for Creating Great Marketing Videos

In recent years, videos have been making inroads in digital marketing, emerging as a powerful promotional tool for businesses to promote their wares in an exciting and engaging way. Though when it comes to video marketing, there’s some pretty definitive ‘rules’ businesses should stick to in order to get their videos right. Get them wrong and marketing videos can be more hindering to a company than profiting.

Fortunately, if you’re a business looking to embark on an effective video marketing strategy, you’re in the right place, as Small Business Trends explores 25 tips for creating marketing videos.

Tips for Creating Marketing Videos

Tell a Story

Instead of being overtly salesy, an effective video tells a story. As the Digital Marketing Institute notes, businesses should utilize the emotive power of video by appealing to their customer’s needs and desires.

Make Sure the Introduction Stands Out

A little like how we are unlikely to click on an email if we’re not inspired by the subject line, an incredible one fifth of viewers click off a video within 10 seconds if they’re not interested in what they see. With this in mind, the introduction of the video is vitally important and should be made inspiring, entertaining and informative, to hook the viewer and encourage them to view the whole of the video.

Create a Stimulating Title

By the same token, your video’s title should be stimulating and eye-catching in order to grab a viewer’s attention. Furthermore, by using relevant keywords in a title, the video is likely to show up on the search engines when viewers search for the topic.

Focus on the Mission and Less on the Product

Instead of being overtly focused on the product and all its benefits, channel the message of the video into the mission of the product. Dove, for example, are hailed are being experts in creating emotional viral videos that focus less on their product and more on their mission.

Don’t Be Boring

Who wants to watch a boring video? It goes without saying, if you want your business’s video marketing campaign to be successful, create exciting and inspiring videos that can never be considered boring.

Get a Little Bit Risqué!

While too much naughty content is unlikely to do the credibility of your business many favors, as Inc. writes, just the right amount can be good for page views — as long as not overdone.

Make it Mobile Friendly

With more and more people using mobile devices to get online, it’s imperative corporate videos are mobile friendly. In fact, according to YouTube, mobile video consumption increases 100% every year! Marketing videos therefore need to be able to be downloaded and enjoyed on mobile devices.

Think About SEO

Quite simply, Google loves video content and an effective video marketing campaign should have Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. To ensure maximum SEO value from your videos, accompany the video with a well-written description that is tagged with relevant keywords to help boost the video’s SEO.

Include Your URL in the Video

Displaying your website address in a marketing video is a good way for companies to get exposure and generate traffic to their website through a video.

Educate Your Audience

As the Digital Marketing Institute informs, one of the most powerful ways to implement effective video marketing is to educate viewers. Often videos that offer advice, information, tips and other informative content can be more effective than a solely promotional video.

Make the Video More Atmospheric with Music

Music is a powerful tool on video content, evoking a myriad of emotions. Don’t be afraid to use music in your video that fits the mood of the message and crafts a more exciting and emotive video.

Use Video Content Generated by Customers

Putting your customers behind the camera to talk about how they have used and benefited from your product, can be a powerful way to engage viewers and appeal to prospective customers.

Include a Call to Action

Similar to how all blog posts and content should have a call to action at the end, which invites the reader to take further action, such as signing up to a newsletter, or visiting a website, so too should a marketing video. Ask yourself, what do you want viewers to do when they’ve watched the video and then encourage them to do so without being overtly salesy.

Take Viewers Behind the Scenes

Consumers love to get up close to a brand and video marketing offers the perfect opportunity to take customers behind the scenes and into your business’s ‘natural surroundings.’

Include Tutorial Videos

Posting tutorials that are relevant to your niche is a great way to connect and engage with customers. Tutorials shouldn’t give away all your industry secrets, but should be enough to entice the viewer with informative and useful content, leaving them wanting to learn more.

Keep Them Short

Online viewers often don’t have much time to spare before they’re off looking on a new site and at a new video. In this sense, shorter marketing videos can tend to work better than long ones. As Helen Klein Ross told Kiss Metrics:

“The less you say, the more likely people are to remember.”

Use a Professional Voice

Words spoken with clarity and professionalism will always come out better in a corporate video than an amateur speaker, whose lack of experience speaking on the camera is obvious. With this in mind, it might be a good idea to have an employee that is experienced on speaking in front of the camera record for the video, or even think about calling in a professional.

Use Micro-Video Apps

Along with all this talk of keeping videos short for  the viewer, it’s also true shorter content is a better format for most social platforms. As Forbes notes, short, concise content triumphs over longer forms of content, particularly on social media channels. Video marketers should consider using micro-video apps, which shorten videos to less than 10 seconds, so they’re ideal of sharing on the likes of Instagram and Twitter.

