Video is everywhere, and for good reason. As a marketing medium, video is one of the best ways to engage and educate audiences, enhance brand awareness, and drive conversions.
Like any other marketing medium and strategy, you have to do video marketing right to ensure it has the desired results and the best return on your investment. In this article, we will look at a few proven and actionable steps you can take to ensure successful video streaming for your marketing endeavors.
Define Your Video Streaming Goals
When doing this, you should try to answer the question, “What do I want to achieve when I start streaming video?” Defining your goals as clearly as possible at the start of every project and video marketing campaign will give you something to aim for. These goals will also become the guide you use as you conceptualize and finally start shooting your videos.
As you create these goals, also have a target audience in mind. Creating a video for everyone is unlikely to help you see the results you are seeking, while going too narrow runs the risk of too few people being interested.
You likely already have your ideal audience and target personas from previous marketing campaigns. If you do not know where to start when setting up the target audience for your videos, use the data you already have available. Doing this can also save you a lot of time and money by helping you sidestep the required research.
Create High-quality Videos
A common concern for businesses that want to start streaming videos is whether their audiences’ devices will be able to handle the stream if the quality is too high, which can lead to larger video files that require more bandwidth to stream.
You do not have to worry too much about this in the modern age because internet speeds are now fast enough, and user devices are capable enough to handle high-quality video streams.
That said, always keep your target audience in mind to ensure they can stream your high-quality videos.
With all the above out of the way, there is tremendous value in investing in video production. If your videos are not visually appealing and have poor audio quality, you risk losing your core audience.
There is also the risk of your audience judging your business as not professional enough to produce good streams. Even worse, people might think you do not care about your output and how you are perceived. All the above are just a few of the things that can kill your video streaming campaigns now and in the future.
Another helpful tip is to keep your video as concise as possible. Numerous studies show attention spans are shrinking, so many people might not get through your whole video. This is especially true if it is not engaging and produced in a way that makes them likely to stay.
Ensure Fast Loading
While you might want to stream your video on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and different social media platforms, you should also consider streaming your videos on your website. Doing so is especially useful for introductory and educational content as you can easily sell to people right where they are watching the video.
Video hosting platforms will handle the video distribution for you to ensure it loads as fast as possible for everyone. If you decide to post on your website, you must handle this yourself. A great place to start is working with a CDN provider.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) distributes your video on several servers so it is served to users from a server that is closest to them.
A reputable CDN provider also ensures availability when the number of viewers increases. They can also transcode your video to various formats to ensure wider device compatibility and support low-latency live streaming when you need to make announcements or host live events.
The best thing about working with such a provider is that they give you the leeway to produce the best video possible. Video of higher quality is often larger, but you don’t have to worry about this because the CDN provider will ensure smooth and fast streaming regardless of video size.
Optimize For SEO
If you are streaming the video on your website, you likely have already optimized the hosting page for SEO. To recap, you should do this by having a description and relevant title, using contextual content and subtitles, adding relevant keywords on the page, and ensuring the video fits with the content.
You might consider streaming your video on different platforms to increase reach. All video hosting and sharing platforms allow you to add titles, descriptions, and tags to improve search engine visibility.
Take some time to do enough research to optimize all these for SEO. This is the best way to ensure visibility on search engine result pages and platforms like YouTube.
Promote Your Streams
No matter how good your video is or how fast it streams, all that doesn’t matter if no one sees it. The result of few views is not being able to reach your target audience and poor marketing outcomes.
To avoid all this, promote your videos. The cheapest and best place to do this is on social media. You can promote your video on various social media platforms for free, with some even allowing embedding your stream for further reach and visibility.
If you have a newsletter, leverage it by including your video links within its body or inside the emails. When doing this, ensure the video is relevant to the newsletter, its content, and your target audience.
Lastly, consider paid advertising if you have the budget for it because it can help you reach a much wider audience. If the video is good enough to share, this can also result in a domino effect where your video gets many more views from people who did not see the initial ad.
Conclusion
Video and video streaming are potent video marketing tools in the modern age. However, you need to do both right to see the desired results. Start by designing your goals and audience and then creating the best videos possible. Then, promote your video to reach as many people as possible.
