Retargeter

Opportunities in Online Video

Online video is one of the most powerful channels available to digital marketers today, and you don’t need a big budget to make a big impact on your bottom line.

One of the biggest upsides of running online video campaigns is that you can leverage to meet a variety of different marketing goals. Online video can help you drive new traffic to your site, engage existing customers, convert more web visitors to customers, and get more out of paid advertising.

Boost SEO and Social Engagement

Many brands, both consumer and B2B, have found that YouTube channels are incredibly effective at driving traffic to their sites. YouTube videos are likely to appear in search results for relevant queries, which can help potential customers find your brand. When a video appears in search results, even if it’s not the top result, it can attract attention because it stands out from other results. After watching a video on a third-party channel like YouTube, you can encourage viewers to head to your website for additional information, or to sign up for a newsletter or receive email updates.

Educational, informative, or entertaining videos can also keep social followers engaged and keep customers coming back. Whether you’re marketing to consumers or to other businesses, you can use a YouTube channel for technical or how-to videos to help customers set up or use your product. If that doesn’t make sense for your business, you can really get creative with videos on how to get the most of your products or how to leverage complementary products.

Conversion Optimization

Adding an explanatory video to your homepage or landing page can help explain your product quickly and effectively, and in many cases can increase conversion rates. In this case study on the Unbounce blog, video marketing software Vidyard found that adding a video to their landing page increased conversion rates by 100%.

Landing pages, home pages, and product pages are all great candidates for video content. Always make sure the video gets your point across quickly and effectively or showcases your product well. That doesn’t necessarily require a ton of cash. It is possible to create great videos even with small budgets. Sometimes, something as simple as screencast with voiceover can communicate enough to convince people to convert. For consumer brands, live action videos showcasing the product can go a long way.

If you’re looking for inspiration on leveraging video for conversion rate optimization, check out this round-up of 10 effective video landing pages.

I’d like to note, however, that videos on landing pages may not always convert better than landing pages without a video. Always A/B test landing pages to see if video adds a boost or actually detracts from conversions. If your video content is low-quality, confusing or too long, it may actually hurt your bottom line.

High-ROI Advertising

Fifteen and thirty-second pre and post-roll video ads are possibly the most powerful way to engage an audience online. Online videos can be targeted with the same precision as standard banners, meaning you can use first-party behavioral data like site visits or third-party demographic data to focus your video impressions exclusively on the most relevant audience. That’s right – you can retarget your site visitors with pre-roll video.

Mobile video ads can also be targeted (though sometimes with less precision) and tend to have astronomical engagement rates, which isn’t surprising given that mobile video views grew by 100% in 2012.

If you haven’t used online video before, how do you see it fitting into your existing strategy? If you’ve already gotten started with video, how have you used this channel to meet your goals?