Why your video is useless without a strategy (Demo)

You decide that the time has come to face the inevitable.  Your business needs a video. Every where you look people are staring into their smartphones and engaging with the online world. You know that if your business does not have a presence here you will loose out to your competitors, who almost certainly will have a video.

So you take the steps to get your video done. Anyone with a decent smartphone can shoot a video to a pretty good standard [just remember to keep it landscape!].

Why your video is useless without a strategy

Voila! Your video is done! Phew you think to yourself. Glad that is all over with and now I will get loads of people checking out my video and my sales will increase. You upload it onto your website and sit back feeling delighted with yourself.

You wait a few months and what happens? You get increased sales? Loads of enquiries? No. In fact nothing is what happens.  You wonder why you went to the bother of it all, video is obviously a useless waste of money.

But you would be wrong! All that has happened is that you were on the right path but you stopped short of the rest of the journey.  You need to continue and get your video to work for you.

It’s all about exposure

Your business is fighting to be top of the pile and get noticed. This is why you got a video done. It explains what you do, your USP’s and all of those benefits you bring to customers. Its aim is to bring you new custom.

The next logical step therefore should be to get it noticed. So, how does uploading your video onto a platform that has access to millions of potential customers sound? Where you might ask? YouTube of course!

Is YouTube right for me?

We’ve written previously about the benefits of YouTube. It is owned by Google, who everybody knows dominates in the online world. It is a sensible place to be marketing your video.

Here are a few of the benefits:

• YouTube has 1.3 billion global users and is growing all the time
• You can own your own channel & people can subscribe
• Specific target marketing: locations, age, gender, interests, etc.
• Duration: choose an appropriate time to start and finish your campaign
• Amount: choose your own budget
• Call to action
• Analysis: (see below)

Analysis
There is real value in the post-campaign analysis. No native advertising could accurately record engagement and conversion rates in the way that YouTube can.

1. You will be able to view how many people watched your video. The image below relates to a video campaign targeting the UK & Ireland market. Within 10 weeks the video has been watched by over 17,000 potential customers (who have been specially targeted based on their location, interests, etc.)
2. The cost. A total outlay of €176.25, that works out at only €0.01 per view! Who could argue with that kind of value for money.
3. What age groups were interested in your video / product? In the next image we can see that the video had the most interest with people between the ages of 18 – 44. This feedback will help to realign future marketing material and campaigns.
4.  You would definitely be interested in knowing how much of the video was actually watched. In this video campaign, 80% (14,100 ) watched the video to the first 10 seconds and under half (7,578 ) watched the full video (43 seconds). This highlights the importance of getting your message across early in your video when the audience retention is at its highest peak.

These are a small sample of the full analytics available from YouTube. You can access reports, traffic sources, devices used, engagement and more.
Conversion rates, KPI’s & metrics
If you want to measure the success of your video, you need to set some goals from the starting point. What are your objectives & goals? What are you expecting to achieve? Understanding what you want from your video is the only way that you can really measure the results. This is all part of your strategy.
In the above example, apart from the obvious objectives of branding & marketing, the video campaign generated good conversion rates which resulted in increased online sales.  This was the main goal.

Viral video

Finally, take a look at what can happen if you create a really great video…it goes viral! The video below, uploaded to YouTube, from the Dollar Shave Club is up on 22 million+ views and counting.