This content is provided by Brighter Vision, an affinity partner of AAMFT. This information is not necessarily the view of AAMFT and should not be interpreted as official policy.
While the concept of using videos in your marketing strategy is nothing new, what has changed over the last couple of years is the prevalence of video content on nearly every platform – especially when it comes to social media!
When done correctly, video content marketing can be one of the most influential and cost-effective ways to promote your products and services. 85% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 92% of marketers believe that online video is an integral part of their marketing strategy.
Video content comes in many forms and can be anything from an explainer video to a brand video. Even event and webinar videos can be used in content marketing.
Video marketing has a unique ability to immediately capture the attention of your viewers, further engage with them, and bring broader concepts to life, making for a more effective marketing strategy.
In this blog, we will walk you through our top video marketing tips and provide information about how to implement video into your current marketing strategy to to expand your audience, build your brand, and grow your practice.
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Video Marketing Tips
It’s not too hard to see why video is so popular these days — for one thing, it’s an easy way to give your viewers important information while also giving them rest from having to read any long-winded text. Video is fun, but it’s also really one of the best ways to get up close to your audience and give them a more in-depth look into you and your practice, and not to mention it’s easy to share across multiple platforms.
By adding a video to your website, you can boost your SEO and increase the chance of a front page of Google by 53 times. You can also attract more viewers and increase engagement. Audiences are about ten times more likely to engage, embed, share, and comment on video content than blogs or related social posts. If you are still not entirely convinced that video marketing is right for your practice, recent research shows that 71% of marketers say video conversion rates outperform any other marketing content.
Now that we all know video is the future of marketing, let’s talk about how you can start to incorporate it into your content marketing plan. Here we’ll outline some best practices for you to start creating and sharing videos that are likely to capture your audience’s attention.
Find Out What Type of Content Your Audience Prefers
Before you ever hit that ‘record’ button, you should first spend a little time researching your ideal client. Try to learn as much about them as possible, but mainly what type of content they’re looking for online.
There are many different ways to familiarize yourself with the needs and wants of your ideal audience. Here are some of our favorites:
Use Social Media Analytics
The first thing you should do is use the following links to locate and analyze the audience data for your different social media accounts:
- Facebook Analytics: https://www.facebook.com/analytics
- Twitter Analytics: https://analytics.twitter.com/
- LinkedIn Page Analytics: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/8261
- Instagram Audience Insights: https://help.instagram.com/1533933820244654
Take note of what kind of content has historically performed the best on each platform. Was it educational, personal, or something you just posted for fun? Which posts got the most likes, comments, or shares? These are all critical indicators in understanding what type of content you should be spending your time on.
To maximize user engagement with your video content, you must know what has sparked the most interest in the past. Then, try to align your video content to match the content that previously performed well.
Ask Questions Directly on Social Media
The fastest, easiest, and most straightforward way to find out what type of content your audience is looking for is also the most obvious – by asking them directly!
Sometimes we get so wrapped up in analyzing the data and trying to predict what our audience wants to see tomorrow based on what they liked yesterday; it’s easy to over-complicate this step.
Simply ask your followers directly on any social media platform with a regular post and ask them to respond by leaving a comment or sending a private message. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can even conduct a survey using a free tool like Survey Monkey.
Choose Social Video Networks That Work for You
The next thing you need to do is choose the networks and video platforms that are the best for capturing your audience’s attention. This choice will vary from one person to another, depending on their unique audience engagement levels.
Here are some of the top social networks we have identified for posting video content:
- Facebook is another fantastic place for video marketing. Facebook video engagement stats show that video posts (at 6.01%) score above other content engagement such as photo posts (4.81%), and link posts (3.36%).
- YouTube isn’t just a social network. It’s the place that people go when they want answers. So, create videos that answer your client’s most pressing questions.
- LinkedIn can be a tricky platform since it is focused more on B2B businesses. However, if you are someone who uses Linkedin and has seen promising results, then Linkedin would be a great additional location to post your video. Wyzowl found that 38% of marketers post video content on LinkedIn. 75% of those who used video on the platform found it useful.
- Instagram is an excellent platform for sharing short online videos. The videos here can be up to a minute long, but the videos that perform the best tend to stay around 26 seconds long.
Ready to put your video content to use? Learn how you can easily schedule your video content to post across multiple social platforms with Social Genie by Brighter Vision!
Create Your First Video
Like many practices, you might not have the resources or time to waste on learning how to maneuver all the video editing software yourself. Lacking experience in video production may make it seem like your only option is to pay a lot of money to hire someone else. Good news, even with limited resources, companies, and practices, can launch great video campaigns.
We have put together a quick checklist for best practices when making a quality video as a beginner:
Make Sure It Looks Professional
Film in a well-lit environment. Move your production into a quiet conference room or hallway, so that you are the main focus and not your background. If the lighting is poor, try moving around lamps, or consider purchasing an affordable light at a home-goods or any hardware store.
You don’t need to buy an expensive video camera but try to use a lower-priced video camera, a digital camera that takes video, or a newer smartphone for a crisp image.
Hold your film device on a tripod or another surface to limit shakiness and camera movement. Too much movement can also cause blurry visuals as a camera tries to auto-focus.
Clean It up With a Video Editing Tool
When it comes to finding software, there are plenty of affordable options. Some computers, like Macs, already come with an easy-to-use program called iMovie, or you can edit your videos on Youtube.
Export Your Finished Product in High-Definition
Exporting to HD allows your viewers to see a crisper image, rather than a blurry one, which makes the video more pleasing to watch and attracts more attention.
Once you finish creating a video you like, it’s time to share it with the world.
Promote Your Video
Once you have created a video, you want to make sure it gets views to convert leads and sales. Here are a few tactics you can use to promote your videos:
Email It to Your Subscribers
If you have a list of email subscribers, make sure you email it to them. This will help you nurture your subscribers and drive views at the same time.
Because email newsletters are one of the most cost-effective marketing tools private practices can use, we highly recommend starting a weekly or monthly newsletter for your practice if you have not already done so.
Share It on Social Media
After sending it to your mailing list, share your video on your social media channels, even if you publish it on a different network. As cross-promotion can help drive views. Use our suggestions from above and find out what social media platforms work best for you.
Pro tip*: Finding the best social media platform for you may take trial and error.
Post It on Your Website
Posting your videos onto your website is a fantastic way to share your videos. Adding video can help increase your click-through rates, drive a 157 percent increase in organic traffic from SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), and lower your bounce rates: People spend over twice as long on a page with video than without.
Post About It in Your Blog
Adding videos in your blog posts is another direct way to integrate your video content marketing. When you place videos in blog posts, your posts become more engaging. By writing a blog post and creating a complementary video, you can reverberate content ideas in a way that feels new and exciting to readers. Blog posts with videos also generate more inbound links, increase SEO, and increase viewership than blogs without.
Final Thoughts
Incorporating video into your content marketing strategy and website is an excellent choice for making your practice more noticeable, it calls the users’ attention. It makes your marketing more powerful than before.
If you are currently a Brighter Vision customer, we can add a video slider to your homepage for free, or we can embed it anywhere on your website, including blog posts. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help take your homepage to the next level, reach out to us for a free marketing consultation. Click here to schedule a call today.
Brighter Vision is a preferred vendor of AAMFT, specializing in making marketing simple for private practices. Their all-inclusive website design service helps therapists grow their practices with a variety of marketing tools and resources. All members receive their entire first year of a new website with Brighter Vision for only $49/month plus no setup fees; that’s a savings of $220. To take advantage of this offer, please click here.