Guide to Video Marketing: Driving Engagement Across Industries

Video marketing has become an increasingly important part of a successful marketing strategy. A full 92 percent of marketers report that they use video in their marketing strategy, and 88 percent say they see a positive ROI from their efforts. Customers appreciate the ability to watch videos across their various devices with people expected to watch 100 minutes of video every day in 2021.

Creating videos allows you to make information easily accessible to customers. They can watch and digest information during times when it might be hard to engage with textual content, such as while trying to multitask. Customers can also engage with the material more passively, which also appeals to an audience that frequently uses mobile devices on the go.

As video becomes increasingly prevalent across different industries, however, brands also need to understand how to leverage these capabilities to gain the attention of their customers and rise above the rest of the industry. Understanding how to increase video clicks and where the videos can be hosted to draw more attention to the brand can help organizations across industries make the most out of their capabilities. 

Video continues to engage customers across industries

Customers’ interest in videos has extended across a variety of different industries, creating a digital atmosphere where brands need to prioritize video.

Hotel industry

In the hotel industry, videos were one of travelers’ top three sources of travel inspiration. Travel videos are watched by both business and leisure travelers, most commonly right before they make definitive decisions about their trips. 

In other words, those in hospitality interested in enticing visitors should consider how videos can be used to inspire people to visit particular destinations and take advantage of different amenities.

In the wake of the pandemic and the slow reawakening of the travel industry, video can also be a helpful medium to communicate about brand safety precautions and protocols to prepare customers and help them feel safe. Use video as a part of a full hospitality marketing strategy.

Restaurant industry

For restaurants, video can also be used to create an experience for customers: let them virtually see the restaurant and envision themselves enjoying that atmosphere. Highlight popular and noteworthy dishes. If the restaurant is known for fine dining, then a video profile of the head chef may be appreciated. If the restaurant creates a sports-bar atmosphere, then a video of the fun crowd at the latest game can encourage more participants.

Financial industry

The financial industry struggles heavily to deliver on personalized customer experiences, with just 6 percent making the cut. Video offers financial businesses to try and chip away at this problem. 

Videos can help welcome customers to the business, provide helpful information for them throughout the onboarding process, and introduce them to many common features and services of the business. It can also provide product or service demonstrations, answer routine questions, or introduce customers to seemingly-complex financial questions that customers often have. Video can help enhance a complete financial marketing strategy.

Healthcare industry

The healthcare industry also offers ample opportunities for video marketing. Using video to provide patients with information about diseases and disorders, as well as patient testimonials, or doctor introductions can be a great way to lay the foundations for personalized relationships with patients.

Healthcare tends to be very personal and patients want to know they can trust their healthcare providers. Video can help add personalization to the promotional efforts as a part of a complete healthcare marketing strategy.

Tech industry

Videos can provide those in the B2B tech industry with opportunities to offer personalized information for their clients, help them better understand their products and services, and show how they can maximize their ROI. Nearly half of customers express an interest in watching videos applicable to products and services they have purchased or that they want to buy. Videos can provide product demos, troubleshooting information, customer testimonials, and related content to influence purchase decisions and educate customers about their options.

Getting the right thumbnail and title

Thumbnails and titles comprise two of the most important features of your video. Like the title and meta description of your textual content, these features will heavily influence your perspective viewers regarding their likelihood to click on your video. You need to generate a thumbnail that makes your video look attractive to the visitor while also clearly stating its relevance to the topic the user wants to learn more about.

It can sound a bit like a tall order to accomplish this with a single image of your video, but there are tricks and strategies you can use to help increase your video’s appeal and build the excitement people feel about it. 

Here are some guidelines that can help you generate an excellent thumbnail for your video:

Make the thumbnail stand out

You want the thumbnail to stand out from others within your industry. Do not be afraid to use bold colors in the background and sharp contrasts between the subject of the thumbnail and the background to create an even sharper image. Depending upon the content of your video, using a thumbnail that also helps to portray strong emotions can be very helpful.

Make the thumbnail relevant to your video content

The thumbnail should also be relevant to your content when people click on your video and start watching. People do not want to feel as though they were tricked into clicking on the video. Use an image that is highly relevant to the topic the user has searched for and that you will cover from the beginning of your video.

Use the power of human imagery and eye contact

Humans are naturally drawn to images of other humans. A thumbnail that includes a picture of your main subject in the video, ideally if they are making eye contact with the audience, can also be an excellent way to draw people in and entice them to click.

Make sure the thumbnail scales easily

Back in 2018, nearly two-thirds of US internet users reported that they used mobile devices to watch videos, and this number has only continued to grow. You need a thumbnail that will be crisp, clear, and useful both on small mobile screens and on larger desktop screens. 

Use consistency

To help brand your videos, try to establish consistency across the thumbnails you select for your videos. When videos from your particular channel have a consistent color scheme or pattern in the images, it becomes easier for people to identify the videos as yours, even if they encounter one while just browsing online versus looking through your channel.

