Video Marketing

Online Video Marketing

Online Video Marketing

Online marketing takes many different forms, and knowing which to choose is important. We’ve covered search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC) advertising, email marketing and native advertising. Today we’re going to cover another very effective form of online marketing: video marketing.

Video marketing has many advantages, particularly when it comes to SEO and search rankings. Studies back in 2009 showed that video ranked 50 times higher than traditional text based content. Obviously we’re in a much different world now, but recently we’ve seen recorded Google Hangouts on Air (HOA) rank on page 1 of Google for some fairly competitive search terms.

YouTube Video for Online Marketing

With any discussion of video marketing comes a discussion of YouTube. Marketing Land discovered that 8 out of 10 video results in Google search came from YouTube. There is an obvious connection between Google and YouTube because Google owns YouTube. As long as the YouTube content provides a great search experience that’s what Google prefers to serve.

YouTube has many other advantages as well. For example you can place your keyword in both the title as well as the description text of your videos. Branding is another important aspect to video marketing, and YouTube offers some great editing features which can be used to brand your videos. Using your logo in video helps build brand awareness, associates your brand with high quality content and helps to personalize your brand.

Provide Value with High Quality Content

As with all content marketing it’s important in video marketing to provide value. Valuable content is helpful, sharable, generates positive buzz and has the opportunity to go viral. When your content helps people, they talk about it, and they share it with their friends. Google pays more attention to content they determine people find value in. High quality video generates more social signals, such as comments and plus ones, and these social signals are part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

Annotate your Video and Spin off Content

YouTube also provides annotation features, which are clickable links that overlay your video. It’s a good practice to use annotations at the beginning and end of your videos with links to your external website, and to subscribe to your YouTube channel. In order to put an external link in an annotation you’ll have to enable your account for external annotations. Here’s a video tutorial on to do just that.

Video marketing is a powerful way to spread your message, and video lends itself well to spin off content. For example you can take a video you’ve recorded, and embed it in a page or post. Then write an article based on the content of that video. Now you have an entirely new piece of content that is very valuable. Whatever your online marketing goals, video marketing can be a very effective part of them.

Stay tuned to our next post, in this online marketing series, we’ll be covering social media optimization (SMO)!