Your Questions About Video Marketing, Answered

SocialSEO and Influence & Co. joined forces to bring you a webinar on how you can unlock more results from content marketing by implementing video into your strategy.

In the webinar, we talked about:

• Video’s role in content marketing.
• Results that video can drive for businesses.
• The types of video content that can be helpful at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
• How you can maximize your investment in content marketing and video.
• How you can test video in your marketing strategy today.

But we couldn’t get to everything in such a short time. So we’ve compiled some great questions that attendees asked and will do our best to give you the context you need to make video an effective part of your content marketing strategy.

—

Didn’t get to attend the webinar?

—

8 Questions About Video Marketing, Answered

1. How can I decide which content to repurpose into video?

Audience engagement is the most important consideration when you’re deciding which content — such as blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, etc. — to repurpose into video content.

Which blog posts are attracting the most visits? Which ones do your visitors spend the most time on? If you have commenting enabled, which ones seem to stir up the most conversation? Is any of your content attracting a lot of backlinks from other websites?

Gary Vaynerchuk also suggests getting a pulse on which sections of a piece of content are engaging your audience the most to decide which micro videos to create. For example, for a longer video he’s released, he’ll look at which time stamps his audience has referenced the most and create shorter videos around those specific topics.

“As a way to engage with my community more, my team and I have been telling our audience to comment with a timestamp to a section of the video that they liked! This makes finding community insights in my comments much easier and allows me to make the content that my audience wants to see.”

Beyond engagement metrics, also zoom out and think about which points of your sales, marketing, and customer service experiences could benefit from video. For example, do you get a lot of questions throughout your client onboarding process? Do leads seem to be confused about any of your specific services? Are you making important updates to your products or services that you don’t want your customers to miss? Short, engaging explainer videos could meet these needs.

2. How can video improve SEO?

Video has become an important consideration for Google when determining which content it will serve up to searchers.

SocialSEO put together a blog post explaining how video can impact your SEO, but we’ll summarize a few key points here:

• Searchers are more likely to click on listings that contain a video thumbnail.
• Google prioritizes search results with video above results without video.
• Video helps bolster two of the most important metrics for SEO: time spent on page or site and the number of backlinks to your website.

3. What are best practices for including video in emails?

Unfortunately, the major email clients — Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook — don’t support embedded videos in emails. So if you decide to embed a video, your subscribers either won’t be able to watch the video within the email, or they won’t see your email at all unless they dig through their spam folder to find it.

HubSpot wrote up some instructions on how to include a still or GIF from your video and link out to your video from the email. Read more about how to do this here.

4. What’s the ideal length for videos during each stage of the buyer experience? What types of video content and platforms are best for each stage of the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey is divided into three main parts: awareness, consideration, and decision.

At the awareness stage, you’re simply making buyers aware of your brand. These folks don’t know you, and they are usually at the very early stages of looking around and gathering information to solve a pain point. So your videos should be short and attention-grabbing. According to Lemonlight, videos targeting people in the attraction stage of the buyer’s journey should be no longer than 60 seconds. Consider creating short videos to share on social platforms, such as blooper reels or how-to videos offering tips and tricks.

At the consideration stage, people know about your brand — and most likely your competitors, too. Now is the time to engage these people with valuable insights via an engaging video that gives them more information about your offerings without quite doing a hard sell. At this point, videos could be one to three minutes long. Try creating case study videos, team videos, and event recaps that you can publish on your website and YouTube and share across social channels.

Lastly, you have the decision stage. At this point, people have gathered the information they need and are weighing their options to make a final decision. In these videos, you should cover your unique value proposition and include a call to action detailing the steps viewers need to take to complete their purchase or sign on for your services. At the decision stage, videos should be no longer than two minutes. Great video formats at this stage can include product demos, tutorials, and testimonials that you can publish on your website and YouTube.

5. How can I edit video content quickly?

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to edit videos, look into Canva. Canva’s video editor allows you to cut, splice, trim, and split videos. And if you’re looking for some inspiration to help you get started, you can use one of Canva’s customizable templates. You can also add text, transitions, graphics, music, sound effects, voiceovers, and more.

6. Should I divert resources from the written aspects of content (blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, etc.) to support video?

Absolutely not. A video strategy should not take from your written content efforts and vice versa. These are complementary strategies that should go hand in hand and support each other.

For example, you wouldn’t need to sacrifice written case studies in order to create video case studies. A more effective strategy would be to publish a written case study on your website and also create a video version. This would allow you to engage various learning styles, reach a wider audience, and position yourself optimally in search results.

7. How can I make summary videos a part of my blog content creation process?

Publishing a short summary video at the top of a blog post to provide an alternative means of consumption is a great idea. You can engage people in a variety of learning styles by offering both video and written content on your blog. To make this a part of your process for your blog content, designate someone to be responsible for creating and editing those videos and ensuring they are delivered to the person who uploads blog posts to your content management system.

For example, your process might look like this:

• Blog post is written.
• Blog post is edited.
• After blog copy is finalized, a short script is written for the summary video.
• Summary video is recorded.
• Summary video is edited.
• Blog post and summary video are uploaded into content management system.
• Blog post is scheduled for publishing.

Just make sure every step and associated task is documented in your project management system so nothing falls through the cracks.

8. How do you get buy-in from higher-ups who don’t see the value of video marketing?

Showing proof that video works can really help gain buy-in from leadership. Here are some statistics that you can sprinkle into your communications:

• The amount of online video people watch has nearly doubled since 2018.
• Nearly 90% of video marketers say video gives them a positive return on their investment.
• Nearly 90% of video marketers say that video has effectively generated leads.
• Over 80% of marketers say that video has a direct and positive impact on sales.
• Nearly 90% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy something by watching a brand’s video.
• Nearly 80% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy or download software or an app by watching a video.
• On average, people watch 19 hours of video online each week.

We hope this has provided some helpful insight as you navigate adding video to your content marketing strategy. Still have lingering questions that weren’t answered in the webinar or this article? Reach out to Sara or Clifton on LinkedIn!

Didn’t attend the webinar? Click below to listen to the recording to learn how you can add video into your content marketing arsenal.