Why? The simple and fast answer to this is as obvious as the nose on your face - Video content, such as that found on YouTube is now business critical as Video is how a LOT of your customers now find out information about products and services such as yours. It is by far the easiest and most prefered format to absorb on a mobile phone. That in itself is a good enough reason to ensure that you include it as part of your overall marketing strategy.

How? Okay, this is where you do need to sit down and spend a little time on it. If you get the foundations right, youre campaigns and website will be more effective.I always believe in effective planning so let's have a look at this properly. I mostly use bespoke planning tools but you can simply write this down on paper or use your PC.

• What do you wish to achieve out of applying video?
• What will identify as success? Which metrics will you use to see that it has worked out? How will you track this?
• What will you use as content? What will work with your audience to achieve the most meaningful interaction and conversions?
• Where will you place this new video content? Where will you potential customers see it?
• Implementation time. How do you then track it? What is working and what isn't? What can you change? Was it a success?

What do you wish to achieve out of applying video?

The obvious is more sales of your products or service. That comes about by more exposure and, in this case, more exposure with content that visitors are more likely to absorb across multiple channels. As a numbers game, this should lead to more of these prospects moving further down your marketing and sales funnel than they otherwise might have done.

For example, which of these two Facebook Ads do you think people will click on more if they are on a smartphone?

The same video ad will do equally well on LinkedIn and Display Ads via Google PPC on 3rd party websites.

I am also a fan of having video content on your website to help engage with your prospects. Ideally, this should be in the top screen but just below the fold (where a visitor scrolls once) will do. This is a great way to talk about your company, why you are different and then place a Call-To-Button in it and below it, to drive the visitor on to the next stage of their journey with you. I aldo believe that more people will watch a video of 'About Us' than read a load of text. Also, you can have a video for your main services.

What will identify as success? Which metrics will you use to see that it has worked out? How will you track this?

You need to set out what will represent success. This will prove that it works. Typically, for me with my clients, this could be several improvements:

For your website

• Visitors now stay longer on the website on average
• The number of clicks on your key Calls-to-Action (Downloads, Newsletter Sign Up, specific services, etc) have risen
• You are seeing more firm leads, such as people subscribing or purchasing a product or service
• You are getting more phone calls than usual

From your Ad Campaign using video

• More visitors to your website
• Depending on the Call-to-Action button on your video - more newsletter signups, media downloads, etc
• More sign ups via Facebook using their Forms Ads
• More hits to your specific campaign landing page
• More sales

Tracking all of this is now easy if you use Google Analytics or the Analytics services inside the channel. Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, have some great tools to track interactions.

What will you use as content? What will work with your audience to achieve the most meaningful interaction and conversions?

The content that you put out generally should always be focused on engaging with your prospects with material that fundamentally helps them on their buying journey. Typically, this is informative or educational although you can simply slot in more sales-orientated material if you have previous engagement with the prospect (remarketing) or have a finely defined Ad audience. Personally, if possible, I would make it personal and perhaps have a person visible and talking, rather than just words and pictures. This is the kind of thing that you should be monitoring and tweaking to see what works the best.

As an example, if I had a client who was selling niche training/casual shoes then rather than just showing the shoe and saying how good it is, I would see if I can get a customer to hold the shoes in their hands on camera and tell everyone how comfortable it is, what good value it represents and their friends loved the. This is the holy grail but, admittedly, hard to achieve.

Where will you place this new video content? Where will you potential customers see it?

You should be dong this already, of course, but you need to know WHO your customers are and WHERE they go to absorb content. Where is it that they frequent that can put your value offer in front of them. I won't handle this one here right now but give me a call if you need to know more.
Typically, the main channels are Search Engines via PPC, Social Media channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn, forums and partners.

Implementation time. How do you then track it? What is working and what isn't? What can you change? Was it a success?

As mentioned earlier, tracking can be done on your own CMS back-end, using Google Analytics or other tracking software, or the back-end tools offered by the advertising channel.
As with EVERY campaign that you ever do, you need to track it early on to see what it working and what is not. Ideally you should be running two or more variants of your Ad and Video to see which is getting the best results according to the metrics that you set earllier.
Be brutal. If it is not working, tweak it or ditch it early. If it working, scale it up.
After a while, you start to get a better idea of what to do in the future and, as a bonus, you are getting a better idea of who your customer really is. This will help with targetting throughout all of your marketing initiatives.

As a bonus, as you start building up videos, you can place these on YouTube and they might well be found by people who are actually searching for your produstc and services. I am a YouTube expert and I can help you with YouTube entry SEO if you need me.

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