What’s the secret sauce for video marketing and ROI?

According to a study from Demand Metric and Vidyard, over 70% of respondents claimed that video performed better than other content for producing conversions. Given all of the positive buzz surrounding video marketing and ROI, it’s time to dive in and find out what makes a video successful.

What’s the secret sauce behind video marketing?

Rich snippets? Not anymore, according to Phil Nottingham in this Moz post.

Hiring a professional videographer? Not necessary; unless you have a large budget and a plan.

All video marketing leads back to this one factor: Trust. If a video fails to build trust for your brand, the person who found it isn’t coming back. Sure, you can make them laugh with a cool skit or give them statistics and data, and they may stick around. However, not all brands can take the BuzzFeed approach.

If you’re going to gain conversions from video marketing, it must build trust & resonate with the target audience
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Video Marketing Tips & The Secret Sauce: Build Trust

How can a company build trust using video, without breaking the budget? Get started with these handy tips, and build and expand upon them as your video marketing campaign grows.

1 Behind the scenes video

What is “behind the scenes” video? Share unique, inspiring stories from the people behind the brand – the CEO, the sales team, the customer service department. Which stories will resonate with the target audience, and who’s going to tell the story?

Use these examples as inspiration:

Elon Musk – Tesla

Before you watch this video, think about the target audience for the Tesla. Who is buying a premium electric sedan, with a starting price of $100K? CEO’s. Business Executives. In the first five minutes of the video, interviewers guide Mr. Musk to discuss his habits, and how many hours he has worked to make the Tesla brand a success.

Brian Mueller – Grand Canyon University

Again, think about the target audience for Grand Canyon University: Prospective
students. Mr. Mueller speaks directly to this audience in his video; there’s nothing flashy, cool, or funny within the video content. It’s the top banana at GCU, on camera, speaking directly to his audience, as if they were in his office.

There are many other video marketing tips to consider, but this one should be first on the list. A competitor can’t duplicate the “human” factor of your brand, and if you can lead the way as the first brand in your industry to use Behind the Scenes videos successfully, you’ll lead the way in building trust with your target market.

2 Clickable links on YouTube videos

Some brands are hesitant to upload their videos to YouTube, as they don’t want to drive traffic away from their website.

With a little work and creativity, it is possible to have a link to your desired site placed over your YouTube video. There are several options:

• Annotations. Annotations allow you to layer text, a link, or hotspots over your video. Google provides instructions in their Help section. The drawback? These annotations may not be visible when the viewer is using a mobile device. Technovally has provided both a blog post and a video which outlines the process.
• Use AdWords. You don’t need to activate a live AdWords campaign in order to use this workaround; it’s free. You do have to set up an AdWords account, but activation of the paid ad is not required. Thanks to Dana Tan for uploading the tutorial to the YouMoz Blog – it’s very detailed, and she even includes a real live example to check out on YouTube. The coolness factor of this workaround cannot be defined in words, just click through the links, read, watch, and learn.

3 No People = No Video? No Way.

We get it. As a marketer, you can barely get company feedback on blog posts or new landing pages. If you are a business owner, maybe you’re too shy or too busy to sit in front of a camera.

Does this mean your video marketing campaign has to end before it begins? No!

Here are several video marketing tips for building trust with your audience, without using actual people in the video.

Create a slideshow, add sound, and upload it as a video. Resources like Prezi and Slideshare make it easy to create a professional slide show. Personalize it with quotes from company representatives, add sound, and you’re ready to rock.

Tools for creating a slideshow video with sound:

• Slideshare or Prezi
• Add sound to your slideshow with Soundslides
• Microsoft Office offers an instruction guide for adding sounds to a presentation
• Apple offers iMovie, but MSU offers a better tutorial than Apple itself
• Screen recording. If you have something of value to share with your audience in terms of a “screen share”, create a screen share video. Jing used to be the leader, but it has since been retired. Look to Join.me, Screenr, or ScreenMailer for Apple products.

4 Explainer Videos

This options has lessened in popularity in recent years, but they’re still a viable option, depending on your industry. According to Forbes Insights, 75% of executives said they watch work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly. An Explainer video could help you stand out among the competition if it’s done well.

Explainer videos aren’t cheap, and if they are, they will probably do more harm than good. This isn’t a project for Fiverr. We don’t need to create a guide for creating the perfect Explainer video, because Quicksprout’s already done it. If you like the idea of creating an Explainer video, or you would like to find out what it is and how to do it correctly, head on over to Quicksprout’s Explainer Video Guide.

Overwhelmed?

Video Marketing is certainly not as easy as creating a blog post or an article. It requires much more planning and strategy, and collaboration from a variety of resources and team members. Stay the course! Why? Video Marketing is not going anywhere, and it’s likely that your top competitors are working on it right now.

Looking for additional suggestions or a video marketing roadmap? Head on over to the MarketingTechBlog. Giddy up partner!