Pose Questions

Strive to create engagement and conversation with your video by asking viewers questions. Ask viewers to leave answers to the questions in a comment section below the video.

Don’t Be Preoccupied with Perfection

Videos for marketing purposes aren’t Hollywood movies and nobody expects perfection. Whilst you want the video to look professional, don’t become too obsessed with perfection that on the 50th take you still haven’t got in right.

But Don’t Forget Production Quality

That said, it’s important a marketing video is produced professionally. From the camera work to lighting, edited to voice overs, it might be a good idea to call upon the expertise of a professional video production company to ensure the video is produced in a high quality.

Use Videos to Help You Create Your Own Effective Video Marketing Strategy

Head to the likes of YouTube to see how businesses are already building videos that have managed to go viral. Featuring the likes of Coca-Cola, these ‘10 Epic Viral Marketing Videos’ on YouTube will give you some pointers on how some of the biggest and well-known brands are producing a video designed to go viral.

Build Hype Around the Launch of the Video

Instead of just going ahead and launching your video, build hype around the video by promoting its launch date on your website, blog and social media channels.

Provide Some Humor

Not all corporate videos need to be serious. On the contrary, some humour can work well in generating more interest in your video. Vidyard gives an example of a humorous marketing video that proved hugely successful — a parody by cloud invoicing provider Taulia of the award-winning commercial series ‘Get Rid of Cable’ by Direct TV. As Vidyard writes:

“The video not only delivers a laugh, but this kind of humorous take on B2B solution can really get your customers feeling connected with your brand and help you stand out in what can be a stuffy market.”

Embed a Video in Landing Pages

Think strategically about where you are going to place your marketing video. Statistics show that embedding videos in landing pages can raise conversion rates by as much as 80 percent.

With video forecast to claim more than 80 percent of all web traffic by 2019 and 90 percent of customers reporting that product videos help them make purchasing decisions, it is imperative companies create videos that resonate with their audience and ultimately help sell their services and products.

Culled from Small Biz Trends

How to Create & Use Data-Driven Content for Link Building

 

If you want to grab the attention of readers and journalists – and attract links – then your content must be exciting, eye-catching, and unique and data journalism is the easiest way to create content that stands out from the crowd. 

Basing your content on statistics and facts about engaging topics ensures that you’re creating content that is interesting, newsworthy, and sharable. And it should also help drive more traffic to your site.

One of the coolest things about creating your own proprietary data is that it’s kind of reminiscent of playing “Jeopardy!” The thoughtful questions, simple responses, and the basic simplicity of being the first to have the knowledge.

 

Be the Source

Creating your own data for an article is typically one big headache.

If you’ve ever tried to survey customers, you know what I’m talking about.

But, as SEJ’s own Loren Baker says, “Be the source.”

When you create your own data, people will want to link back to the place they cited.

Using tools like Google Trends and Google Consumer Survey, you can search for trending topics and build your own data.

 

Pick Your Topic

Good data doesn’t always equal good content.

You have to figure out how to tell a story with the data you have.

First, you must decide what your content is going to be about.

With data, this can be a chicken and egg situation – do you use the data you have to form your topic or do you choose your topic and then collect some data around it?

It may depend on whether you have pre-existing data or whether you already have a subject matter in mind that’s newsworthy or trending.

When researching what topics I may want to cover, I’ll start researching with Google Trends and BuzzSumo. These tools are built for research and exploring trends.

 

Gather Your Data

The first step to creating data-driven content is to actually find the data.

I begin to gather my resources of data, whether I’m surveying users or using my own data.

Important note: When building content with your own proprietary data, it’s not about quantity. Traditional content strategy suggests more content equals more leads, but that’s not true. You only need one major piece of killer content to achieve your goals.

 

- Conduct Surveys

The go-to place for collecting fresh data, surveys are a fantastic way to gather information and to get statistics and data around subjects that you specifically want to focus on.

Think carefully about your questions before asking them. You want to get the best results possible to generate a variety of angles for you to use in your content.

Make sure your questions will support your story and limit the number of open-ended questions you ask. Include a variety of demographic questions so that you can cross-reference answers given with details about the respondents. This will allow you to create multiple sub-stories and angles to push out to local press.

 

- Ask Your Community

Do you have your own community of customers or fans? Then ask them a few questions or send out a questionnaire!

If you work for a bigger brand and have forums where your customers come together to discuss a range of different topics, this is a great place to start a conversation about the topic you want to create content around.

