-YouTube has more than a billion users (almost one-third of total internet users).
-Forty-five percent of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week.
-More than 500 million hours of videosare watched on YouTube each day.
-More video content is uploaded in30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years. (I find this astonishing.)
-87% of online marketersuse video content.
While full length workshop videos can be effective for educative marketing, for PR and brand building purposes the best segments are less than five minutes long (and the very best are generally less than two).
For additional ideas on how to amplify the audience for your video I turned to Karen Neicy, an internet marketing expert in Delray Beach, Florida. (Her newest video commercial for millennial viewers is available here). Neicy breaks the alternatives down into two buckets: Paid Marketing and Organic (Earned) Views.
Paid Marketing
Google. Part of the budget you secure for video marketing can be used to create a targeted video marketing campaign in Google AdWords, for video marketing on YouTube. In this medium, you can create Ad Groups based on where you’d like your video to be played. For instance, for millennial-targeted brands, you can focus on placements such as Buzzfeed, Elite Daily and Vice by using “Placements” within the display campaign. By creating a separate Ad Group for each placement you can effectively measure and report your views and impressions for each. Likewise, you can target applicable groups using the Demographics, Topics, Audiences and Keyword features within each campaign. This allows you to create a single video campaign with multiple target groups for A/B testing in order to make the most of your budget, and to create detailed, in depth success reports.
Facebook and Instagram. Facebook video ads are a guaranteed way to reach people who matter to your brand. If you’re already leveraging an organic Facebook presence, you can remarket your video to those individuals as well as discover new potential customers daily. Just like Google, Facebook allows to you reach people across multiple devices, which is crucial as online video now accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic.
Using the video views objective in Facebook, you can upload your video, define your audience and set the copy for your video campaign. Unlike Google, Facebook gives you the opportunity to market your video using your own creative text, buttons and meta data. It’s important to set up multiple campaigns in order to A/B test with different audiences and copy. Facebook’s reporting offers actionable data that will help you maximize the number of views and impressions that your video receives. If your company already has an Instagram account, you can upload your video as a post, and set the audience directly from the post. You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook interface. Both methods are extremely effective for increasing your video’s views and impressions.