If you’re part of a small team, your expertise needs to be incredibly wide-ranging. Everyday you come up with great ideas, you get creative with production, and then of course comes marketing your videos! Follow this guide to marketing videos on your own, and you can add another valuable skill to your ever-growing list.

Before You Upload the Video Online

  1. Have you included a call to action in your video? It’s essential to tell viewers what you’d like them to do next. Do you want them to buy your product? Visit your website? Share the video? Conclude the video by telling them what to do next.
  2. Your title needs to be catchy and incorporate key relevant words for SEO. Use Google’s free keyword research tools to research what people are searching for in the topic your video addresses. These tools will suggest synonyms with high search volumes; your job is to spot the words that have high search volumes and low competition. These should be the words you use in your title.
  3. Your main target keyword should be the first few words of the title. Add a colon after these keywords and include more information. For example, a video on baking with children could be called: “Baking with Kids: Healthy and Tasty Treats for Preschoolers”.
  4. Let your friends, family and existing customers know that you’ve made a video. Promote it to them and ask them to share it online.

Marketing Your Video on Your Website

  1. Post your latest video towards the top of your home page. It means that those who don’t scroll below the fold won’t miss it.
  2. Incorporate the video into a dedicated blog post.
  3. Once you have made the video and posted it online, that’s only the start. You can quickly and easily repackage it. Consider using the information contained within the video in an infographic, a listicle, or even a podcast (and link back to the video in each of these).
  4. Create a user-friendly video directory in your website. This will ensure that even when you aren’t promoting a video, it can still be easily found by visitors who are browsing your site.

Marketing Your Video on Social Media

  1. Create a teaser for your video. This will help you build hype and grow your audience. It will also enable you to promote longer videos on short-form video platforms like Instagram and Vine.
  2. Reach out to influencers who have shared similar content in the past. Anyone with a large following who might find your content interesting would potentially be a good candidate.
  3. Select one interesting or funny scene from your video and turn it into a GIF. If you add captions, this will help to convey your message.
  4. If growing your reach is your goal, enable the option to allow others to share your video embed codes. Follow these instructions to enable embed code sharing through the player. Start the ball rolling by sharing your video with relevant blogs and social media users who are likely to share on their own sites.
  5. Find communities online, whether Facebook pages, LinkedIn Groups, subreddits, or popular hashtags, and share your videos to help gain circulation amongst niche audiences. Be careful not to come across as overly self-promotional. Your focus should be on adding value to the community in a respectful and helpful way.
  6. Promote other business’s videos too (providing they are not direct competitors). If you are generous with your suggestions and ‘likes’, it is more likely that other organizations will respond positively to your own content.

Analyze Your Results

So you’ve made the video, repackaged it, and told everyone about it, but there’s one more crucial step. You’ll need to analyze the results of your efforts.

Facebook and Twitter make this extremely easy, thanks to the analysis tools that they provide as part of your account (Facebook have even compiled this handy guide to understanding your video metrics).

Understanding how website visitors are engaging with your video is a little harder, but we aim to make it as painless as possible with our extensive offering of video analytics features. If you know what resonates with your audience – and what doesn’t interest them so much – it’ll make things much easier when it comes to planning the next video.

Marketing a video on your own isn’t a one-off 30 minute task that you can quickly tick off your to do list – it takes time, dedication, and oodles of creativity. But we promise that your valuable time is well spent: the video marketing strategy we have set out is the best way to get the results you hoped for, and for your video to receive the online recognition it deserves.