How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing

HubSpot recently held a webinar on how to use video for your online marketing campaigns. Here are some of their tips.

Content

There’s a content tradeoff. You can either make an informative video with lots of information for the viewer or an entertaining video that catches viewers’ attention and has the potential to go viral.

Short is sweet. Focus on the first ten seconds of your video and try to do something shocking or entertaining to rope people in.

Use an outline, not a full script. You’ll be much more engaging.

Test your video on friends and coworkers and edit it according to their responses. If they don’t find your joke funny, chances are your online audience won’t either.

Optimization

Publish and promote everywhere. You want your video found!

If you upload your video to either Visible Measures or Tubemogul , they’ll upload it to all of the different video sharing sites for you and provide you with analytics, too.

You need to decide if are you going to optimize your video for SEO (by using straight-forward keywords) or for viral (by using enticing keywords). Tip: start with a viral title to make the video popular and then change it to a more keyword-rich title to make use of its long tail potential.

Post your video on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and your blog. Encourage co-workers and friends to post it on their blogs too.

SEO

YouTube

* Use keywords in your title and description. Include a link to your website in the first couple of lines of the description so that viewers see it when the description is collapsed.

* Tags are important. Although they’re not visible on the public video page, they govern what videos your video shows up.

* Encourage people to rate and comment on your video. Controversial content is one way to spark discussion.

iTunes

* Make sure that the title, artist and description are keyword-rich.

* Use an appealing image to stand out on the search page.

* Ask viewers to review your video to increase its popularity.

Analyze

Analytics are crucial! Why make a video if you don’t measure and track its success?

Use YouTube Insights or Blip.tv Stats to see who’s watching your video and what they’re finding engaging about it. You can also use Visible Measures or Tubemogul, to see your analytics across multiple video sites.

For more information watch the full webinar and download the slides.

Looking for related information? Check out Steven Witten’s article Six Degrees of YouTube, a case study of online competitive video dynamics, which looks at how YouTube’s ‘related videos’ list gets built and the effect this list has on a video’s popularity.