Tips on promoting your video to your audience.

As I often say there is really no point or sense in making a great video if nobody ever sees it.

Promoting your video to your audience on your paid, owned and earned media channels is essential to guarantee that they watch it, comment on it, share it and engage with it.

Video promotion however, isn’t limited just to your traditional digital avenues – there are literally thousands of more creative, more unexpected ways you can promote your video than you probably realise.

While I would love to share all of these options with you, today I'm going to take a look at a few of the less conventional ways you can promote your video, to attract a larger audience.

This options work really well when combined with your other marketing efforts across paid, owned and earned channels.

Start showing more of your video content at events.

Showing your latest video or videos at even just one event or trade show could give your visual content the boost it needs.

Events and trade shows are surprisingly great places to capture the eyeballs of your audience with quality content they will remember and talk about (just like with traditional movies and cinema - word of mouth goes a long way to generating interest in your content).

Whether your company is sponsoring an expo, putting on industry training sessions, participating in meet-ups, or speaking at a conference, these are all great opportunities to highlight the information you are presenting at an event or even better - to introduce your company and your content to a whole new receptive and captive audience.

This won’t immediately raise your view count and it probably won't be a clear and attributable metric that you can walk into your bosses office on a Monday and say:

Hey that event generated 5000 new views of our employer branding video...

But you and your boss need to remember that view count is really just one of those vanity metrics that doesn’t necessarily accomplish much (apart from you looking impressive to your boss that is).

Your goal instead should be to get people to your website, spread brand awareness, and eventually convert into a lead, a sale, a new employee or whatever your specific measurable objective is.

With a captive audience, this is actually one of the places your video may be the most effective.

Start including your latest video in your email signature.

Depending on your video strategy and the clear and measurable goals you have developed and outlined for your video content for this week, month, quarter and year, you might have planned and executed an entire email campaign or two around your latest video.

You've probably done this because like everyone else in marketing and sales you have read that adding video to your emails has been shown to improve open rates by over 7 percent and click through rates by over 200 percent.

But, there is an often-ignored component in every email that could be an enormous free win for you here: your email signature!

Including your video in your email signature could increase your video plays, make your emails more engaging, and lead to substantially higher response rates.

All it takes is a video thumbnail with a play button that, when clicked, takes the user directly to your video.

Then, you’ll be exposing everyone you email to your video, and if you’re in sales, marketing, or customer service, that’s likely a lot of people each day.

If you are smart and either tell everyone in your organisation to do the same (or smarter and make it easy for them by updating and deploying new signatures for them without them having to do a thing) – the effects will improve your video’s performance and get people to engage with you and your brand, business, organisation or institution in a unique and unexpected way.

Start leveraging your video content across all your online communities.

Many brands, businesses, organisations and institutions are active in niche online communities, like Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, forums, or even Q&A boards.

However many marketers and sales people across these organisations fail to realise that this niche online communities are actually another excellent and free place to promote your video content.

Free to post and with a highly relevant, targeted and engaged audience, your reach may not be huge, but here, your audience is at least twice as more likely to engage with the content you post than across your other digital channels.

You can also utilise these niche distribution points to test and trial content with a reception audience before going to mass distribution across your more traditional paid, owned and earned channels.

For the best results just be sure to post organically whenever and wherever possible.

Partner or align your video content to a podcast.

Have a favourite Podcast?

No?

Chances are your audience probably does.

Podcasts are back and they are particularly hot right now.

Sure, they are not a visual medium, but if you partner up with an industry-relevant company as a guest speaker on their podcast, you can take advantage of their audience and their distribution channels to tap into your audience or into a new audience you are hoping to develop and engage with.

How do you do this you ask?

It's actually surprisingly simple.

During the podcast recording, just mention your video in a natural and authentic way during the conversation, and ask if you can send the host the link to share with the audience.

Then, they can distribute it to their audience as they see fit, on their website, via their socials, or through email – however they choose to market their podcast to their audience.

Not getting enough shares of your video content? There is an easy way to fix this... Just ask your audience.

For some reason there is this weird notion many of us have (not just in marketing and sales but in life) that asking someone directly for what you want is too forward but in many situations and circumstances that actually couldn’t be further from the truth.

Asking for a quick and simple favor, like sharing your video, can actually be a breath of fresh air if you’re immediately upfront and sincere in your request.

In other words, don’t use it to segue into a sales pitch or an avalanche of other requests.

Instead, network, talk to and engage with people, reach out on social media, and find a few people who you’d think would not only be willing to share your video, but who have a big enough audience to actually be impactful in helping you reach yours.

Be quick, be nice, and get to the point and the person you’re reaching out to will appreciate it, and, best of all, they will help you and your brand, business, organisation or institution extend your video’s reach.

If you need help sharing one of your videos... Reach out to me on LinkedIn or any of my other social channels and I'll be happy to help.

STILL NEED MORE HELP?

Reach out to me and the team at APV! 

We’d love to talk to you about video distribution for your brand, business, organisation or institution and the story you are looking to create and share with your audience!

Thomas J Elliott is the Senior Producer/Director for APV an advertising agency specialising in video and animation with offices in Wan Chai Hong Kong. 

He is a winner of numerous international awards for video and animation and the author of five books on visual content.

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