Tag: video marketing

Categories
Content Marketing

Why Your Videos Aren’t as Successful as Your Blog Posts

The increasing popularity of video content is sending many marketers to join in on the party. After all, we see many shiny new things come into play – remember Vine? And it’s easy to want to jump to the next big thing. The difference is, we have plenty of data to support the fact that video marketing is here to stay.

HubSpot research shows that more than 50% of consumers want to see more video content from the brands they know and love, so it’s no surprise marketers are eager to please. Data also shows six out of 10 people would rather watch videos online than television – and mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year.

All that said, optimizing video content for search, much the same way you do for blog posts and other text heavy forms of content, is a big difference in whether your content is seen or not.

Like many other marketers, you’ve decided to embrace video marketing and spend some of your budget on creating video content, but you’re just not seeing the SEO results. You’ve gotten great results with the majority of your blog posts, but just don’t understand why you can’t get the same for your video content.

There are many reasons why your videos may not be getting the search engine attention they deserve, but for the sake of brevity, let’s cover some of the biggest ones.

Lack of an Optimized Transcript

Are you aware of the fact that most videos on Facebook are watched on mute? This alone is a good enough reason to use transcripts.

But, transcripts are more important than that, because even though they help the hard of hearing and let people consume video without bothering the people around them, they also make your videos easier for the search engine bots to crawl. As a result, there’s more content to rank.

When you create your video transcript, your keyword usage may look a little different than you’d see it in a blog post. This is because written verbiage sounds a bit different when it’s spoken rather than read. Take the time to build your transcript around conversational keywords and phrases. You’ll be fine as long as you understand user intent.

In video marketing, you’re generally trying to rank for long-tail keywords. The number of YouTube searches that start with “how to” are growing by 70% year over year.

Lack of a Visually Interesting Thumbnail Image

Looking at the thumbnail image itself, there isn’t much of an importance to it in terms of the SEO value it offers. The title, description, tags, etc. are far more important. But, if you’ve one everything right to make sure your video is ranking, the wrong thumbnail could sabotage your efforts. Why?

The thumbnail is the thing that will give people their first impression of the video. As such, it plays a role in determining whether or not to watch the video.

According to a Backlinko study of more than one million YouTube videos to see what they could learn about video SEO. The main takeaways include:

  • Videos with more comments ranked higher
  • The number of shares a video had strongly related to page 1 ranking.
  • Likes play a major role in how a video ranks
  • There is a slight correlation between the channel’s subscriber count and video rankings.

If your thumbnails are turning people off, that’s going to stop them from viewing the content, so you won’t get many comments, shares, likes, or subscribers. That’s why it’s worth taking the time to create a custom image for your video thumbnail, using something like Canva. Research shows videos that have custom, relevant thumbnails get 30% higher play rates than those without.

Videos Don’t Properly Align With Your Web Pages

Let’s turn the focus to your website for a moment. Getting your webpage to rank for video content is a challenge since there are many factors to consider. There are a number of reasons why web pages with video content struggle to rank.

The largest issue comes from the page itself with both blog posts and pages with video.  You cannot rely on SEO-friendly video alone to carry the full load of ranking. The page the video lives on must be optimized, too, because if it’s not the search engine bots are likely to crawl the page in the first place, regardless of how awesome the video is. Consider these factors:

  • Is the page fast to load?
  • Is the page secure?
  • Is the page content, other than the video optimized for the keywords?
  • Is the video relevant to the rest of the content on the page?

It’s best to place one video per page, because Google typically won’t index the more than one. If there are multiple videos on a page, make sure the one you’re trying to rank for is first.

Using the Same Approach With Video and Blog Posts

If you’re getting a lot of success with your blog posts, it may seem logical to build out your videos in a similar way. Though the message in a blog post and a video can be the same, the delivery is much different.

WIth a blog post, you can provide a ton of context, examples, detailed analysis, and more. With video, that’s not always possible.

YouTube confirmed a while ago that watch times and completion rates play a role in how content is ranked, so if your videos are similar to reading a long blog post, you’re likely to bore your audience and harm your completion rates.

Streamline your main points and get to the key takeaways quickly when you’re creating video. Map out your important parts and spell them out in the video.

Research shows videos between one to two minutes retain about 75% of their viewers, but videos that are in the four to five minute range keep less than 60% of their viewers.

This by no means suggests you should keep all your videos really short. It just means you need to focus on cutting the fat wherever it’s possible.

People’s attention spans aren’t like they used to be, so it’s easier to lose video viewers than you may think. Keep your message clear and to the point.

Ranking your content, especially videos, is important to your overall marketing strategy. The good thing is that the attributes that make your blog content successful transfer to your videos – but the fine points about how to get the job done for the videos are a bit different.

Focusing on these four elements as you create and optimize your video content will get and keep you in the search engine’s good graces.

