A strategic online video marketing campaign is perhaps the most under-utilized internet market domination strategy for small businesses on a budget. Like every strategic marketing campaign, it should be marked by large scale planning, alignment to the highest business goals, and systematization (for the purpose of long-term monitoring and optimization).
The Power of A Strategic Web Video SEO campaign
Imagine two Digital Media Consulting businesses decide to create a Web Video campaign to generate more business from the internet. If they were both advised to create a single YouTube video as the centerpiece of their campaign, and restricted to spending the same amount, the video that is deployed as part of a strategic internet marketing plan will produce 5 to 10 times the back end profits every time.
Why?
A strategic online video marketing plan prepares for the back end utilization of such resources as the YouTube Video clip. By planning in advance where watchers should be sent, and how they should be invited there, the video can be produced to do a better job of teasing a landing page, or special offer.
One of my favorite marketing mentors and business consultants once said that, “strategy makes every tactic work five to ten times harder”. Strategy is about all the overall planning and decision-making (choosing) that ensures that each resource (or video) that is subsequently deployed in a plan is utilized to the fullest extent.
An example strategic online video marketing campaign
Any strategic marketing campaign should start with a clear and detailed analysis of the business goals that are to be met. All the resources and tools that will be part of executing the strategy should be audited and confirmed to be affordable and available for use.
In consulting with clients, we look for market research that identifies key needs that their customers have. We then develop a content strategy around the 3 to 5 most important needs that we identify (depending on the scope of the project).
In the next step, further research is conducted to connect the needs we found to keyword demand, competition, and cost metrics. We start working on videos only after we have developed a list of keywords and keyword phrases to anchor our web video marketing campaign.
The keywords that we identify are then used to develop the topics for the videos. This is very important for getting the videos to generate significant organic search engine traffic.
In creating a video for to market your business online, or to pre-sell your products and services, it’s very important that your headlines imply a benefit while leaving the viewer at least a little curious as to how the video will help them attain that benefit.
Benefit plus curiosity is the key for most lead generation advertising (which is what this tactic is). Additionally, your videos should almost always end with an invitation to a landing page or email capture page that offers either a great deal at a significant discount, or a highly valuable bait piece in exchange for a name and email address.
So many businesses that venture into web video marketing get this step wrong. If you send people from your videos to your generic website, you risk losing them for good. If you capture their email addresses, you will have many opportunities to drive them to your websites, partner websites, and to your products or services.
If you do not currently use an email service provider that offers a robust auto-responder as part of the package, you can check out the services like Aweber and iContact.
Video Promotion in a Strategic Campaign
One advanced strategy that we help our clients execute is to syndicate your videos into multiple video distribution sites, as well as to share your videos across your social media presence.
TubeMogul.com is a great free video syndication service that gives you the ability to syndicate your videos to over 10 of the top video sharing websites. You may decide to spend some money and get a virtual assistant, or even an intern to syndicate your videos among the many video sharing sites out there.
Finally, you can share your videos through your social media in an organized and semi-automated manner by using syndication tools to share the links to your social media contacts. Another thing I like to recommend is to connect your videos to themed and search engine optimized press releases.
