Connect with us

MARKETING

5 Ways to Drive Traffic and Sales with Short Videos

Published

on

We live in a world where everything is moving faster. People no longer have the patience for long-form content and are looking for short, digestible videos, preferably under 3 minutes. 

Adopting a video marketing strategy that is based on short video content not only allows you to give your audience what they want but also helps you get across your message to them in a more effective manner. 

But why is short video content better than traditional long-form content? Let’s assume you have an excellent blog post on your website about a particular feature or a product that you offer. The chances are that even if a particular set of your audience is intrigued by the content in the article, they might not read the entire thing. And this can happen due to a multitude of reasons including short attention spans, lack of time, etc.

The fact of the matter is, that the content that you painstakingly created is not being consumed by a section of your targeted audience. But, if you summarize the same article into a short video, the viewer is more likely to sit through the whole video, thereby increasing engagement. 

What is Short Video Content? 

Short video content is often defined as anything under 60 seconds in length. Short-form videos became popular thanks to social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Snapchat. It is fast-paced, emotional, and engaging. It can easily be distributed across multiple platforms, and the content style is addicting due to its short nature. 

Advertisement

Humans have always been interested in watching small films without cuts, and as technology becomes more advanced, opportunities are expanding. Short videos also have an advantage over other long-form content in the amount of time and resources you put into creating videos. 

Top brands in every industry have embraced short, easy-to-make content that is in line with the current social media trends while slowly phasing out long-form content with high production value. 

What Platforms Can You Post Short Videos To?

Over the past couple of years, short video content has become a visual marketing trend that has caught the attention of all major social media platforms. Almost every social media platform worth its salt has a feature that lets you create and share short videos. Some platforms require a little bit more work than others to set up, and some will provide you with more exposure to your target market than others. 

Let’s take a look at all the major social media platforms that allow us to post short video content.

Platform #1: TikTok

5 Ways to Drive Traffic and Sales with Short Videos
Source

TikTok has taken the world by storm since its release in 2016. This short-form video app is a social media sensation that allows users to create and share short videos, which can now be up to 10 minutes long. With over 2 billion downloads, TikTok is growing faster than social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.

With a host of new features designed to help brands increase their engagement, more and more businesses have hopped onto the platform to promote their products. Even with an explosion of brand presence on the platform, there’s plenty of room for brands to gain market share on TikTok. Getting on the platform right now is a great idea, as it allows your business to be an early adopter of a tool that drives ridiculous organic engagement and impressions.

Platform #2: Instagram Reels 

1651685390 223 5 Ways to Drive Traffic and Sales with Short Videos
Source

Instagram Reels is a content format that allows you to create and share short, memorable videos. Unlike Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hours, Reels don’t time out. 

It’s fair to consider Instagram Stories as the original short-video format on Instagram, and while there a plenty of ways to leverage Instagram Stories to drive traffic to your website, Reels offer way more functionality and opportunity for users.

Advertisement

The format has grown in popularity since its introduction, mainly due to its ability to drive massive amounts of organic traffic to your page. Brands like Sephora, Walmart, and Beardbrand regularly use Reels alongside their other short-video platforms.

The addicting nature of Instagram Reels makes it an excellent content style to pursue for brands. The platform empowers you to be creative, highlight your strengths, and design visually inspiring content up to 60 seconds in length. While other platforms allow you to do all of this, Instagram is still one of the best social media platforms on the market when it comes to deploying a video marketing strategy due to its maturity as a platform. 

Not only does Instagram have access to a much larger userbase than its competitors, but there’s also tons of Instagram tools that can help facilitate the creation and publishing of your content on the platform. Many newer platforms like TikTok still lack the same third-party tools that make life easy for digital marketers on platforms like Instagram.

So, are Reels different from TikTok? Yes and no. Reels are usually much shorter, but does that make a lot of difference for content that’s already very short? Probably not. 

The real difference between TikTok and Instagram reels is the platforms themselves. In Instagram, there is the need to be ‘grid worthy’. That is, you want your content to look good on your grid, and have a certain aesthetic appeal to it. TikTok on the other hand is a bit more ‘crazy friendly’ and allows you to explore the kind of content that wouldn’t normally work on Instagram. 

