5 Tips for Better Video Marketing

As the Internet changes the way prospects access products and services, businesses must focus on new marketing strategies to get on the radar of their target audience. According to ComScore, the online video reaches 85.4% of the U.S. Internet audience. If your business isn’t incorporating video marketing into its overall strategy, you could be missing out on huge chunk of the prospect pie. Since YouTube is second only to Google in volume of searches, it’s a great (free) place to upload and manage your video marketing content. But don’t just create videos and upload them to your channel; make sure your videos are being watched.

Wasp Barcode Technologies recently celebrated the milestone of reaching its one-millionth view on YouTube. Small businesses and content marketers can easily learn from this success with five simple content marketing tips to apply to your video strategy today.

1. Utilize a variety of content
Part of the appeal of Wasp’s YouTube channel is that we provide more than just product videos. Using vlogs (video blogs), video case studies and other recorded video testimonial in addition to video product marketing creates a more dynamic video channel, while also providing information users or potential prospects need.

2. Know your audience
Which groups of people can benefit from your product or service? Once you’ve narrowed down who needs your product, you can position yourself for success at the corner of “search” and “intent.” Wasp makes its video content readily available to business owners, IT professionals and others looking for sophisticated business productivity solutions at a great price point. Our strategic video marketing plan focused on the creation of videos that solve problems common to our target audience. Video marketing is more than putting content online for people to stumble across; it’s about catering content to the people who will benefit from it.

3. Harness the power of video search optimization
Video should be optimized to reach your audience based on search intent and brand name. Focus on adding keywords to titles, tags and descriptions. Also consider adding playlists centered on industry keywords and terms. Doing so will help users find content specific to their search queries. At the start of our video marketing campaign, we identified the term “asset tracking” as one of our targeted key words. Through proper optimization, many of our videos appear on page one of YouTube for targeted search results.

4. Advertise
It’s important to keep in mind the value of organic video views to reach an engaged audience. However, through Google AdWords for video, many companies are able to expand their reach by targeting specific demographics and individuals with niche interests. The cost per brand impression can be as low as pennies on the dollar given the volume of video people consume and the engagement associated with video. Additionally, targeted ads reach those who could benefit from the service, thus increasing sales and revenue. Proper targeting also avoids over-inundating those who have no interest in your product. As a result of targeting the right audience, Wasp experienced an increase of highly focused, engaged traffic from YouTube to our website.

5. Don’t forget YouTube is a social network
Many small businesses consider YouTube to be a hosting platform for their video content. However, with over 800 million active users, YouTube should be considered a top social network. At Wasp we didn’t get to one million views by acting like a wallflower, we engaged with other users, liked content and shared videos. Users like to see brands that are more engaged – it instills a sense of community.

Video is changing the way businesses and prospects interact. Implement the five best practices above and you’ll be surprised at the increase in qualified web traffic and leads you generate from a well-optimized and effective video marketing strategy.