Your PR strategy needs Video Content Marketing... NOW!

One leg of the PR stool is helping clients demonstrate their thought leadership in their industry. It’s one of the best ways to connect authentically with their audience, benefit from free coverage, and develop channel partnerships. And Video Content Marketing is a great way to demonstrate thought leadership!

This strategy can grow your visibility, and get your clients to know, like & trust you. It’s not surprising that many growth experts now call video THE best way to grow a business.

And at Board Studios we’ve made it our mission to help client develop & execute a video content marketing strategy that grows awareness, drives traffic, and generates organic leads.

Here, we’ll tackle the WHAT, WHY, and HOW of video content marketing.

WHAT is “Video Content Marketing”?

Video content marketing can mean many different things. But for the purposes of our discussion, we refer to the regular production and promotion of video across social media channels.

This video content is primarily educational in nature. The goal is to get in your clients’ shoes and figure out what questions they’d like answered if they had free access to your expertise.  

Then, you create videos addressing each top-of-mind challenge for your audience. And finally, you optimize and promote in order to get your videos in front of the right people.

WHY does video content marketing work?

There are 3 main reasons why Video Content Marketing can be considered a white-space opportunity:

1 - Very few companies are doing it.

Most companies are running pay-per-click ad campaigns and publish blogs and white papers (all great and essential marketing tools in their own right).

That’s because the barriers to entry in these media are very low, whereas video is a big hurdle for most companies.  

• “How do we do it?”
• “How do we use it?”
• “How do we track ROI?”

As a result, only a tiny fraction of them do video content marketing. And if very few competitors are doing video content marketing, that’s where you want to be!

2 - Even fewer companies do video content marketing RIGHT.  

That’s because it requires new skills that most marketing teams don’t have. Video is very different than general content or advertising campaigns. And if you don’t do it right, you can easily blow through your budget without measurable results.

The outcome: you nix your video initiatives because they look like a money-losing endeavor and you can’t justify the investment.

3 – Video CAN be expensive.

But that’s because it’s typically done haphazardly, without a proper plan in place, without a promotional strategy to support it, and without a streamlined process to control production costs.

Most companies end up producing a few videos that cost too much and don’t get any support so they don’t reach the right audience. Eventually, they give up and their video channels fizzle into oblivion…

HOW does video content marketing work?

Here are some quick tips on the basics you should know in terms of executing a successful video content marketing strategy.

First – come up with the right content.  

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. With some careful SEO/keyword/competitive analysis, you can identify topics that already resonate with your target audience. Look at competitors’ blog posts and use tools like kwfinder and ubsersuggest for some competitive intelligence.  

Your competitors have effectively done a lot of the research for you, and you can see which topics get more traction than others. So you can focus on those topics or series initially, and of course make them your own by injecting your expertise or offering a different perspective.

Second – post consistently high-quality content.  

There’s a debate as to which is more important: frequency vs consistency vs quality. Well, let’es end the debate here: quality tramps all. That’s because if your videos are high-quality (and also optimized for clickthrough, meaning an optimized thumbnail and title), then when YouTube shares your videos on other people’s feeds they will click through and watch them.  

If that happens, YouTube will continue sharing your content with people outside your circle, thus growing your reach rapidly – and for free. This can be the difference between getting hundreds of views on your video to a hundred thousand!

And third – prime the pump for success, so to speak.  

Unfortunately, it’s not true that “you will post it and they’ll come.” Especially when you start and you post your first few videos… you’ll hear the proverbial crickets. You have to put some effort behind your promotional plan.

As soon as you post a video on YouTube, the clock starts ticking. Its ranking algorithm needs to see that people are searching for and watching your content.  

That will indicate that your content is a) relevant to your keywords, and b) valuable to your audience. So how can you send a preliminary positive signal to YouTube’s ranking algorithm?

Have your “launch team” ready. That can be your team, for example. As soon as your video is uploaded, ask them to search for your keyword, scroll down as much as needed until they find your video, and then watch, like and share it.

Next, you can spend a small budget ($50 can get you approx. 1,000 views) to pay for some initial traction for your videos, especially if your channel is new. This can increase the legitimacy of your channel so organic viewers are more likely to subscribe and watch some of your other videos.

You NEED video content marketing – NOW!

The bad news is that you can’t wait. You need to figure out video content marketing, and you have to start NOW! Here’s why:

A) Content is getting consumed increasingly on mobile. The result is that fewer people are reading content. But they’re definitely watching video! You can do a quick test on that next time you check your LinkedIn feed. When you scroll, do you stop and read the text posts, or do you focus on the videos? You should also know that LinkedIn – like most platforms – is making a big push to promote video on its platform, because it knows that video does the best job at keeping people on the platform. Same goes for YouTube and other social media, of course.

B) What about blogs? Of course they have a place in your marketing strategy. However, it’s probably already very difficult to rank for your keywords. And that situation will only get worse. On the other hand, video content can help you leapfrog the competition because it has a MUCH higher chance to rank on the front page of Google.

Test this for yourself: start noticing how many videos appear on the front page when you do a search on Google. And compare the results: for competitive keywords you’ll see a few well-established websites at the top, but then underneath you’ll see videos from much smaller companies that have found a very smart way to break through!

C) If you fall behind, it becomes exponentially difficult to catch up. That’s because ranking algorithms work on a cumulative basis. For example, one of the key metrics that YouTube uses in order to rank your videos is based on your channel’s total watch time. That means, that it aggregates all the minutes that viewers have watched of your videos on the YouTube platform. If your competitor has a 3-month headstart and posts regularly, then it will be very difficult to catch up. Because their videos will be promoted more heavily, and as a result they will continue accumulating “watch time” at an exponential pace.

In conclusion…

All the above spells a BIG opportunity for companies that master video content marketing. Building a successful YouTube channel can be a long-term competitive advantage that can’t easily get copied. And repurposing your video assets on LinkedIn can connect you with channel partners and generate high-value referral opportunities.

Imagine being the only one of your competitors who can generate organic traffic while they have to rely on ever more expensive pay-per-click ads and other content campaigns.

BUT, in order to win the video wars, you need to have the right strategy in place, keep your costs competitive with a streamlined production approach, and critically you need to know all the science behind optimizing your videos and promoting them.

At Board Studios, we constantly test what works, we interview successful business YouTube channel owners to learn their secrets, and stay on top of the latest tricks that can make a vast difference between a channel that starts strong but fizzles out, and a channel that properly tests what works and doubles-down in order to beat the competition and stay ahead of the game.