The fact that you are reading this article is because you understand how important it is for your company to be seen on the internet. You probably also know that website designers like to talk about a mystical voodoo science called “Search Engine Optimization” or “SEO” that helps you get to the first page on Google search results.

In general, the higher and more frequently your website ranks on the search results page, the more traffic you will receive from the search engines. Therefore, the more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.

One of the secrets behind achieving high search engine rankings, is to optimise and promote high quality video content on your website. Mainly because there is less video content out there to compete with (unlike web pages which massively outnumber video assets), it can be relatively easier to achieve a high position on Google than just by optimising web pages.

After all:

• Websites that contain video hold a viewer’s attention for more than two minutes longer than sites without video content. This is very valuable, as visitor time on your website is one factor that can boost search rankings (Source: ComScore).
• More than half of senior executives share videos with colleagues at least weekly and receive work-related videos just as often (Source: Forbes Insight Study).
• Videos are 53 times more likely to receive an organic first page ranking than traditional text pages (Source: Forrester Research).
• Videos produce a 41% higher click through rate than plain text results (Source: Aimclear).

The Importance of Buyer-Centric Video Content

Creating content is now one of the most important aspects of a marketer’s job. Valuable content is what search engines and people are looking for.

Whether you’re creating a whitepaper, blog article or a video, it’s critical that you provide helpful, educational information to your prospects.

It’s no longer about creating product-centric content, but buyer-centric content

that will encourage viewers to share.

When creating engaging video content, it’s important to leverage video’s unique power to tell stories. Tell narratives that demonstrate that you understand the customer experience enabling them to emotionally connect to your company. Remember, “facts tell, stories sell”.

The Importance of a Video Promotion Strategy

Once your video is made, it’s now more important than ever to have your video promotional strategy all ready to go, before you even upload your video to the Internet.

When you consider that a staggering 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, every minute, then you can appreciate that YouTube looks for videos that attract a lot of “eyeballs” within the first 24-48 hours of being uploaded.

If your video goal is to get it ranking highly on YouTube, then you need to have your video promotional strategy all set to go, once your video is live, so that YouTube is more likely to notice you from all the lovely views that your video is receiving. But even if you’re not interested on being easily found on YouTube, you will still need to spend time promoting your video.

Ensure that you:

1. Research- what keywords your customers use to find solutions for their problems and make sure that you create your video around these search terms.
2. Optimise – Think of video optimisation as a way to help Google and your prospective customers, easily find your video and understand why it is suitable for them. Optimising your video is all about correctly filling out metadata with the keywords that you want to rank on. This is the information that surrounds your video such as title, tags, description and thumbnail. YouTube and Google read this information to help index the video for search, features, related videos and ad-serving. Basically, the best optimised videos get the highest search engine rankings.
3. Promote- Share your online video with as many people as you can. Suggestions include relevant industry blogs, the media and any appropriate stakeholders. Make sure all of your followers on social media are aware of your video. Promote your video link to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc. Create an email marketing campaign and promote your new video to your database. As soon as your video is uploaded, reach out to everyone with your video link.
4. Analyse - Creating video content is about achieving business goals, rather than content objectives. It’s all about getting prospects to take action whether that’s to download a report or sign up as a new customer. Before you even start your video, work out what goals you want the video to achieve. After all, you don’t want to be good at creating video content, you want to be great at marketing your business through creating video content. Measure your video success to help your improve your next video creation.

Video content is no longer aspirational for companies, but part of a well thought out marketing plan. But just creating a video is not enough. Neither is creating one video and hoping that it will be a hit. It’s now increasingly important to spend a lot of time planning how to create a range of website video content for your audience as well as correctly optimising and promoting your video.

Getting this right will elevate you to the coveted thought leader position within your industry and also drive lots of traffic to your website for many, many years.