Video content is one of the most effective forms of content. It’s crisp, engaging, and gives a lot of information in a short time. As many as 85% of all internet users in the US watch video content every month.
Due to its many benefits, as many as 87% of all marketers use videos for marketing their brands. 83% of marketers also use video marketing because they think that it gives them a good ROI.
Let’s take a look at how you can increase the ROI of video content even further.
1. Set Goals
Just like all other forms of marketing, effective video marketing also requires that you set clear goals. These goals need to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely.
Your goals can help you channelize your efforts and create better video content that can benefit your brand.
Your goals can be to:
- Increase your sales within a certain time period
- Improve your brand awareness
- Increase conversion rates to get more sales
- Generate more leads within a stipulated time period
Once you’ve set your goals, you’ll be able to develop videos that will help you reach them. At the same time, all of your teams will be on the same page to help you drive better video marketing ROI.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
To succeed with video marketing, you need to understand your target audience thoroughly. Figure out who they are and what they like and dislike. Based on that, you’ll be able to craft more effective content.
You need to find their pain points and create content that can resolve them. When they see that your content is giving them genuine value, they will keep returning back to you.
After all, your videos need to connect with your audience emotionally. They will return to your brand only if they find that your videos are useful to them.
3. Create Great Content
Once you’ve figured out more about your target audience, your goal should be to create great content that will resonate well with them.
Create videos that are informative and engaging. Aim to create high-quality videos that can solve their problems.
Use bite-sized captions in the video to further elaborate on what’s being displayed in each clip. You can also consider adding subtitles to your videos so that your audience will be able to understand everything that’s said in i.
Additionally, you need to keep the video duration in mind as well.
HubSpot analyzed thousands of videos and found that:
- Videos that got the highest engagement were only about 26 seconds long.
- The best videos on Twitter averaged around 43 seconds.
- On Facebook, the audience engages most with videos that are 1-minute long.
- YouTube videos which are about 2-minutes long see the most engagement.
Thus, you should create videos by keeping these factors in mind.
For Instagram and Twitter, try creating short videos that deliver information quickly. On Facebook, you have the liberty to make slightly longer videos.
Lastly, on YouTube, you can create videos that give in-depth information to viewers. This gives you a chance to be more creative with your content as well.
4. Add a CTA
It’s crucial to add a CTA (call-to-action) to your videos, especially when you want your viewers to take a particular action.
It’s better to tell viewers to take action rather than leaving them to guess. The CTA can be something as simple as, “Share this video with your friends.”
When you recommend what they should do next, there are more chances of them taking that action. This way, you’ll be able to drive engagement, reach, leads, and even conversions. This, in turn, can help in improving the ROI of your videos.
For instance, GoPro wanted viewers to become their subscribers on YouTube. For that, they added the words “Subscribe” at the end of their videos to push viewers to subscribe.
Image via YouTube
5. Have a Distribution Strategy in Place
Creating great videos isn’t enough. You need to have a distribution plan in place to get these videos to your target audience. Otherwise, you won’t be able to find viewers for them.
So, you need to figure out where your audience is the most active. Analyze your audience and find out the social media platforms where they engage with content the most.
Based on this research, zero-in on one or two platforms and put all of your effort into reaching your target audience there. Doing so will get you the most engagement.
You must also tailor your videos to the platform that you’re targeting to improve your engagement further. This can help improve your ROI.
You can, of course, publish your videos on other platforms as well. A great way of doing this is by creating templates for each platform and then scheduling them for publishing. It’s a great idea to post videos on your blog as well. Adding them to emails and landing pages can help too.
6. Repurpose Content
One of the best ways of using your content is by repurposing it. If you want to improve the ROI of your videos, you can repurpose them into other forms of content and get more out of the same piece of content.
It can be quite a task to come up with engaging content that can resonate will with your audience. By repurposing content, you can reach out to different segments of your audience that may prefer various content formats.
For instance, you can create blog posts out of your videos and vice-versa. Alternatively, you can cut the video into multiple parts and share those on social media. In some cases, you may be able to create infographics or albums from your videos as well.
To improve your ROI even further, you can reuse your videos. By publishing the same video on different platforms, you’ll be able to really get the most out of it.
It’s also an effective cost-cutting method as you’ll spend less money on creating videos. The key, of course, is to create great videos that your audience will like.
7. Track & Optimize
Like all other types of marketing, you need to track the effectiveness of your videos as well. By doing so, you’ll get an idea of what’s working and what’s not. This will help you improve your future videos to get better results.
Some of the most important metrics that you need to consider are:
- Play rate: This is the percentage of plays as compared to the number of times the video was loaded. A higher play rate indicates that the video is extremely relevant to your target audience, and that’s why people are watching it.
- Average viewing duration: This figure gives you an idea of how long your audience watched your video, on average. The longer the average viewing duration, the more engaging and relevant your video is.
- Click-through rate: This shows you the percentage of viewers who clicked on the call-to-action during or after watching your video. A higher CTA means that your viewers are taking the action that you wanted them to take. You can track the effectiveness of each video by adding a UTM code to the URL in the CTA. These codes can be easily tracked using tools like UTM.io.
Final Thoughts
Videos can help your brand reach greater heights if used well. You need to ensure that you create top-notch videos and distribute them in the right places.
Make sure that your audience sees them and that your content resonates with them. Use CTAs wherever possible to push them to take action.
It’s also a great idea to repurpose your content to get the most out of it. Lastly, make sure that you track and optimize your campaigns to improve your results even further.
Are there other ways marketers can increase the ROI of their videos? Let us know in the comments.
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