Occasionally, I come across a business or organization that has already taken the plunge into video marketing to mixed results. When I do a little digging, I typically find that the videos were compelling and looked great, but no one was watching them.
The reason for that was that distribution and promotion of the video(s) were never addressed. I know a lot of great videographers, who will charge you a lot of money to create a video, but they know nothing about getting those videos seen by your target audiences.
Whether you are hiring a firm, like Seven G, or doing it on your own, online video distribution and promotion for your videos is a critical part of your video marketing strategy – arguably more important that the video production process.
Your video distribution and promotion plan – with actionable tasks – will map out how your videos will be viewed by your target audience. What follows is a general plan that can be adapted to your specific marketing needs.
- ___ Create a YouTube Channel
Create a YouTube channel if you haven’t already. In either case, make sure your channel is completed with information about your business or organization, your website URL, your social network connections. As you develop videos, upload them to your channel. You should also be optimizing the videos during the upload process to include having your website’s clickable url address, keyword/tags relevant to the video and your business, and a catchy title. Make sure the videos can be embedded by others wanting to share on their blogs and so forth.
- ___ Embed your videos on your own website
Whether you put it on your home page, your blog, or its own unique page on your website, you should be embedding your video on your own website. There is a compelling argument for hosting your videos on your site, but the purposes of this blog and my own preference is to upload to YouTube and embed. Don’t simply embed and walk away, but make sure to add SEO searchable text description about the video with relevant keywords. Also consider having social sharing buttons on the pages where you have embedded videos.
- ___ Social Networks
It should become automatic that you share links to your uploaded videos on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social and professional networking platforms. In some cases, you can automate this process through YouTube. You should also make a “human” post on these respective channels about your new video – and include a call to action, “watch my new video,” or “share my new video.”
- ___ Social bookmarks
Add links to your video on social bookmarking sites such as Reddit or Stumble Upon. This not only creates inbound links to your content, but also introduces your videos to a wider audience, which, in turn, can now easily share your videos with their own networks.
- ___ Video Distribution Channels
One option that will get your video shared on a number of video and social platforms is via a video distribution website such as TubeMogul’s Oneload. These video distribution sites – others include Hey!spread, Video Upload Pro, ContentBuzz, and Video Counter — allow you to upload a video to multiple platforms at one time. These sites vary on what they offer (how many platforms your videos get uploaded to, analytics, etc.) and what they charge.
- ___ Partners
Think about what potential partners may be a good fit for sharing links to your video, either through their social network channels or via an embedded post on their blog. Approach them ahead of time and see if they are willing to do so, perhaps in a reciprocal relationship.
- ___Newsletters/Email/Other
Finally, you should be including links to your new videos in your periodic email newsletters and other communications. Each email marketing vendor – Aweber or Constant Contact and so forth – will have a tutorial on their website on how to embed the video into your email newsletter. You should also consider adding links to the new video in your email signatures and the signatures of your employees. And you should add the link or a QR code for the video in your offline marketing activities (direct mail, advertisements, in-store displays, and so forth).
That is a basic to-do list for distributing your videos. The next step is creating a plan for promoting your videos.
Research the channel on which you are distributing your video and learn when people – your audience – are on the platform and able to see your post. For example, Facebook users tend to be on the website in the evenings and weekends.
Based on that research or your gut instinct, develop a posting plan for each video. That would cover the first day, second day, first week, second week, first month, and quarterly thereafter. Don’t be afraid to repost links to your videos. I believe only 16 percent of your friends on Facebook will see any one post, so reposting is good as long as you are not saturating the channel (in which case you become annoying and risk losing audience).
I have a ton more ideas on what you can do to fine-tune this process so that you get more bang for your buck. If you want to learn more, give me a call or shoot me an email.