Video content marketing is about providing viewers with many opportunities to engage with your company through its videos. Here are some signs you may be missing out on some opportunities.
1. You think you just need a video.
Maybe you’re introducing a new product. You want a video that gets people excited, right? But if your glitzy product video leads the viewer to content that is flat and quickly abandoned, you have reduced the ROI of the your centerpiece video. Makes no sense. For video content marketing to work, every video needs to deliver value.
2. You’re not repurposing videos.
Your existing videos almost certainly contain a great deal of good stuff that could be re-purposed to make other good stuff. Maybe it’s the “demo” section of a recorded webinar. Or just the part of the demo where the user clicks through to find the right information. A good way to make an old talking head video new again, is to add graphics.
3. None of your videos measures viewer engagement
The leading producers of branded video (mostly B2C companies) are increasingly relying on engagement metrics, not views or viewing time, to measure performance. It’s easy to add calls-to-action in YouTube and other video sites. It’s easy to add interactive chapter headings to video.
This not only keeps the viewer engaged by offering a choice and something to do, it also generates data you can use to determine what information viewers choose to consume.
4. You’re not producing different kinds of video
Here are eight kinds of video ranked in order of preference by The Content Marketing Association (UK) members. How many kinds of video are you making?
- Customer testimonials
- On-demand product demonstration videos
- Explainer and tutorial videos
- Thought leader interviews
- Project reviews and case studies
- Live and on-demand webinars
- Video blogs
- Event videos
Incidentally, I would place explainer videos and tutorial videos in different categories. Tutorials should teach you what you want to know. Explainer videos should make you want to learn more.
5. You’re not demanding enough from your video resources
The research and editorial skill that goes into scripting a short-form video can easily be applied to scripts for other kinds of video, or even written content, on related subjects. For example, you could ask your video producers to consider add-ons like
- Does the video feature a process animation? Consider an extended version that could be used in webinars, white papers, and FAQs.
- Will they be interviewing subject matter experts by phone? Ask about recording the interviews to video (with DSLR or Skype) — then edit these interviews for follow-up videos to beef up your video content on the subject of the short form video.
- Edit the short form video into even shorter forms for social media or teasher videos.
6. You’ve never considered the “hero-hub-help” video content marketing framework
It’s a framework for a video content marketing strategy recommended by YouTube (under the less helpful-sounding rubric “Hero-Hub-Hygiene”).
Hero content is the advertising video that packs an emotional wallop, goes viral and attracts large numbers of visitors to your website. This is probably not a realistic goal for most tech company marketing budgets.
Hub content is aimed at the specific interests of your target group — the idea is make your video content people will subscribe to or seek out repeatedly, like a series of videos on some hot topic in your industry.
Help (Hygiene) content is the stuff that brings people to your website via search engine. Examples are tutorials, how-to pieces, tech talk. Since video typically scores very high in search engines, videos produced to support these kinds of communications will work very well.
The idea of the hero-hub-help content framework is that these types of content interact and reinforce each other. The hero content builds up visitor numbers and can add subscribers to your YouTube channel, for example. Hub content focused on target groups keeps good prospects coming back. Help content builds visibility in search engines and attracts new visitors to your hub.
Even if only the bottom two elements of the hero-hub-help framework are relevant to you, it’s worth thinking about in developing a video content marketing strategy.
7. Your don’t have an adequate budget for video content marketing
According to a 2015 Web Video Marketing Council survey, 30% of video content marketing budgets are below $10,000 per year, and only 13% are above $50,000. Even $50,000 is certainly not extravagant for anyone who needs to keep up a steady flow of relevant, valuable, authentic video content.