Categories
Social Media

How to Use Facebook Video Ads

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Video is among the most popular type of content on the internet, and with good reason. By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic – 15x higher than it was in 2017. Studies show shoppers who view videos are 1.81x more likely to purchase than non-video viewers. So it makes sense as to why marketers would want to include video in the marketing strategy.

Facebook is a saturated platform where it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the competition. Ads are everywhere, but Facebook video ads give you a bit more room for creativity in terms of your ad campaign options.

In this guide, you’ll learn what Facebook video ads are, why you should be using them, how to set them up, and a few tips to help you make the most of video advertising on Facebook.

What Are Facebook Video Ads?

Facebook video ads are the same as Facebook ads, but rather than using text and images, they use video. You don’t have to write a snippet of text or upload an image. You’ll instead upload video you’ve created in-house or, created with a videographer, or one you already have so that it operates on Facebook’s native video player. After the upload is complete, you’ll be able to customize the video description, the video thumbnail, the ad budget, and the audience you want to see the video.

Why You Need to Use Facebook Video Ads

Facebook video ads are a great way to make people remember your brand and come back to your site. Using video is a strategy proven to engage and convert website visitors, push leads down your funnel, and to fuel social engagement across a number of channels.

Video promotions are just as popular as photo promotions on Facebook – and video is more memorable than text and images. People are over 27x more likely to click a video ad and than a static ad.

Setting Up Facebook Ads

Now that you understand the power behind a Facebook video ad, it’s time to get them up and running. If you’re already familiar with Facebook Ads, the process is similar.

Step 1:

At the top of your profile page, press the “Create” button. Select “Ad” from the menu that appears.

Step 2:

Set the campaign objective to “Get video views.”

Step 3:

Set your audience – either by defining it or choosing a predefined audience already in your account, along with the budget, and ad schedule.

Step 4:

Create your ad. You can upload a video, browse through your library for video to add, or create a slideshow with images. Most of the time, you’ll want to use a pre-made video from your desktop or promote a video that you’ve previously posted organically.

Pay attention to the recommended video specs before you upload to make sure you get the highest quality playback experience for viewers. If the video doesn’t fit in those specs, you could have poor playback which may negatively affect your brand in the eyes of viewers.

Step 5:

Customize the copy above your video, preview it, then set it to start running. It will begin once Facebook approves it and run according to your budget.

Tips to Improve Your Facebook Video Ad Campaigns

To make the most of your campaign budget, use these tips to give yourself an edge.

Show Videos That Don’t Need Sound

You never know where people will be when they see your ads. That’s why it’s important to create videos that people can watch and understand without needing the sound. 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound anyway, so it makes sense to build your ads with the assumption that people won’t have the volume on.

If you want to be sure your video makes sense without sound, Facebook allows you to automatically add captions to your videos. Facebook reports captioned video ads increase video view time by an average of 12%.

Use CPM Bidding to Make Sure Your Ads Autoplay

It may be tempting to shy away from autoplay in certain environments, but Facebook shouldn’t be one of those places. Why? Facebook has enough distractions as it is, so it’s important to engage the newsfeed scrollers who are already multitasking. Automatically playing your videos is the best way to do that. To be eligible for autoplay, you must bid with cost per impressions (CPM) instead of cost per click.

Get to the Point

Facebook Business reveals the maximum video duration for a video ad is an astonishing 14,460 seconds. For those who aren’t quick on the draw with math, that’s 241 minutes, or four hours and one minute!

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to watch an ad that runs for the length of two movies. The longer your video ad is, the less likely someone is to watch it in its entirety.

Data from Wistia shows videos up to two minutes long get a lot of engagement. There’s a sharp drop off between two and three minutes, though. The longer the video runs, however, the less engaged people are.

Use Video Content That’s Performed Well on Other Platforms

Have you ever uploaded video to your Facebook page? Check the stats to see which of those videos have performed the best. Which of your webinars have driven the most engagement? Which videos on your website perform the best? Use the data you have about videos you’re already using to guide your ads, because the better performing content gives you an indication of what your audience wants to watch.

Look at metrics like engagement and pay rate of your video content across all your channels before you determine which videos are worth investing in ads to run. Focus on promoting only the best content.

Examine Ad Stats and Adjust Accordingly

Once you’ve run your Facebook video ads long enough to get a significant amount of views, take a moment to analyze the data. Is the money you’re spending giving you a return? Is the return worth continuing the ad? How many people are watching the videos? How many people are clicking on your ads? How many are visiting your website after watching?

