When you create an awesome video that barely gets any results for your business… it hurts.

It hurts a lot.

It’s the marketing equivalent of throwing an epic birthday party – only to discover that nobody showed up.

And the most upsetting thing of all, your video is good! It’s engaging, it’s useful, it’s targeted to exactly the right people. So how come it’s so difficult to get traction?

The truth is, video marketing is hard. Even when you have a terrific piece of content on your hands, it’s no walk in the park. So if there’s anything you can do to increase the odds of success, then you should.

And that’s what today’s article is all about!

This week, we’re going to give you 10 video marketing tips for getting better results from your content. Most of them have nothing to do with changing the video itself – so you can try them immediately and see what kind of impact it makes.

Ready? Let’s dig in!

1. Refine your call to action

Generic calls to action are the #1 thing that could hurt your video marketing performance.

After all, your end goal is not to make your customer watch the video – that’s the (relatively) easy part! The real challenge is getting them to do something afterwards like:

  • Buying your product.
  • Subscribing to your email list.
  • Sending you an email or calling you.

That’s why improving your call to action is one of the easiest, most immediately rewarding video marketing tips you could implement. So try and do this:

  1. Pick one of your marketing videos. Ideally, one that gets a good number of views but doesn’t have a lot of conversions.
  2. Examine the call to action. What are you asking the viewer to do? Why would they want to do it? What’s in it for them? And is there any way they can misunderstand or ignore your request?
  3. Re-do your call to action to be small, specific, and immediately actionable. For example, instead of “buy now,” “order today,” or something vague like that, try changing it to:

“Click the link below this video to see our new arrivals”

For more tips on how to create an irresistible call to action for any marketing content you create, check out this article – as well as this short post about power words.

2. Optimize videos for social media

When it comes to social media, most tips for video marketing just tell you that you should, in fact, do that. Groundbreaking advice, isn’t it?

But it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Social media users interact with video content in a particular way – and if you want more people to see your videos, you want to do a little bit of optimization.

For example:

  • In most social feeds, videos autoplay without sound. Consider adding closed captions so they don’t miss the voiceover (if you have it). You can also use closed captions to make your video content more accessible to audiences whose first language isn’t English.
  • Also, it’s a great idea to create a visually engaging introduction that will stop viewers from scrolling down. Regardless of where your main viewership is, attention-grabbing openers can’t hurt!
  • Video length is important. You can’t upload a 10-minute video on, say, Twitter, and call it a day. Make your social videos short – under a minute, ideally. And if someone is interested, point them to a full-length version of your video on YouTube or on your website. A social video is almost like a trailer, or a “highlight reel” for your main content.

For a list of 6 mistakes to avoid when you’re trying to create engaging videos for social media, read this article.

3. Add some bare-bones interactivity

We’ve talked at length about interactive video and how it’s more engaging than “vanilla” video content. But the truth is, you can benefit from the effects of interactivity even if you don’t create one for your business.

Here’s how…

If you want to boost engagement and conversions, try giving customers just a little bit more control over their viewing experience. Things like:

  • Clickable calls to action or in-video lead capture forms that let people complete an action right away, as opposed to doing it later and getting distracted.
  • Timestamps that allow viewers to skip to different parts of your video rather than watch the whole thing from start to finish.
  • Images linking to relevant products mentioned in the video, so customers can go to the product page and check them out for themselves.
  • Links to related content you’ve created, so viewers can learn more about the topic if they want.

Your video hosting platform of choice might not support all of these, but implementing even one of these video marketing tips can make a difference in engagement and conversions.

4. Add annotations and create eye-catching thumbnails

Video annotations and thumbnails are great video marketing tools – especially when you’re trying to get more traffic on a third-party platform like YouTube.

It’s hard to attract viewers when you don’t have an attractive thumbnail and there’s a dozen more recommended videos staring them in the face, all competing for attention.

To create attention-grabbing thumbnails for your video content, follow these simple guidelines:

  1. Make sure the video title is also on the thumbnail, clearly legible.
  2. Don’t crowd it with images, but have a prominent, centered visual like the presenter’s face or some other element from the video.
  3. Make sure the thumbnail reflects the actual content of the video, so it doesn’t get flagged by users – or the algorithm.

And as far as annotations go, there are many ways you could use them that go beyond the scope of today’s article. So if you want to learn more about them, check out these 6 video marketing tips for using annotations.

5. Make your videos SEO-friendly

Video marketing tips don’t usually feature SEO advice – but they should. Video SEO is the definition of low-hanging fruit. It can give you more traffic to your content with just a few tweaks – and none of them involve changing the video itself!

If your video is self-hosted, consider performing perform basic optimization on the page or blog post that features it:

  • Identify the keywords you want to target.
  • Write a good title tag, an H1 headline, and a click-worthy meta description.
  • Write a mini-article around your keywords, at least 400 words long.
  • Alternatively, just post the full transcript underneath the video.

If your video is hosted on a third-party platform like YouTube or Vimeo, here’s what else you can do:

  • Write a compelling video description around the keywords you want to use.
  • Tag it, so both the users and the video algorithm have to problem finding it.
  • Revisit video marketing tip #4 and create a good thumbnail.
  • Write a descriptive title with your target keyword in mind.

YouTube is the world’s second-biggest search engine now. And with 300+ hours of video being uploaded online every minute, you don’t want to neglect an additional opportunity to make your content easier to find.

For more tips on video SEO, check out the two articles here and here.

