Video marketing is an incredible tool, with many different abilities. One of its greatest features is the ability to attract an audience. This is possible whether you are trying to build upon an existing audience, or if you are trying to create an audience from scratch.

Creating this kind of optimized content will help you get your video in front of your audience quickly. Take for instance, YouTube channel davehakkens, who created the concept of “blokphones”.

Rather than constantly buying the latest new phone, he created the concept of phones you could simply upgrade as you go and recycle the components you didn’t need. With this method, the idea was to create less waste, as well as a more convenient experience for the customer.

To explain this idea, he created a 2 and ½ minute video explaining the concept. He posted it on both YouTube and the crowd speaking platform Thunderclap.

On YouTube alone, between when it was released in 2013 and now, it has 22 million views. Between the platforms, it has reached almost 400 million people, nearly a million of which became supporters of his campaign.

This is an incredible boost to viewership, nearly from scratch. This is possible not only with new inventions but with companies wanting to expand their viewership.

Another example of the success in growing an audience through video is the dollar shave club. They are not one of the largest razor companies, being dwarfed by others such as Gillette, but they have still carved out a successful business model.

This is in part to their video marketing plan. Take their video, “Our Blades Are Great” video.

The video takes a somewhat comedic approach to show how great their razor blades are while walking around one of their production facilities. It cost the company around $4,500 to make the video.

Within the first 48 hours of the video being posted, 12,000 new orders came in for the company. With products ranging anywhere between $10 - $50, in addition to their subscription option, it is safe to say they made at least $120,000 from this one video alone. Not bad for a single video.

How To Start A Video Marketing Audience

Now that we’ve talked about the success stories of this type of content, how would you start? Before creating the content, there are several things you can do to optimize your reach.

First would be to identify your target market and understand what values they hold most important. The second would be to then identify keywords that work for your chosen target audience.

How many you will need depends on your audience, but generally, you should aim to have 8-10 keywords per piece of content. Keywords can further be divided up into “short tail” and “long tail” keywords.

Short tail keywords are generally 3 words or less. Long-tail keywords are generally more than 3 words. Short tail words are a little less targeted and can be used to help boost your video across a wide range of keywords.

Long-tail are much more specific and can be used when you want to hone in on your target audience better. You should have a mix of both words.

To gain ideas on what keywords might be in the ballpark of your topic, you can simply start to type in your topic in really any social media search bar, and generally it will fill in ideas for you to search.

This is a great place to start your brainstorming. Other ideas would be to check titles, descriptions, and video tags to see what competitors are using.

Next Steps

Once you have a list of possible keyword ideas, the next step would be to narrow them down and figure out what keywords would be the best. Ideally, you want a mix of low competition and high use keywords.

An easy way to check how competitive the keywords are would be to put them into google, or the platform of choice and see how many results you get. The lower the result count is, the more of an indicator that it is a less competitive keyword.

If you are using Google as your platform, you can also use some of their tools. A tool that is very useful for discovering how much traffic keywords get is Google’s Keyword Planner.

This tool enables you to check for how much traffic keywords are getting in an average month. If you can get your video ranking in both your chosen video platform, such as YouTube and the general searches on google, you will greatly increase your video’s visibility.

YouTube has similar metrics for understanding it’s advertisement mechanics. Watching your engagement rate, average view percentage, audience retention, impressions, and clarify how much your audience appreciates your videos.

Audience Retention

Now that you’ve started building up your audience, getting out high-quality content, and building your keyword list, what’s next?

Now you have to retain the audience that you have worked so hard to build. There are many theories on how to retain an audience, but thankfully, video marketing is one of the best ways.

One of the keys is to continue to do research on your keywords. This doesn’t stop after the first piece of content or after you feel confident with the first few.

You have to continue to optimize, research, and do more listening to your customer base to better understand which pieces of content might hit home for them.

If you are building this content on YouTube, an incredibly good way to stay connected and visible with your audience is to make sure you are being active in the comments section.

Not only does this help your audience feel like you are making a personal connection with them, but the highest-ranked videos often have some of the highest rates of comments.

Also, make sure to try and have people subscribe to your medium. Whether this is an e-mail list, YouTube subscriber count, text messages, etc, it usually helps to include something at the end or beginning of the piece of content, reminding viewers to subscribe for more great content.

Subscribers will then get notifications when you put up new content, leading to retaining those that stopped by to watch the first video.

Example of Audience Retention

One company that did retention very well was Old Spice. Old spice had a massively successful video marketing campaign with the “Your Man Could Smell Like” series.

It generated a massive amount of interest for the brand, but the company wanted more than just a video series. It created a “response” series to accomplish this goal.

They took questions from all the major social media sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, and had the main actor respond through a series of videos. All these questions gave them a tremendous amount of material to pull from, and the ended up creating 186 video responses.

Each of these was its own, personalized video that could be further optimized to fit the keywords they wanted to target. On the first day of this campaign, they amassed 5.9 million views.

Just a week after launching, they had over 40 million views on the videos total. Over this same period of time, the brand’s twitter following increased by 2700%.

Facebook fan interaction went up 800%. Traffic to their website increased by 300%. Sales of the product doubled. This is an excellent example of capitalizing on success.

Using Real Life Events to Create More Video

Creating scripted, rehearsed content on social media platforms is often the most common form of video marketing. It allows for research ahead of time, enables you to optimize the video for the platform you are putting it on, and more.

However, this does not have to be the only way that you create video. You can use real-life events that your company uses to make an optimized video for your audience. Examples of this would be trade shows, conferences, and conventions.

You would use the same ideas as other videos, just looking for topics related to the live event.

There are a couple of ways you can maximize these events. One of the first would be to think about live streaming.

Livestreaming is helpful because it enables viewers to feel apart of the action, even from thousands of miles away. You can also go back later and cut up the live version for smaller videos.

Testimonials are another great way to maximize effectiveness. You can use them both for live streaming to boost credibility and record them for later, in conjunction with other video marketing efforts.

All of these efforts together make live events an excellent opportunity to use for video marketing efforts.

Conclusion

As you can see, video marketing is an incredible way to create and then retain an audience even if you are starting from ground zero.

You have an incredible array of tools to customize your message to exactly who you want it to go to. In the age of digital media, you would be foolish not to have a robust video marketing campaign.

How will you start building your video marketing audience?

Sources:

https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/video-advertising/viral-video-marketing-examples/