Online video is a powerful medium for your company’s content. It boosts the success of your promotional campaigns and enables you to connect with your audience and develop lasting relationships. Whether you’re a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or a marketer, you can make sales with YouTube videos. This article reviews how to develop an online video content strategy that generates leads and grows your brand.
Why Online Videos are Important for Marketing
Online videos are essential to a company’s marketing strategy for several reasons. The most important of these is content. When it comes to driving traffic and increasing conversion rates, content plays a critical role in your digital marketing strategy. It provides more opportunities for search engines to determine whether your site is valuable to online users. The more your content resonates, the higher you’ll rank in search results. This gains you more visibility and drives more traffic to your site.
Online videos also help position yourself as an authority in your field. By posting in-depth, informational content that meets the needs of your audience, you’re providing valuable insight and are viewed as a reliable resource. This helps build brand loyalty and keeps people tuning in for more.
Videos are a great way to demonstrate ideas or practices and build confidence in your products and services. Up to 97% of marketers say their videos help customers gain a better understanding of their products.
Videos can help customers:
- Understand how to assemble a product from video instructions
- Supplement and support written content on your website
- Follow how-to guides
Whatever the situation, when people see your offerings in action, they overcome any hesitancy and are assured in their purchase decision.
When you understand how to make sales videos on YouTube, you’ll be able to reach your audience with meaningful content that generates revenue and solidifies your brand identity.
How Do You Get Started?
As you prepare to develop your online video content strategy, there are three things you must determine:
- Purpose: Identify the reason for creating your video. Maybe you’re trying to gain credibility, close sales, or boost your revenue stream. Whatever the reason, knowing your purpose will give you direction for the content you need to create.
- People: Determine the target audience you want to reach. By understanding their demographics, you’ll know what kind of language resonates with them. Understanding how they respond to different content and where they’re accessing these videos will play an important role in your online video content strategy.
- Platform: Once you know where people are watching your videos, you can decide what approach to take with your video publication. If your audience is watching YouTube, you can create long-form vlog content. If they’re more into advertising channels, you’ll want to post on Facebook. Knowing which platform is most effective for your audience is crucial to the success of your campaign.
Once you have these answers, begin outlining your content and building an arsenal of videos to attract your audience and close sales.
The 3-Step Online Video Content Strategy
YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world. This makes it a great platform to gain visibility and build brand identity. An effective online marketing content strategy will first draw a large portion of your audience to your YouTube videos. Then, once these people are in your audience, you’ll create quality videos that continue to engage them and build your credibility. Finally, you’ll be able to convert them to customers.
It’s important to realize that not everyone who sees your videos is looking to purchase from you that day. If you only focus your efforts on hot buyers or “buy today” people, you’ll lose your entire audience. Everyone who accesses your marketing videos is at a different place in their customer journey.
Some customers are not yet aware that they need your products. Others are comparison shopping between you and your competitors. Eventually, they’ll all become hot leads who are ready to commit to purchase from your company.
All of this means you need to create a wide range of videos that reach your viewers at different touchpoints in their sales journey. We’ll cover how to create a systematic video workflow in another blog. For now, here are the three categories of videos you need to create to generate leads and close sales with your online video content strategy.
1. Pull Videos
Pull videos are designed to draw your audience in from search results. Content includes how-to videos, highly based on SEO and research. These videos should be informative, authoritative, and offer value to your viewers. Worried about giving away all of your secrets? Don’t be. You’ll never give everything away at once. That’s only for customers.
Every video should contain one core moment of value. We call this the climax, or the high point of the video. This is the key information that viewers are tuning in to see.
The goal of pull videos is to get people to subscribe to your channel. Then, you want them to watch at least 60% of each video. This is a lofty goal, as the average YouTube viewer retention rate is around 50%. That’s why the climax of your post should happen close to the first half of your video. Once you draw your viewers in, you want to keep them there.
Online video content strategy helps with SEO and is designed to earn you higher search rankings. YouTube searches help viewers find the most relevant videos for users’ keyword searches. While videos are ranked by factors like title and description matches, search only accounts for 10% of YouTube results.
Engagement is also a driving factor for YouTube success. That means you’ll also need to trigger their algorithm with videos that demonstrate your unique knowledge and position you as an authority on your subject.
Here’s an example of Pull Video:
2. Push Videos
That’s where push videos come into play. These are designed to engage the audience you’ve been building through your pull videos. They’re called “push” because you’re creating these videos based on topics your audience may not be searching for. Instead, you’re “pushing” your knowledge to your viewers to make them aware of new topics and concepts. Essentially, you’re giving them content they didn’t know they needed.
Push videos should be designed to trigger YouTube’s suggested algorithm through binge-watching sessions. You want people to find one of these videos, and become so engrossed in the content that they watch the next one, and the next one, and so on. That’s why these topics should be as unique to you as possible. You want to capture your audience’s attention and maintain their interest because they can’t find this information anywhere else.
Here’s an example of Push Video:
3. Pow Videos
Now that you’ve attracted an audience and drawn them in, it’s time to pack a punch with a hard-hitting sales message. Pull videos have helped you build a following and push videos allowed you to nurture those leads. It’s time to convert your audience with a variety of powerful sales videos.
Here are our favorite formats for effective pow videos:
- Sales Videos: While they won’t get a ton of views, they will get some clicks. And really, that’s what you want. Sales videos will never go viral, but that’s not their purpose. They’re designed to convert sales, and they will – but only for people who are ready to buy.
- Webinars: As a tool, this is one of the best-kept secrets for business owners. Webinars gather your audience in a video conference room (like Zoom calls). There, you can deliver a presentation to a captive audience. For lots of content on how to run webinars, the best software to buy, and how to present your offer, check out our course, The Video Marketing School.
- YouTube and Facebook Live: Live streaming is a fantastic tool for converting new sales. When working with a software company, we sold 40 subscriptions in a single live stream. Going live is like hosting a live webinar or having your radio show, only it’s video. Visit my YouTube channel for tons of content on how to run a live stream for your business.
Here’s an example of Pow Video:
Taking Your Next Steps
Online videos have a positive impact on your marketing goals. By reaching a target audience, delivering unique content, and developing relationships with your following, you’ll generate revenue and grow your brand. So now what?
After reading this blog, you have a better understanding of what it takes for an effective online video content strategy and how to make money with YouTube videos.
You use:
- Pull videos to bring in new people.
- Push videos to nurture those leads.
- Pow videos to convert them to sales.
Now that you get the strategy, it’s time to create a content plan around these techniques. Read The Video Marketing School’s next blog to learn how to accomplish this next step.