Pairing your thumbnail with a great title

Once you have generated your thumbnail, you want to pair it with an excellent title that will encourage people to click on the video. The title should also follow a few important guidelines to increase your clicking rates:

• Incorporate your main keywords for the video so people and algorithms understand its relevance
• Keep the title short and easy to understand
• Make the title interesting to pull in the user.

Where to promote and include your video

Videos and their popularity with users continue to improve digital engagement across platforms. This makes them a particularly useful tool for engaging customers and encouraging them to get to know your brand better. They can be optimally employed across a variety of different platforms.

In your email

For email, video already has an excellent track record. Videos in email can decrease your unsubscribe rate by 75 percent. They can also increase your click-through rate by 300 percent. Simply using the word ‘video’ in the subject of your email can increase clicks.

Using video in your emails, of course, should not be done simply for the purpose of having a video in the email. Use the enticing nature of the video to provide something useful for your audience. For example:

• A hotel might use it to showcase a new amenity or entice vacationers at the start of the travel season
• A restaurant might use it to promote an upcoming event or highlight a new dish
• A business in the healthcare industry might want to give a tour of safety and health procedures for patients nervous about visiting a doctor office during the pandemic
• A tech business might showcase or announce a new product
• A financial business might provide a preview of a client interview.

These types of attention-grabbing events enhance video appeal. As you embed videos in your emails, however, follow these basic practices:

• Make the video short– if it is part of a longer sequence let the reader know it is a preview and direct them to click for the full display
• Give the user control over playing the video and have the sound off as a default
• Check your audience’s response to email videos
• If possible, try to host the video on your own website so that if users click on it, they go to your website and not off-site, where they could easily forget about you and your offer.

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine available, after only Google. Additionally, Google often pulls YouTube results to display on its own SERPs in response to queries that it deems to be answered best by video. Therefore, building a presence on YouTube can benefit many brands interested in optimizing brand reach.

Youtube provides an excellent platform for growing a brand presence. However, you do not want to forget that it is not your website– customers can be actively shown ads for competitors or have videos suggested to them not from your brand while watching your videos. 

Therefore, YouTube often works well as an opportunity to provide brand building, informational videos that introduce leads to your knowledge and understanding and encourage them to learn more about your organization.

Make sure that you optimize your videos on YouTube using best practices to encourage your video to appear in internal searches. This includes:

• Using keywords in your title
• Writing a thorough description so that YouTube can contextualize the video
• Building out a channel of helpful videos
• Working on attention-grabbing introductions to minimize the number of people who click off immediately
• Create a custom thumbnail and title, as described earlier.

Your website

You can also use video to boost engagement and the user experience on your website. An incredible 80 percent of marketers report that videos help to increase dwell time on their site, which in turn builds engagement and brand associations in their minds. The videos themselves also provide a practical purpose– 43 percent of marketers also report that videos help to reduce the number of calls going to support.

Think carefully about the audience of your video, and whether you would be more likely to find them on your website or YouTube. There might be some that work well on both– such as product help videos. These might fit on YouTube and the website to catch people searching for a solution to their product questions.

As you add video to your website, watch your load times and follow best practices to avoid slowing down your website. Remember, particularly with the Core Vitals Update, load time and the user’s first impression of the site will be an important part of how your site ranks.

Video sitemaps

Adding a video sitemap can also help you give your optimization a boost. With a video sitemap, you can help Google and other search engines better understand your content. 

Google gives you the option to create a separate video sitemap or just include it in an existing sitemap. If you have more than one video on a given page, you can also include each video within the sitemap for a single page. 

Keep in mind that even with the sitemap, however, Google will still take the text you include on the video page into account when determining what the video is about and its value. The search engine also reports that if they determine the content on the page to be more helpful than the text in the sitemap, they will favor the information on the page.

Google offers the following as an example of what a sitemap might look like.

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″

        xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″>

   <url>

     <loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>

     <video:video>

       <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>

       <video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>

       <video:description>Alkis shows you how to get perfectly done steaks every

         time</video:description>

       <video:content_loc>

http://streamserver.example.com/video123.mp4</video:content_loc>

       <video:player_loc>

http://www.example.com/videoplayer.php?video=123</video:player_loc>

       <video:duration>600</video:duration>

       <video:expiration_date>2021-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>

       <video:rating>4.2</video:rating>

       <video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>

       <video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:publication_date>

       <video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>

       <video:restriction relationship=”allow”>IE GB US CA</video:restriction>

       <video:price currency=”EUR”>1.99</video:price>

       <video:requires_subscription>yes</video:requires_subscription>

       <video:uploader

         info=”http://www.example.com/users/grillymcgrillerson”>GrillyMcGrillerson

       </video:uploader>

       <video:live>no</video:live>

     </video:video>

   </url>

</urlset>

Incorporating video marketing for your business

Across industries, video marketing has become an essential part of engaging with modern consumers and providing them with the user experience they seek. See how you can begin to incorporate video marketing into your campaigns.

Contact us at +1 408-200-2211 or email us at sales@milestoneinternet.com.