So, you must have separate strategies for both platforms to be successful. 

Advertisement

Platform #3: YouTube Shorts

1651685390 595 5 Ways to Drive Traffic and Sales with Short Videos
Source

YouTube is the most relevant video platform in the world. No other platform comes even close. YouTube has 1.9 billion users, more than double the amount of the next largest video platform, Facebook. It is the second-largest search engine in the world after Google. YouTube also has the highest engagement rate of any video platform and accounts for just under half of all internet traffic. While Facebook has nearly three times as many users, its engagement rate is a fraction of that of YouTube, which has a staggering watch time of 100 minutes per day.

But a lot of that traffic was thanks to long-form videos which Youtube is generally popular for, but all that changed with the launch of Youtube shorts. Within a few months of its launch in India in September of 2020, the daily views accumulated by YouTube shorts zoomed past 6.5 billion. That number can only be higher now. 

YouTube Shorts also has an advantage over Instagram and TikTok because they are apps mainly just used by younger consumers, which can make it hard for brands to find success. In contrast, YouTube is used by people from all sorts of age groups, countries, industries, and niches. It seems like there’s a video for everyone on YouTube. With YouTube Shorts, more brands will be able to give their content to an even wider range of audience targets.

For example, a B2B brand might have difficulty finding success on TikTok, but they might be able to find success with professionals looking for industry-related content on Shorts. Similarly, if you target older generation audiences (e.g. Gen X), your short-form videos would get more engagement on YouTube than on TikTok or Instagram.

Platform #4: Snapchat Spotlight

1651685390 324 5 Ways to Drive Traffic and Sales with Short Videos
Source

It’s not uncommon for people to underestimate the power of Snapchat as a video marketing strategy tool because it’s thought of as a media-sharing app where you text with friends. You may have heard of this feature called “Spotlight,” where popular videos are curated and featured in a dedicated tab on the Snapchat app, much like on TikTok.

You can set this up to pull in users you follow who have posted a certain type of video, like a brand or a specific event. Then, you can choose to re-post the video to your story or not, depending on whether you think it’ll be of interest to your audience.

Snapchat’s user base allows brands to do promotions that are highly targeted and thus serves as a great platform to reach people that you wouldn’t have otherwise reached.

How Can Businesses Drive Traffic and Sales with Short Video? 

With platforms competing for short video content, organic impressions and engagement are at all time highs for those that decide to post short video content. Brands can take advantage of this to drive more traffic and sales for their business. 

Advertisement

Let’s go over some methods that you can use to drive more traffic and sales to your business with short video content.

1. Hire Influencers to Create Short Video Content

There are several benefits to hiring influencers to promote your business. People are visual learners and video allows you to communicate with them in a very powerful way.

Influencers allow you to add a human element to your brand, this is important considering that people trust people more than they trust brands.

1651685390 123 5 Ways to Drive Traffic and Sales with Short Videos
Source

Here’s things to keep in mind when using influencers:

  • They should create educational videos that attract people to your product. Content should be natural, and not overly promotional.
  • Influencers should grant you permission to redistribute the content, sometimes this is going to cost you a bit extra, but it’s well worth it.
  • You should have methods in place that allow you to track ROI of the influencer content, whether that be sales, website visits, signups, or more.
  • Provide them with an influencer campaign brief so that they are clear on the goal and objectives of your campaign. Confusion and misalignment between brands and influencers is the number one reason why campaigns fail to work out.
  • The videos should be a mixture of your brand identity and the influencer’s own identity. If you don’t have a brand identity yet, here is a checklist to help you establish one. 

If you have any problems finding the right influencer for your brand, you can make use of an influencer marketplace, this will make the process of finding influencers for your brand much less time consuming. 

2. Run Ads with Short Video Content

Using short video for your advertisements is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. There are multiple benefits to paying for traffic, and video does an excellent job of capturing the attention of the users. 

Short video content gives you more opportunity to capture the attention of an audience as opposed to static photo content. This can be accomplished by using a catchy hook, having a clear message, and choosing the right short video ad format. 

