ADVERING™

In today’s digital world, more and more people shop, work, and communicate online. While this is convenient, it means that we aren’t putting faces to names as often. To humanize your brand, use video to connect to your audience with as close to a face-to-face interaction as possible. Our emotions are what tend to motivate our decision-making and the actions we take, so the use of both sound and moving images appeals to all our senses.

Using a video to showcase your brand’s personality helps visitors on your website get a better sense of who you are and what you stand for—which builds trust in your business—and the emotional connection is one of the reasons that keeps customers coming back.

• 90 percent of online consumers report that a business’ product or service video helps them make a decision to buy
• 65 percent of executives who watch work-related videos visit the business’ website afterwards
• 64 percent of people who visit a business’ website are likely to buy their product after watching a video
• real estate listings that include a video get 403% more inquiries than those without video

For many brands, video starts here. It begins as a way to show a customer how to do something more efficiently – whether it’s using a cool online tool, setting up a user account, or tiling their new bathroom in time for the holidays.

Explainer or tutorial videos allow customers to see, in action, what it is they’re trying to accomplish to help them follow along at home. They can also be used to simplify hard concepts in a customer’s mind.

These videos are great not only for establishing expertness and authority in a vertical, but for capturing the all-important “how to”- and “hack”-themed queries in the search results. For queries that are especially competitive, targeting these phrases via video is easier than trying to gain rankings via traditional organic. Why fight through a crowded front door when you can walk through the side door?

Whether you realize it or not, you’re probably already creating this type of content.

Maybe you’re using Screenflow to record a software demo to walk your team through the new install. Or maybe you’re using GoToWebinar to record a presentation intended for priority customers. Don’t just sit on it. Post it and let your whole audience benefit from the information you’re going over.

Content you only use once is content wasted. Always be on the hunt for additional ways to leverage the content you’ve created. Whether you’ve hosted a webinar to 20 customers or you’re spoken on a webinar broadcasted to thousands, how else can you use that content?

Product reviews are a staple in the world of corporate video, but they are so for a reason. Because they’re effective.

According to a fourth quarter 2012 study from Invodo [PDF], 57 percent of consumers are more confident to make a purchase online after watching a product video. More confidence equals fewer returns, fewer sales calls and happier customers willing to share their experience with your brand.

There’s also the famous stat from Zappos where simply adding video to its product pages had a sales impact of 6 to 30 percent. All they did was add video. Nothing else. Why wouldn’t you do that?

When it comes to evoking an emotional response, nothing does it better than video. Whether you’re a nonprofit on a limited budget or you have some serious cash to spend, to use video is to use the combination of sight and sound to affect people in a very real way.

Below is a video PSA created for the New York Council on Problem Gaming as part of its KnowTheOdds gambling awareness campaign. Does NYCPG have tons of literature that speaks to the same things addressed in the video? Yes. Are the effects of problem gambling a mystery? Maybe not to some. But this video and the others created hit viewers right in the chest and the impact was real.

Whether it’s from clients sharing how great it’s been to work with you, from industry partners who have benefited from your collaboration or even your own team talking about what it was like to be part of your latest project, testimonials are a powerful way to establish social proof.

Even better, they’re as effective shot on your iPhone as they are on a professional cyc wall. Snap them during in-store events, at tradeshows, or after the release of your latest project.

Whether you hire a motion graphics company or use a free too like Animoto, animation is another type of video to incorporate into your content marketing strategy. The reason many brands like animation is it gives you the creativity the brand is after, while still allowing a little distance if your CEO is weary of being too outspoken in his own skin.

Through animation and brand characters, a new dimension of your brand is created. Animation provides visual and emotional stimulation, as well as that wow factor your content needs to be remembered.

Your business’s video must contain compelling, engaging and customer relevant material. It should be the focal point of your video otherwise viewers will not stick around for longer than two seconds towatch it. Your video needs to tell a story, show the benefits of your business’s products and/or services and resonate with the audience.