Many businesses also have a large database of customer contact details and some regularly send out newsletters. An easy way to obtain data is to send this database a set of questions or forms to fill in via email and reward them with a discount code or entry into a prize drawing once they have returned their answers.

If you have a large social media following, you can use Facebook and Twitter polls to gather data.

Or simply run a competition on your site to find out the information you need using a data capture system as a form of entry.

 

- Use Your Own Data & Reports

Many SaaS companies don’t realize the amount of data they are already sitting on.

You likely have some analytical tools to track the success of your own website and marketing efforts. These tools could be used to give you useful insights and data you could use as part of your content marketing strategy.

Google Analytics is a good place to start, as you can look into different consumer demographics such as their age, gender, and location of your customers, along with the industries they work in, what they buy, what devices they use, and more.

You can also carry out your own tests and experiments to generate data and insight that will interest others in your industry or your customers.

 

Look for Interesting Angles

Once you’ve got your data, you need to analyze it and pull out the angles you want to use to tell your story and make your content as newsworthy as possible.

Analyzing data isn’t always easy, especially if you find yourself staring at a huge spreadsheet of numbers and stats.

Try and highlight any key points and statistics that support the storyline or headline you want to use and pull out any compelling insights in your results. Use conditional formatting and create pivot charts to find correlations between different data sets, and if you don’t get the answer or result you were hoping for, don’t force it — put it to one side and focus on a different angle.

Once you have some strong data in front of you, segment your results demographically. This will help you find a range of local angles you can pull out for your content based on gender, age, location etc. – perfect for pushing out to regional press and publishers for extra coverage.

 

Visualize Your Data

The way you present your data is key to the success of your content.

Data visualization is the first step of making your content engaging and shareable. But it isn’t easy.

Ideally, you should work with a designer to visualize your data. But if you don’t have access to one (or don’t have the budget), you can make it yourself using a data visualization tool.

Once you’ve created your visual, you need to make sure there is still some content around it to tell your story and make your data come to life. Always keep in mind how you want your readers to digest your content and that it needs to be responsive on mobile and tablet devices.

 

How to Structure Your Content Support Activities

If the content is truly a unicorn, as Larry Kim would say, you need to do all the supporting activities around this piece.

Here’s how I structure my content support activities:

• Collaborate with the PR team to create a strategy. PR teams develop some of the highest-quality link opportunities, but they leave a lot of opportunities on the table. This is where link builders come in to do the manual outreach.
• Conduct manual outreach to industry blogs for backlinks and guest blogs.
• Partner with other companies on a webinar to discuss the data.
• Create a blog post series to give further context to the data and optimize for new search terms.
• Utilize the data in presentations at conferences.
• Recreate the data in infographics, charts, and graphs.

 

Awesome Examples of Data-Driven Content

Here are a few pieces of data-driven content to inspire you:

The Guardian has really taken the lead with data visualization and has a whole section on their site dedicated to it. It’s a great place to go for inspiration on how you can shape your data into eye-catching graphics.

Here’s another really cool example of some data visualization based on A Day in the Life of Americans:

 

Don’t Have Any Data?

Don’t have time to collect data yourself?

No problem!

There are plenty of data sources you can use and combine to make a whole new data set.

For example, you could take two similar data sets that were created 10 years apart and then compare and contrast them.

Or, you could analyze someone else’s data and pull out some new angles that haven’t been used yet.

Here are some other resources to find some interesting data to use in your content or as a starting point for a bigger piece of data journalism:

• Pew Research Center
• Wikipedia
• Google Scholar
• The Office for National Statistics
• Reddit’s Data is Beautiful subreddit

You can also simply type into Google “[keyword] market research” or “[keyword] data sets” to find a range of different information available online.

Read this article for a case study and even more ideas: Building Links with Data-Driven Content (Even When You Don’t Have Any Data)

 

Credit: Search Engine Journal 

Content Marketing: How to Attract More Customers

 

Are you looking to attract prospects, convert them to customers and keep them coming back? Then social media and content marketing are a match made in heaven.

The key to success is to make the connection between content marketing and social media. Let’s look at the content needed to get your marketing to that lucrative intersection.

#1: Attract Prospective Customers

The first question on a prospect’s mind when considering a purchase is, “What solutions are available?”

Your goal is to create awareness and make sure that your solution meets the buyers’ need when they’re ready to make a decision.

According to data from Google and Shopper Science’s Zero Moment of Truth report, consumers in 2011 consulted an average of 10 sources before making a buying decision. That’s up 100% from five sources in 2010.

The number of sources a buyer consults before making a decision doubled year over year.

