Optimizing Videos For Marketing

It is hard to know what to say about optimizing videos to get search engine exposure and traffic until you’ve actually posted a few videos and seen the result. Your first few video posts may be disappointing because they will probably not get much traffic. You may get lucky and hit on a topic and a presentation that gets some buzz, but for most marketing applications that seems unlikely.

That is why video marketing enthusiasts focus on trying to come up with “viral” videos. But the problem with most “viral” videos is that they get a lot of “junk” views. Sure it’s impressive when a million people look at a video of a dancing monkey or some guy playing a guitar with his toes, but what does that have to do with marketing. If you cannot leverage those views to get exposure for your product or brand, from the marketing point of view those views are simply wasted.

This leads us to ask “What is my objective in putting up these videos?” From the marketing point of view there are several reasonable and obtainable objectives and you’re best to get these straight before beginning your “campaign”. Recognizing these objectives and setting things up to achieve them is what I mean by “optimizing” your videos.

Let me throw out a few objectives for consideration:

Objective 1 - To get people to view your video.

Objective 2 - To expose people to your product or brand.

Objective 3 - To create a positive and attractive impression of your product or brand.

Objective 4 - To encourage viewers to click thru to your website and actually get some traffic.

As I said above, setting your videos up to achieve these objectives is what I mean by “optimizing” them. This is more than SEO - search engine optimization - although it includes that. Because they are relatively video-unfriendly, the search engines only play a relatively small part in using videos to drive traffic. From the marketing point of view, optimizing your videos is about getting people to see and act on them.

In my next post I’ll look at the first two objectives - getting people to look at your videos, and exposing them to your product or brand.

Check out Linknet Video to see how we create an optimized video campaign.

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