Video Marketing: Attract, Engage and Convert

The sight, sound, and motion that video includes makes it a powerful medium for converting visitors into prospects and buyers. A rock-solid video marketing strategy and platform will allow you to attract, engage, and convert your viewers and maximize the ROI of your video content marketing programs. This article explores how online video can be used as the most effective medium for marketers to promote their offerings and drive valuable engagements within their online communities and attract more visitors to your site. For starters, stop only sending your video viewers to YouTube. Marketers have been using video for content marketing for some time but, while video is easier than ever to produce, most marketers are using first-generation video platforms that can only support embedded video on a landing page or website. Others rely on public video platforms such as YouTube, and as result lose control over calls-to-action and their "customers" by directing traffic away from their own websites. Speaking from years of experience in this industry, it is next-generation video platforms for B-to-B and B-to-C marketers that can make a difference and help you spread the word about your brand or product. Attract: The first step in any successful video content marketing strategy is to attract the user. Make sure your users can find your valuable content. For example, IP features, such as video SEO, video search, video content recommendations, and syndication to sites like YouTube are essential. Engage: The second critical step in any successful video marketing strategy is to engage the user once they've found your content. Strive to offer viewers a "lean forward" experience. This is derived from the ability to transcribe, tag, and translate the video content which delivers things like search within the video, closed caption based navigation, and other lean forward features to keep the viewer on your site and watching the video to completion. Convert: The third and most important step in any successful video marketing strategy is to convert the viewer to a lead, prospect or customer using the video content that you've produced. You can do this by synchronizing contextual related content and offers. This can include lead forms, offer forms, and other calls to action, including integrations from marketing automation platforms, such as Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, and others. So how does video attract viewers to your website? The spoken word or audio track within the video, when transcribed, can greatly enrich the overall metadata for a particular piece of video content. This metadata helps you categorize and organize your video, gives your data context and the transcriptions help a search engine understand your voice. We believe that when you use metadata in a powerful and strategic way, you can really increase the number of visitors to your site. For example, Better Homes and Gardens was able to increase their visitors and viewers of their videos by 320 percent. BH&G website is using their online presence in new ways to attract visitors and convert them into active engagers by getting them to click through to advertisements and in some cases, click through to other video content on the site. Also, Entercom, which is one of the largest radio broadcasters in the country, incorporates metadata for all of their podcasts and they were able to increase their Twitter referrals by nearly 300 percent. Another is the People's Choice Awards, which, was able to increase their number of page views by more than 4 times in less than a year. So this audience engine effect can be very, very powerful. Marketers are looking for new ways to attract more visitors to their website, and many marketers have or are still trying to identify, recognize and synchronize the power of their video content. There are video marketing tools that allow your viewers to have enhanced video capabilities for watching, controlling and exploring your site and content and then acting on the content that they see. For example, enhancing the search and SEO functions that are built into the website is one way. It's also important to integrate actual timing to the content within the video itself, allowing multiple calls to action within any given video. Video content marketing is one of the most powerful content elements in the world available today, particularly online. The goal is to engage the consumer with you organization and brand and, as I've said earlier, to convert them to customers. When was the last time you reviewed and refreshed your video marketing strategy and technology platform? Tom Wilde is the CEO of Boston, Mass.-based Ramp, a next-generation video experience provider. He can be reached at twilde@ramp.com.

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Video Marketing: Attract, Engage and Convert

Tom Wilde

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