 

Did you know your marketing video needs 10 essential elements to be high-converting? We have developed a neat checklist you can use to fail-proof all your video content before you release them to the world. Click the link right below to grab it:

Download the free checklist: “10 Things Every Marketing Video Must Have to Convert”

 

6. Give mobile users some love

Without knowing anything about your business, we can safely say that at least 30% of your audience are going to watch your videos on a mobile device.

According to Cisco, mobile traffic has exploded 18-fold over the past five years, and will most likely overtake desktop traffic by 2020. So here’s a simple tip for video marketing: if you want more viewers and higher conversions, fix your mobile viewing experience!

In practical terms, this means:

  • Creating a dedicated mobile version for each of your key video landing pages.
  • Testing your video content on mobile for loading speed and possible errors.
  • Making it just as easy to follow your call to action on mobile as it is on desktop.

Oh, and don’t forget to make the other elements of your marketing funnel mobile-friendly, too. It’s not a good look when a potential customer watches a video on their phone, clicks the link inside, and ends up on a messy website that barely works on mobile (if at all)!

For a few more tips on how to do mobile optimization right, read this article.

7. Create lead magnets and content upgrades

It’s never a bad idea to give your potential customers an additional incentive to stay in touch with your brand. Offering them exclusive content they can’t get anywhere else is an excellent strategy to do just that. The more subscribers you get, the higher the odds that they will become paying customers later on!

 

So consider creating a great lead magnet for people to download, and make that your video’s call to action. Or simply put an opt-in form – or a link to the opt-in form – somewhere they can’t miss it.

If you want to learn more about lead magnets, here’s a two-part article that explores them in detail.

Lead magnets are great, but creating a video-specific content upgrade is an even better strategy. A content upgrade is a kind of “bonus” material that expands on, complements, or follows your main content.

For example:

Let’s say that you did an in-depth video tutorial on how to reach out to big-name bloggers for guest posts or sponsorship opportunities. As a content upgrade, you could give away any (or all) of these:

  • An audio interview with an editor working at a big-name blog, talking about the do’s and don’ts of outreach.
  • A word-for-word email template your viewers can use in their next marketing campaign.
  • A huge spreadsheet of blogs and online magazines in different niches, sorted by topic, complete with editors’ email addresses.

A great content upgrade can easily triple the number of new subscribers you get from a video – so we strongly encourage you to try them!

8. Improve your video title

If you can only do one thing on this list… this is it.

If we ranked these tips for video marketing from easiest to hardest, this one would be #1. But we didn’t, so it’s over here instead!

Changing the title of your video takes less than a minute, but it can boost your traffic and conversions significantly. There are literally hundreds of tactics and formulas you can use – so we can’t describe all of them in this section.

Instead, we’re going to give you two quick resources for creating highly engaging, clickable titles:

  1. Use this free headline analyzer to test your existing video title – or any of the new ones you come up with!
  2. Read this short tutorial on how to craft a great title for your video.

Changing your video title is a small thing, but don’t underestimate it. Viewers take less than 3 seconds to decide whether or not they’re going to watch your content, and they often do it based on the title alone. So as far as video marketing tips go, this one packs quite a punch!

9. Update or follow up on your best content

That’s right – sequels and remakes aren’t just for Hollywood! You can use a similar tactic in your video marketing efforts, to great effect.

Think back to the most successful video you’ve done. The one that earned the highest number of views, or received the biggest response.

Now, ask yourself: is there anything left to say on the same topic that would be helpful, relevant, and valuable to your viewers? Maybe your position has changed. Or maybe some new information has come to light, and you need to revise the content.

If the answer is yes, you can either:

  1. Create a new-and-improved version of your old video and promote it to your viewers, or…
  2. Make a follow-up video that would expand on your previous content and provide even more value to your potential customers.

Either way, it’s a great strategy that’s almost guaranteed to be successful. For starters, you’re building on previous well-received content, so the odds are in your favor to begin with. And on top of that, you’re working hard to help your viewers even more – something they will notice and appreciate. Win-win!

10. Repurpose your best-performing videos

It pains us to say this, but… not everyone loves video as much as we do.

Some people listen to podcasts. Others read long-form articles. Still others love infographics and presentations.

So if you have a successful video, and you want to get maximum ROI from it, the best strategy is not to promote it even harder – but to turn it into something else.

This is where repurposing comes in.

You can take your video and transform it into:

  • A blog post, or a series of blog posts.
  • A downloadable PDF.
  • A slide deck.
  • A piece of audio content.
  • An infographic (pay someone to draw one).

And more.

That way, you can even get the attention of those of your customers who are interested in your message, but don’t watch video all that much. It shouldn’t be the reason they won’t be exposed to your message and buy from you later, now should it?

We thought so!

Want more video marketing tips? Grab this free bonus

We hope you’ve found these tips for video marketing valuable – it would be awesome if you implemented at least one of them in your next campaign!

That said, there are many more powerful strategies you could be using, and these 10 tips don’t even scratch the surface. So we have prepared something extra for you…

After working on 1,000+ whiteboard videos with hundreds of clients, we’ve had front row seats to some of the best-performing video marketing campaigns in the world. And we took notes, and compiled the most valuable takeaways into a short-but-powerful report.

It’s called “Top 10 Ways to Use a Whiteboard Video” and it’s yours free

Click the link above to download it, and you’ll discover exactly how the best companies in the world (Subspot, Twitter, and Uber, among others) use video to get more customers!