Short video ad formats are broken down into three categories: skippable video ads, interactive video ads, and in-stream video ads. By choosing the right video ad format for your business, you’ll be able to create an effective video ad and will be able to track how effective your video is and convert them into customers

Advertisement

The most important tip we can give is to create an ad that is both interesting and relevant to your business. If your ad doesn’t have either of these traits, then it will not have the ability to get many views and clicks. These days, natural content seems to work best, so don’t try too hard to sell your product. Instead, let the product sell itself by showing off the most valuable aspects of the product.

A few things that make video ads particularly great are captions and fast cuts, these are both great ways to retain the attention of the viewer so that they watch the ad all the way through. There are plenty of web-based ad makers that can help you achieve this, which is great for people that lack the knowledge to use traditional video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

Whether you are looking to get more traffic or want to increase your ROI, short video ads can also help you gain more organic traffic. When you use video ads, you’ll be able to get a higher click through rate (CTR). A higher CTR means that more people will be able to click on your ad or watch your video and then they’ll be able to go directly to your website. 

3. Ask Your Customers to Create Short Video Content

Asking your customers to create short video content that serves as testimonials for your product is perhaps the most powerful tool you have at your disposal to reach the targets outlined in the video marketing strategy. Testimonials are easy enough to make for your customers because all they would need is some sort of video recording device and the ability ‍to send the footage over to you. 

The power of word-of-mouth has been so studied and documented that it’s scary. A study by MarketingSherpa found that customers were willing to spend up to 30% more on a product after reading positive reviews.

Another study found that customers were willing to spend 43% more when they were provided testimonials. Video testimonials are a powerful way to get your customers to speak up on your behalf. 94% of customers trust word-of-mouth referrals and 92% are more likely to trust a local business with a customer review. 

Advertisement

A recent study found that customers are just as likely to trust a review from a stranger as from their friend. Video testimonials are the next best thing to a customer recommendation. The greatest benefit of video testimonials is that they build trust and credibility for your business. Testimonials tap into a deeply rooted psychological bias where we trust the opinion of people we know. 

4. Add Short Video Testimonials and Product Videos to Your Website

Adding the short videos that you create to your website is a video marketing strategy that we can’t stress enough. 

When customers are browsing around your website, there are a million questions or objections they have about your products. With a short video formatted as a TikTok, you can easily answer most common questions or objections in less than 60 seconds. 

The reason short video formatted as a TikTok or Instagram Reel works especially good is because consumers are already familiar with this format because they browse content on those social platforms. When they see this style of content on your website, it provides comfort. 

Explainer videos on the homepage of your website help reduce the burden on consumers of having to navigate to different sections of your website to learn about your product. The easier you make it for potential customers to learn about your product, the better it is. 

Adding short video content to your website is an excellent way to handle objections and increase conversion rates. You can even leverage short video on your “about us” page to build trust.

Advertisement

5. Repost Your Short Video Content to all Social Media Platforms 

There is no upside to publishing content and then doing so little with it afterward. If we can get more mileage out of the expensive content we create, our return on investment will only go up. That’s right — re-using your content will improve your entire video marketing program’s ROI.

Publishing a piece of short video content and then not redistributing it is a wasteful strategy. It’s like buying an expensive clothing item and only wearing it once before throwing it away. A huge part of content creation is repurposing content.

When you post a piece of short video content on TikTok, download the original and post it on YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels as well. Slice it up into smaller clips and use it as an ad creative. Find creative ways to re-use your short video content.

That’s a lot of traffic and conversions you have to give up if you let your content lay dormant on a blog or social media post, with no re-shares, links, or clicks.

Conclusion 

Adding short videos to your video marketing strategy is an excellent way to increase traffic and engagement across your social media channels.

The different methods listed above show how there is no single method of leveraging short video content to drive more traffic for your business. Rather, there are multiple strategies that can help get your short video content in front of more people, and by constantly iterating and introducing new strategies you can make this an effective channel for your business.

Advertisement


What Does it Take to be the Head of Marketing

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

MARKETING

How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

Published

on

A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

Advertisement

Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

Advertisement

Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

Advertisement

“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

Advertisement

Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

Advertisement

Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

Published

on

Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

Published

on

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

(more…)

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending

Follow by Email
RSS