Without doubt, there is a huge opportunity for brands through online video content to gain traffic and market to an audience. With Google claiming that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine – with more than 1 billion unique visitors each month (source: YouTube Insights), you’d be mad not to look at it – but how do you make it deliver for you? It’s a question we get asked a lot by new clients.
Here are a few top tips about how you can get going with making your video campaign deliver results & ROI.
1. Start with the basics – decide if your video is going to be a standalone piece, or whether you’re going to use it as part of an integrated campaign. For the latter, use it to bring display assets to life, or go one step further by introducing a new aspect or angle through video. Deciding which route you use is really important so that you can market and measure results correctly.
2. Understanding exactly who you’re trying to reach – know their likes, dislikes and key interests. This will determine both the video content itself and the campaign behind promoting the content once launched. Do your homework!
3. Once you’ve identified your audience, brainstorm engagement opportunities - to do this, map out a list of topics, common interests of the brand, events, industry trends or news. This will help you build a campaign that makes your target audience WANT to engage with you. And before you know it, watching a simple video has turned into a branding & advertising opportunity.
4. Be creative with your content - video has become so much more than a stationary exercise for the viewer. Engagement through comments, likes and shares is great, but now there’s even more available to bring your videos to life. Shoppable videos are becoming more popular, where you can click on items in a video to add them to a basket and later buy.
Additionally, we all saw how successful the ice bucket challenge was - a humorous but charitable exercise that encouraged a deep level of engagement, not to mention results and global brand exposure. Who wouldn’t want the level of visibility?
5. When you’ve chosen your content, create a strategy to gain traction with it - you could have the world’s greatest video, but without views and engagement, its failed in delivering a return for you. Always remember that video can be very short lived, and launching with a bang can be the difference between success and failure online. Be proactive in identifying your methods of delivery, which could include: blogger outreach, online publications, pay per click campaigns, shares on your own social channels and website take-overs.
6. One trumpet we never stop blowing is the tracking trumpet - make sure you use every available method of tracking to determine if a video has been a success or failure. If you’re running a series of videos, plan enough flexibility to change future videos based on the success, failure or interaction of their predecessors. This creates something quite unique… A fully ‘responsive’ and ‘real-time’ marketing campaign.
So how can you apply these tips to your campaigns? Here’s a practical example from one of the most successful video campaigns performed by Blendtec - one of the world’s leading blender manufacturers.
Blendtec created a simple & cheap YouTube campaign which “blended” obscure but popular objects (iPhones, cameras & even an airsoft gun!). From this, they created 145 Short and effective videos (and counting) and the results were phenomenal. Since the launch in 2006, they’ve secured 750,000 YouTube subscribers, 250,000,000 YouTube Views and importantly, a 700 percent increase in sales.
Although we don’t know the exact cost of this campaign, it’s likely to have been very cost-effective, based on the following:
- It has now run for over 8 years, which shows that they’re still allocating budget to the campaign.
- The views on YouTube alone will have returned over $250,000 in adsense, which will have likely covered a huge portion of the cost of shooting the videos.
- Blendtec’s very first blend video is very basic and looks to have been shot in-store. With over 6,000,000 views, you can’t argue with it’s success!
In conclusion, you need to focus on making your videos deliver results – from direct sales to branding as well as total user outreach. Achieve this by creating and distributing video content that will create positive reactions with your targeted audience which spark that all-important engagement. Finally, never forget to follow-up on the engagement – otherwise your time and budget will have been completely wasted.
By Nick Trueman, Head of Search Marketing at Collider (@wearecollider)
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus