A video marketing series can help your marketing efforts in several ways.
Design with a Video Marketing Series in Mind
When you’re planning your video, consider developing a series of videos to build awareness and to align with the often varying needs of your customers. Here are just a few of the reasons planning a series can really amplify the effects of your video marketing:
- Keeps your message concise and consistent
- Aligns your message(s) with different customer needs
- Brings viewers back to older videos
- Creates another ‘touchpoint’ with customers
- Focuses on new features and use-cases
- Let’s look at these in more detail, starting with your message.
One tip you’ll consistently read in my blog is prepare. Knowing what you’re going to talk about ahead of time can really help your efforts. The more time you spend in pre-production, the less time you’ll spend in post- production. When you start your series, make sure you say what number in the series it is. If it is a predefined length, say “part three of my five part series on…” This will let people know that if they find the middle episode, they may want to go back and start with the first one. Also, they will know if they’re “committing” themselves to a long series. Three to five episodes is a good number.
Optimize Your Tags
Once people find out, and they like it, they’ll look for more in the Related Videos section. If they can digest three or five at once, you’ll have them hooked.
Read more at Marketing Profs
Tags are one of the most powerful tools on YouTube, and I’m convinced that they are often overlooked by newbs. Tag as many relevant keywords as you can think of. Use the “auto suggest” on YouTube, but don’t be afraid to use others. Sometime I find the auto-suggest tags a bit wordy. Here is the power tip for a series: If you want your other videos in the series to be more likely to show up in the related videos sidebar, use a unique – or several unique – tags for your video. I like to use both the name of the series, with and without spaces, as well as any hashtag abbreviation you might want to use in your twitter marketing efforts.
Show Clips from Other Parts of the Series
Much like old serialized movies, you want to have a little bit of a “cliffhanger” at the end of your video. I don’t mean to leave a major point of your video unanswered, but tell viewers what to expect in the next episode. In addition, add thumbnail insets of other episodes in the ending of the video. Under these thumbnails, you can put the title and a link. Make sure you don’t skip this next step:
Annotate Your Video
YouTube annotations, to be honest, are a great tool that has even more potential than what it’s currently being used for. For those of you who don’t know, “annotations” are clickable labels and buttons that you can add over the image of your video. If you’ve been on YouTube on your computer, I’m sure you’ve seen these. However, they don’t show up on iOS devices, such as iPhones, iPads, etc. Nor is there any way to create them in your video on those devices – it must be done from a desktop Mac or PC.
Even with all of those caveats, I still strongly encourage you to add them to your video. You can make a frame around the thumbnails that links directly to the video that is being mentioned. You can also add a “subscribe” button so that viewers will receive notification when you post new videos.
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