There are some very good reasons why you should continue to include video content in your digital marketing strategy these days. Most marketers are aware that there is any number of surveys which indicate the increased levels of engagement and conversions that video content can bring about, but there’s another powerful reason for continuing to use video.
It wasn’t long ago that social referrals were extremely useful and productive in driving users to your website, and this practice involved creating some high-quality content on your site and then including links to that content in your social media posts. There has been a drop in the effectiveness of that strategy, primarily due to the increased level of competition, but also because many of the social media platforms are focused on keeping users right there, rather than allowing them to link to somewhere else.
Social referrals are still effective, and you should continue to use them, but in order to boost your declining social referral numbers, you should be making greater use of video content. Here are some ideas for creating new and engaging video content.
Edit your live webinars into clips
One of the most common B2B marketing methods includes the use of webinars since it allows you to generate leads and then convert people who register for the webinar into actual customers. This is one of the primary reasons that businesses invest so much effort into the creation of a webinar, and why they share their best content through these events.
One of the drawbacks to webinars though, is that they are live events, which means they always have a short life span. If you’re willing to actively promote them, you can share recordings of those webinars, although they won’t be nearly as appealing as the live event would be. A better way to derive additional value from your webinars is to edit them into little snippets and clips and share them to your social media platforms.
By sharing the best snippets from the actual webinar, you’ll engage your users more, and hopefully, give them an inkling about what they’re missing, so they’ll want to attend the next life webinar. This tactic may also increase registration for subsequent live webinars. There are software tools you can use which have built-in editors that will allow you to clip and trim the snippets you want to use for social media. One of the best of these is ClickMeeting, which includes a number of features that you can use for this purpose.
Share hacks and tips
One type of video which can be very good at engaging users, but which doesn’t take much effort to create, is the short-duration educational video. At less than a minute long, these videos can be very helpful by including important facts or tips on any subject, and they’re perfect for a platform such as Instagram, where short videos dominate. To produce a video like this, you really only need a good video editor and some background images. Once you’ve gathered your background images together, you just have to upload them to your video editor, where you can add in any special effects and overlay your text.
Create an entertaining video
Every video you create does not need to be educational or helpful in some way to your following. You can also demonstrate your lighter side by producing a humorous video, or one that is really entertaining in some other way. If you can get your audience laughing, that is one sure way to have them remember your brand, and hope to have them seeking out more content from you in the future. There is any number of ways that you can create entertaining or humorous videos to keep your audience engaged. Ideally, the content that you include in a video like this should have something to do with your business, so that it reinforces brand awareness while also entertaining your audience.
Interview experts on specific subjects
For many B2B’s, video interviews are another form of content which works very well with engaging users. It’s a pretty simple concept, because all you have to do is invite an expert on some particular topic to participate in a face-to-face interview, and then explore topics of interest to your viewers. There are a couple of reasons why these kinds of videos are very successful, the first of which is that they can provide some very useful and valuable insights on the topics being covered.
Chances are, the expert that you’re interviewing will also promote the video, so you have two separate channels which are urging users to watch and engage with the content. These kinds of video content can be especially effective if you can research those topics which have the most interest for your viewers, and focus on those during your live interviews. It will also make the interview more effective if you can develop the most useful questions for your expert to respond to since these will be of the most direct interest to your users.
These types of videos can be live events or they can be recorded, although live sessions probably are more effective. When conducting a live session, viewers can participate and send in questions they would like to ask of your expert. This is very beneficial to your business since it means that viewers are much more engaged with the event, and they’ll certainly remember your business as the one which sponsored the event they participated in.
Create product tutorials
This is one of the easiest forms of video content you can create, and if you’re not comfortable appearing in videos yourself, it’s an ideal option because you never have to actually make an appearance. Before attempting to create a product tutorial, you should determine what your audience’s needs are, and then provide them with an explanation of how to use a specific product or service.
All you really have to do to create a video like this is to record the screen and provide a voice-over narration of what it is that you’re doing. These are extremely popular videos because they solve a problem for users which they can’t solve for themselves. To make the process even easier, you can purchase a tool such as Screencast-o-Matic, which will provide a full suite of editing tools that you can use for your production.
