How to Use Online Video to Boost Your Business

Are you using online video to market your business yet? If not, you’re about to be left behind. According to The 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed over 5,000 marketers, about 65 percent B2C and 35 percent B2B, online video is one of the hottest growth areas for social media marketing in the coming year. We touched on this in yesterday’s post about social media marketing trends. Today, we’ll take a closer look at what’s going on with online video marketing and share ideas for using it to raise your business profile.

Already, six in 10 marketers in the survey use online video to market their businesses, and 73 percent plan to do more with video in the coming year. Specifically, 63 percent plan increased marketing efforts around YouTube. Just 8 percent have no plans to use online video at all.

Especially hot: Live video. Half of marketers say they’d like to do more with live video tools like Periscope and Facebook Live, and half say they would like to learn more about live video. (Check out this post about how to use live video.)

Not so hot: Vine. Just 11 percent of marketers plan to use Vine more frequently for social media marketing in the coming year — down from 15 percent last year.

How can you use online video for business marketing? Here are some ideas:

• Interview experts in your industry — either on your staff, or your customers. For instance, an IT company whose clients are small businesses could interview staff talking about cyber security issues small businesses face.
• Develop how-to videos about common problems your customers face. For example, a bicycle store could do a series of videos on maintaining bikes.
• Create demonstration video showing how to use your product. For instance, if you sell a kit to polish car headlights, create demonstration videos showing how to use it.
• Do behind-the-scenes videos sharing insights into your company. For example, a brewery could give a video tour showing how the beer is brewed.

Ready to try marketing with online video? Keep these tips in mind:

• Keep your videos short. One to three minutes is a good link for most videos. It’s better to have a series of short videos than one long one — lots of people won’t commit to watching a video that’s too long.
• In addition to hosting your videos on your business website, create a YouTube channel for your business — it’s free. Link the channel back to your website.
• Use relevant keywords in your meta-data, including your video description, title, tags and transcript. Search engines can’t “read” videos, so the meta-data is essential to getting found.

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