If no one sees you video, even if it’s the greatest video ever made, it has no value! There are two strategies for optimising your video:

1. Optimising the video for search purposes
• Identify relevant keywords to your video
• include text containing these keywords because videos are not visible to search engines. Include them wherever possible -  on your website, YouTube or Vimeo for example. Posting a transcript of the video can be useful for search engine optimisation purposes
• Include keywords within the meta tags and description of the video
• Use a short, catchy title
• Optimise the page URL by making it short
• Encourage user ratings
• Upload the video channels such as YouTube  and Vimeo . Video platforms can be used to upload your video to many channels such as Limelight and Ooyala.
2. Optimise the video for Sharing
• On your website, ensure appropriate social media and email badges and emblems are properly placed to allow viewers to share content as they please
• Websites such as YouTube have excellent sharing functionality and options. If your social media accounts are synced with your YouTube account, your videos can be automatically distributed through to these platforms

Once optimised, your video needs to be promoted to increase its visibility. Here are a variety of ways that the video can be promoted:

• Through your own channels and other employees' business and personal social media channels
• Through other employees' personal channels
• Encouraging your friends and family to share your videos is also useful
• The video can be embedded on the homepage of your business’s website
• A blog could be written with the video embedded inside
• The video could be promoted through your business partners’ websites
• Reaching out to influential bloggers, social media personnel and companies is a great way to promote your video and increase your video’s reach
• Keep an eye out on groups and pages on social media and video sharing sites, such as LinkedIn YouTube and Vimeo, where you can engage with and join in on conversations. They may be discussing topics that pertain to your video.

Measuring and analysing your business’s video is extremely important. Measuring the video’s results is necessary for not only evaluating its effectiveness, but to discover what didn’t work for the purpose of future video creation.

Metrics for your video can be obtained from the video sharing sites that your video has been published on, or via a third party metric supplier. Some useful metrics your business may want to measure include the number of views the video has received, average time spent watching the video, the completion rate of the video and the number of views per country.

• It’s creative
• Keep it short
• Learn from past successful video marketing campaigns
• A little humour never hurts
• Give your videos a call-to-action
• Make sure your customer knows how to find you
• There are no hard and fast rules for making an effective video

We hope this strategy helps with creating effective videos for your small business. Check out our next blog of our three blog series about the battle between YouTube and Vimeo.

Watch that you don’t fall into the trap of equating this utilitarian video style with boring. Whether you opt for fun animations or a cheeky twist on an industry tutorial, be sure to keep things interesting while also providing the facts and useful information your audience is anticipating.

Focusing on 1-3 points maximum per explainer video is ideal. You should also ensure your video is easily accessible for anyone new to your brand by embedding it on your homepage. If you’re working within a tight budget, PowToon is an excellent resource for creating explainer videos.

An alternative to tutorials, interviews can function as a great way to convey information without feeling like you’re shoving it down your audience’s throat. Interviews are also less rigid than you might think, since you can incorporate variety by speaking with a range of relevant individuals, including industry experts, members of your team, or consumers who can offer testimonials about your product or service.  Like explainer videos, the interview format is popular and well understood, resulting in organically optimized content that will increase traffic to your site when used with proper distribution techniques. The trick to a great interview is to ask open-ended questions that will play into the interests and concerns of your audience.  In this example interview series by Cisco, the brand uses humour and improv to lighten the mood and keep you attentive.  Aside from setting up the perfect shot and ensuring your interviewees’ answers are audible, there isn’t excessive behind-the-scenes effort required for video interviews as with many other production styles. This means you can produce video content more frequently by introducing interviews into the mix.

Keeping the full-length version intact, cut a 15 second version that highlights your best ideas and will elicit an emotional response from a viewer. Got it? Great. Now do the exact same thing, but get it down to just 6 seconds. You should now have three versions of your video ready to share online.

1. Your Website
Why is this seemingly obvious choice in first place? Because you want to establish authority for your content prior to publishing it elsewhere. If you put it on your website first you will be more likely to help, rather than hurt, your SEO efforts – especially if you follow our tips for each subsequent platform.

To publish a video to your website, select a video hosting provider that suits your needs. Look at the analytics, security, sharing, and customer support available for each platform you evaluate. For very good reasons, you may not want to go to Youtube, even though they are known for providing free video hosting, and if you are thinking of self-hosting your videos, consider that you might be giving up analytics, security features, and a lot of time you could spend elsewhere.