Successful businesses are communicating with prospects on social networking sites and directing them to the material the prospects need to make an informed decision. How are they doing this?

One way is to create informational articles.

Social network users are constantly sharing, curating and consuming informational content. Often, the headline or a short description of the content appears on the social network together with a link to view the content on a company website.

Businesses need to share this informational content and have it written for prospects who are in research mode, learning about the solutions that are available.

Charles Schwab, a financial planning company, distributes links to resources via social networking sites and makes them available for prospective leads who reach out via social media.

Charles Schwab diverts this prospect who is early in the buying cycle from Facebook Page to a free resource on their website.

Another method is to raise awareness of your products and services through informational webinars and seminars.

Informational webinars and seminars can demonstrate your expertise while providing prospects with the information they need during the research stage of the buying cycle.

This tweet from Cleveland Clinic is an excellent use of social media to lead those interested from Twitter to the informational content a decision-maker needs to make a choice.

Cleveland Clinic provides a link via Twitter to register for a webinar for those considering epilepsy surgery.

In this case, the conversation begins on Twitter, but continues to a registration page and ultimately to informational content delivered via webinar.

Key Takeaway: Conversations about your products and services often begin within social networks, but additional content may be needed to assist the prospect. Make sure that those who are communicating with prospects via social media are aware of all of the resources your business has available for prospective customers.

#2: Convert Prospects

The second question on a person’s mind when considering a purchase is, “Which is the right solution for me?”

Businesses that successfully convert new customers from social media create and distribute content that provides proof points to the sale. Content that assists in meeting this goal proves that your solution provides more value than the other solutions the prospect has researched.

A very effective piece of content to meet this goal is the demo video or “explainer” video. The social media tool Little Bird provides a demo video on their home page that displays the tool in action and details the benefits.

Little Bird investor Dharmesh Shah provides a link from Twitter to see a demo of the application.

A second piece of content that will build the type of trust that closes the sale is the case study. Case studies close sales because they prove that others have had success with your solution.

The Mayo Clinic has dozens of success stories on their website that they distribute via Facebook.

This Facebook link leads to a Mayo Clinic success story that provides proof of their expertise.

A third piece of content that can convert leads into sales are white papers. For B2B marketers, the white paper is a staple piece of content used by possible buyers to assist in the decision-making process.

Gene Marks, an author, writer and speaker, makes good use of social media and white papers.

This tweet diverts those interested in CRM software from Twitter to a white paper download page.

Key Takeaway: Create content that provides the proof that prospects are looking forbefore they will part with their hard-earned dollars. Distribute that content through social media channels.

#3: Keep Existing Customers

The last question on a buyer’s mind is, “Am I happy with the decision I made?”

This goal is about retention and referral. Successful businesses will use social media and content to keep customers satisfied.

One type of content that retains existing customers is support documentation.

At the Crazy Egg software company, part of their content and social media strategy is to reduce the number of support tickets and raise customer satisfaction by resolving as many issues as possible through the use of online content.

Crazy Egg efficiently handles this technical issue with a link to support documentation on their website.

They could choose to divert these questions to a tech support phone call or email-based ticketing system, but in many cases this is neither convenient for the customer nor efficient for the company.

A second content type that increases loyalty is documentation of best practices.

Businesses that create content that teaches customers how to get the most out of their product or service will increase customer satisfaction.

Charles Schwab provides in-person workshops that teach their customers how to better manage their money.

This tweet leads interested individuals from Twitter to a registration page and ultimately an in-person workshop.

Another content type that increases retention of existing customers is case studies.

While the function of the case study in converting a new customer is to provide a proof point, the case study is also useful in retention because it provides guidance to the existing customer.

Unbounce, the landing page software company, does an excellent job of providing case study material to existing customers.

Unbounce’s Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Optimization report has numerous examples of the do’s and dont’s of using their software.

This Unbounce customer is grateful for the additional value the company provides through its content, so he shares a link to it on Twitter.

Key Takeaway: We’ve all heard that it’s much cheaper to keep existing customers than to find new ones. Use social media and content marketing as a customer-service tool to increase satisfaction and referrals.

Final Wrap-Up

Social media and content marketing are joined at the hip.

Social networks like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn are not always where a conversation begins and ends. To attract, convert and keep customers, social media and content marketing should be parts of a seamless marketing, sales and customer-service strategy.

Your current and future customers are using social media. Make sure you have well-planned content marketing and give your social media team the information they need to share the content your audience needs.

What do you think? How do you integrate content marketing with social media? Leave your tips and comments in the box below.

Social Media Examiner