Video as Content vs. Video to Drive Traffic
As part of your video planning, it is essential to determine if your video marketing project is to sit in a web page as moving content or if it is designed to entice new traffic to your website from an external network. Rarely can the video do both. This article will briefly look at both strategies and also consider the few exceptions where you can get the best of both worlds.
Video as content
This is the most common video type, your video is part of a web page and will either be the main content or add to what is already there. This type of video can be to introduce a company, service or product or could be more informational, process orientated and support based. Generally the viewer will already be on the website and will therefore find the video on their travels and hopefully choose it as an easy to ingest option.
YouTube may well be used to host the video but due to the company specific nature of the video, it is unlikely to achieve any remarkable search engine positions. For the same reason, the video is unlikely to be a popular share on social media or via other referral methods. This video is designed primarily to communicate existing messages and is usually specified internally based on existing marketing communications.
Video to drive traffic
This type of video is still a relatively new concept in business and still takes a little explaining and careful management to ensure it does not end up as ‘video for content’ instead. The prime objective is to research what is being searched for that is related to your business activity. This has to be based on hard facts and not perceived activity to be truly effective. Once you have identified what your prospective customers require, the videos need to be made that fit this search criteria.
By creating the perfect answer, your organisation has just engaged with many potential customers – not by pitching your services, but by providing helpful and unbiased answers and useful information. In a world full of ‘broadcast’ style adverts and promotions, the viewer has learned to tune out and instead undertake some initial research themselves. With video an attractive research medium and YouTube being owned by Google you can easily see the potential of this format. Now take into account the power of social sharing and potential for referral traffic and you can see why YouTube is so popular.
Video that works as both
The crossover point is where you can create videos for both your website visitors and the Google/YouTube audience. These videos are FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) which correctly identified should provide valuable answers for both situations. You will be able to cross reference known pre-sales questions with YouTube and Google search data to identify the best order to develop new video content.
One of the biggest myths of video marketing is that you can gain valuable search engine positions by simply having video content. Although it is true that it is possible to get surprisingly good positions, relatively quickly, the value element is only true if you target search terms that your customers are actually searching for.