Understanding how your ads impact your audience will help you improve your video production and your ad strategy so you can get the best ROI. If you find that you’re not getting the ROI you expected, test various ads to see what works best for your audience.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Leveraging Video Marketing: Why You Shouldn’t Ignore YouTube

There’s no doubt about it – video marketing is huge. No matter what social site or website you land on, you’re bound to see at least a few videos, ranging from vlogs to LIVE sessions to carefully constructed advertisements. Video gives marketers the opportunity to grab the attention of their audiences with short, creative bursts of information, and there’s no end to the litany of unique things you can do to stand out.

As video marketing grows, some people are shying away from YouTube, instead looking towards platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others. I’m here to tell you that if you’re going to spend time on video marketing, you need to leverage all available platforms.

And YouTube, despite what you may have heard, is far from dead.

Why You Need Video Marketing

According to Forbes, “By 2019, online content will consist of 80 percent video marketing, and mobile consumption of video content continually rises by 100 percent annually.” Those numbers are astounding. Consumers who respond to visuals are retaining more of the details they get from video ads and up to 90 percent admit that video has an impact on their purchasing decisions.

Properly utilized, video marketing can have a huge impact on your business’s organic SEO rankings. A properly optimized video can increase your odds of a front page Google listing 53x. It’s also a lot easier to measure the reach of video content versus plain text. Sure, you can see how many times a blog post was visited, but with video you can track how many times a visitor watched the video, exactly where they stopped watching, and much more. The amount of feedback you can get will help you to better tailor your future campaigns.

Video, in general, drives engagement. Audiences, regardless of niche, love to interact with videos. They will share, like, comment, and otherwise interact with videos they love (and sometimes hate) more than any other type of content, including photos.

Facebook Versus YouTube

While Forbes indicates that 49 percent of consumers consume video on Facebook, another 32% still turn to YouTube. Considering YouTube is still considered the second largest search engine next to Google itself, there’s no reason at all to ignore the platform when creating your online video marketing campaigns.

Youtube and Facebook have both seen huge successes and there is no question as to whether or not video marketing is a passing trend (hint: it’s not). As a matter of fact, YouTube has surpassed live television in terms of overall popularity. Approximately 61% of the American population uses YouTube regularly. The site sees a billion unique visitors each month, globally consuming over 6 billion hours of video. The site is available in 75 countries and 61 languages. That type of reach has huge potential.

Even if you get a ton of engagement from LIVE videos on Facebook, you can leverage the content you’ve created by downloading it, making some simple edits, and uploading it to your YouTube channel as a replay. Anything you create for one channel can be duplicated for cross-promotion on another.

How to Rank Higher on YouTube

Of course, the methods you’ll use to rank and gain engagement are different from channel to channel. As you do create a larger content library on YouTube you’ll want to make sure your videos are properly optimized so that they’ll continue ranking, earning you new views and subscribers (and the future potential for monetization within the platform if you haven’t earned it already).

So what should you do?

Keep your Videos Short

Anything from a minute to three is considered golden. You can go longer from time to time, but the most engaged with videos are usually three minutes or less.

Contribute Something Educational

Don’t make videos that are full of fluff. Be creative about sharing an incredibly useful tip or piece of information your users will eat up. Video marketing isn’t about being salesy. It’s about adding value and educating the public. The sales will follow naturally when your audience realizes your product or service can solve a problem in their lives.

Aim for Quality

Quality beats quantity when it comes to video. Smaller businesses with a cozy personalized strategy can get away with live videos in well-lit rooms with good sound and a stable base for the camera. Larger businesses will need to be more competitive, with good video equipment or a strong video marketing team. The sharper you look, the better your response.

Improve Your Headlines

Your title matters as much on video as it does on a blog or other written work. Keep it short and sweet and try to naturally include a relevant keyword. This is important to the SEO and overall visibility of your video. Never leave a video with a standard numerical file name or title; it will decimate your ability to rank.

Write Clear Descriptions and Add Tags

YouTube’s description box is there for a reason. Use it. Your description should be written for the reader, but should also include some carefully placed keywords. Gloss over what’s included in your video, but try to keep it to a maximum of 3 lines. Less is more.  Use the tag section for all of your short and long-tail keywords.

Customize Your Video Thumbnail

Make sure your video contains a clear thumbnail image that will look good on any size mobile device. The thumbnail needs to clearly depict the content of your video and should be high-resolution. You can include the thumbnail within the video or, if your account allows, upload a custom thumbnail after the fact.

The CTA Matters, Too

Just as with any other type of content, make sure your YouTube video has a clear call-to-action. Ask them to subscribe to your channel, like the video, click the link in the description to sign up for your newsletter. No one in your audience is a mind reader. You need to tell them what you want them to do – and they’ll do it!

Video marketing is growing and YouTube isn’t going anywhere at all. Utilize as many video marketing platforms as you find appropriate for your business, but don’t ignore this one. It’s guaranteed to make a measurable difference.

As always, if you’re stuck or struggling to find your next best digital marketing move, I’m available for consultations. Follow this link to reach out. Let’s connect!

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