You have just created a cool, informative and persuasive video and have it embeded onto your website. How do you get people to discover this?
You want to drive traffic to your site hoping for leads that will convert into customers, right? Whether you want them to buy your products, hire your services or maybe just to become a subscriber to the page. Maybe your objective is to promote brand awareness and increase your name recognition. Each of these goals would require a different marketing strategy.
Here is a few tips on how to promote your video so you can maximize your objective.
A lot of this is SEO related, the goal being a front-page search-engine appearance and rich content. Promoting your videos on social media and how to give your video the best chance of going viral to maximize brand awareness are 2 other subjects we'll touch on later.
Presenting the Video
A lot depends on how the video is presented on your web page.
Most importantly, use Google-friendly code to embed your video. The best codes for the purpose from streaming platforms are HTML5 with JavaScript or Flash Player. Unfortunately, iframes is something to stay away from at the moment. That may change in the future, as we all know, Google is always updating.
Second, make a decision about your goals. Whether you're looking to maximize ranking for your page itself or to generate the largest views. If you're looking to maximize ranking, don't enable embedding elsewhere. If your goal is to increase views, allow others to embed the content. If you can, try to utilize both solutions. If you are hosting the video yourself then enable embedding but require that iframe be used. This creates a link to your site, but isn't likely to have their site displace yours in searches. Self-hosting your video content is not suggested. Services like YouTube or Chisel Multimedia are better choices for stability and performance.
Next, make sure the video is prominently displayed in a good size frame, about 640 x 360 px or so. You do not want people scroll past it because it's not eye-catching on the page.
It's also important for SEO purposes to have a variety of content on the page where the video is embedded like text, photos and links. One thing you want to stay away from in most cases is having more than one video on the page. You want searches for videos about a specific subject to show your page prominently in the results. That's most likely to happen if your video on that subject is the only one on the page.
Be sure and test with searches duplicate those your desired traffic will likely use. If the search gives you a result where your video shows up as a snippet on the first page, you've set it up right.
Promote Video on Social Media
All the usual rules of social media promotion apply to promoting videos. It's a discussion, not advertising, so to avoid any spam. Try to engage in conversations with your target audience. Let yourself become known as someone interesting who has something to contribute to ongoing discussion. Occasionally present links to your web site when it's appropriate. Most of your social media participation shouldn't be self-promotion of any kind.
Should you embed the video itself on the platform? That depends on what you're trying to do and also on the nature of the video itself. Do you want people to come to your site to see the video? In that case, you do want to embed it. Do you want people to see the video, and be interested enough by it to come to your web site for other offerings? In that case, embedding it would not be wise.
If the video is long enough to justify this, one approach might be to create a teaser trailer. This trailer can then be hosted on a video portal along with a link that takes the viewer to the whole video on your site.
Promoting Video for Brand Awareness
If you are just trying to create brand awareness then the guidelines above do not apply at all. For that purpose, the only things that matter are the content of the video itself. The video should identify your brand clearly and enable viewers to find your web site easily. Your goal then is to maximize the number of people viewing it.
If you're using your video to bump your web site in the search engines and drive traffic, one site you want to stay away from is YouTube and any other video sites. YouTube is excellent for reaching a lot of people with your video, but it won't give them links back to your web site. Searches for a video on the specific subject will likely display your video on YouTube before the version on your own site. That defeats the purpose.
If you're going to use the video for brand promotion then that calculation isn't that important. You'll drive traffic to your site not directly but by increasing brand recognition. Meaning, people that are interested in what you have to offer will search specifically for you later. In that case, YouTube is exactly where you do want to share it, because of the size of the potential audience. Just be sure that keywords, such as the name of your business and the title of your site are prominent parts of the video content.
In summary, there is more than one right way to promote your video. Whichever approach you decide on, it should have a clear overall marketing strategy.