Once you have picked a video hosting provider, upload your video, and copy and paste the embed code to the HTML code on your website. It is as easy as that, although you might want to feature it on your homepage or mention it in a blog post to help your existing website traffic notice this new content on your site.

Twitter is great for promoting a video because new content can be shared very broadly very quickly if it catches on. If possible, get the page you are publishing it on approved for Twitter Player Cards prior to tweeting it. This will enable you to publish the video directly in a tweet, so it will show up and play in your followers’ feeds.

Can’t get that done in a timely fashion? Just tweet links to your videos anyway, and make sure to use relevant hashtags to reach the right audience. You might also want to tweet it at certain brands or followers if they would find it interesting and are likely to retweet.

Reddit is a social news and entertainment site that is organized by topic into subreddits, which are essentially granular discussion forums. You will surely find several that make sense for the topic your video addresses.

The ideal way to post content to Reddit is to be an active community member, and to participate in different subreddits that are posted to frequently. Get a feel for the tone and general manner in which people in your target subreddits interact, then post your video along with some text to give context to why you are doing so. Definitely be wary of posting overtly promotional materials as these tend to do less well than authentic, informational, or hilarious posts. The Reddit community is not known for being gentle, so proceed with caution and monitor your post.

Pinterest is not just for photos anymore! Video might be Pinterest’s most underutilized feature, however, your pins will stand out even more because of this fact. Pins of videos have a subtle play symbol in the bottom lefthand corner of the poster frame image that is displayed on your board or feed.

Intersperse videos with your regular pins to existing boards, especially those with a large following, or create different boards for each type of video you produce, such as testimonials, tutorials, etc. To encourage sharing, add a Pinterest widget to your site so your viewers can easily pin your videos to their own Pinterest boards.

The largest social network for professionals just made a bold move to become more content-rich, and somewhat more quietly, dramatically enhanced the company profile pages. Take advantage of that with video, especially if you are targeting a B2B audience.

Posting to LinkedIn is relatively easy, but there are a couple things to consider. You cannot use hashtags (LinkedIn briefly supported them, then stopped), and the best place for your video, depending on its content, might not be the newsfeed. The lack of hashtags means you need more connections and Groups to obtain a farther reach. Consider publishing it to your company page instead of, or in addition to, a newsfeed update.

Since adding support for autoplaying videos in the newsfeed, Facebook is a great choice for sharing videos. Use hashtags to your advantage here as well, and be sure to link back to the original content on your site. Take a look at your page insights and try to post at a time when the majority of your fans are likely to be online.

To simplify your life, you could cross-share your Instagram post to Facebook, since a shorter form video might do better than the full-length version on Facebook anyway. If you choose to do this and tagged a lot of Instagram followers in your original post, you might want to go back and clean them up from your Facebook post since the tags might not work.

Monthly audience: 130,000,000 visitors

Account types: free, Plus ($59.95/yr), PRO ($199/yr)

Vimeo.com is a fast-growing platform with a quite serious traffic. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo mostly holds prof-looking videos and has three options for its users: a basic account with limitations and two paid ones with advanced options and bigger space. Here are the principle differences between free and paid accounts.

As you see, Vimeo Plus or Pro accounts suit you perfectly if you are professionally involved into video editing or need to sell your videos. The only thing that you may not like about Vimeo is a lower number of views compared to YouTube.

Monthly audience: 100,000,000 visitors

Account type: free

Dailymotion is a French video-sharing website that allows users to view, upload, browse videos by searching tags, categories, channels, or user-created groups. Dailymotion offers a wide range of random video content: from funny animal videos to serious political reportages. If you want to upload your video to Dailymotion, you should remember that length of the video files is limited to 2 GB and 60 minutes. Also the upload quality to regular users is limited to 1280*720p. However, these restrictions don’t seem a real trouble, and Dailymotion can be a good alternative to YouTube.

Monthly audience: 45,000,000 visitors

Account type: free

LiveLeak is a UK-based video sharing website that lets users publish videos. Although LiveLeak is majorly oriented to politics, war, and other world events, users are free to post any content they want if it doesn’t violate the website policy. For example. it’s prohibited to upload any advertising media, music (unless you are the copyright holder), videos showing criminal activity, etc. The ideal for LiveLeak video should contain sufficient factual background information or news value