Video Marketing Tips and Strategies to Outshine Your Competition

Gone are the days where you can get by simply by producing blog posts.

You see, as the amount of content produced every day increases it present an opportunity for the content consumer to decide where, how and why they consume content.

This means you need to make use of other content mediums, video being one of them.

Your competitors are probably already making great use of video and use it to position themselves as an authority and generate leads.

In this post, we’re going to learn what video marketing strategies your competitors are using and why you need to start too.

15 Types of Videos You Can Create to Enhance Your Marketing Efforts

The great thing about video marketing is that there are loads of different types of videos you can create.

#1 – Industry leader interviews

If you find industry leaders in your niche, you can invite them for an interview. If you record this interview its value will last. What’s more, if you opt to work with a popular industry leader and they share the video, your reach will go further.

#2 – Funny videos

Even though you run a business – it doesn’t mean your marketing has to be boring – even in the world of B2B. See if there’s a comical approach you can take to a topic and create a video about it. Bonus, if you get it right, people are likely to remember you.

#3 – Case studies

Before working with a new company, people like to read case studies to see the type of results they too could generate. Instead of just having your case studies written down, why not turn it into a video in order to explain explicitly what you did and the type of results you generated.

#4 – Product tour/demo videos

Before using a new tool, it’s beneficial for your audience and potential customers to see how the tool works and what they can achieve using it. The best way to show this is to produce a video product tour that walks users through the most common use cases.

#5 – Round ups or curation videos

People love an expert round up. Roundups are a great way to take a load of content and condense it into its most important points. You can also do this effectively using video.

#6 – Meet the team videos

If you’re looking to humanize your business, creating a video where you introduce your audience to the people on your team is a great way to do that. This especially works out for people reaching out to customer support. After they’ve seen the video, they feel as though they have a personal connection with you and thus, customer support queries are handled more effectively.

#7 – Behind the scenes videos

In general, we’re fascinated not just by results but how people get there. If you create a physical product, why not produce a video that takes people behind the scenes to show the process of actually creating that product.

#8 – Feature explainers

When your product or tool has a range of different services, it can be hard for people to initially grasp which ones are useful to them. Creating separate feature explainer videos helps people identify which features of your product they’ll benefit from most.

#9 – Live videos

Live video is a great way to add a personal element between your audience and customers and your brand or business. It gives you a chance to interact with the people who keep your business running.

#10 – Vlogs

Vlogging has become increasingly popular over the years. A vlog style video could work well for a busy CEO who wants to show “a day in the life” of what they get up to.

#11 – Videos for emails

Did you know, your emails don’t just have to contain text? They can include videos too and often it’s a great way to increase email engagement.

#12 – How-to videos

How-to or explainer videos are a great way to take a complex topic and use video as the medium to explain it clearly for your audience.

#13 – Product reviews

Product review videos are great for conversions. However, do be aware that producing your own product reviews can often lead to a sense of bias.

#14 – Q&As

If you find that your audience has a range of different questions about your business, your industry or your product, but the answers don’t warrant creating a separate post about each question – you can use a video Q&A instead.

#15 – Announcement videos

When something exciting happens in your business, you’re going to want to scream and shout about it so that others feel the same level of excitement. Nothing is more effective than portraying excitement than actually seeing someone excited about a topic.

Using Video Content to Boost SEO Rankings

Your audience loves watching videos to learn more about your specific topic or niche, but did you know Google loves videos too.

In fact, as Google owns Youtube, when you conduct certain searches on the search engine, you don’t just get blog post links – but video links too.

Let’s look at that in more detail.

If we were to search for the phrase “how to do video marketing”, we can see (in the image below) an entire section for ranking videos.

Getting your video to appear on the first page of Google means that you need to make sure your video is SEO optimized with a good title and description.

Calling your video: “Video 1” will reduce your chance of ranking simply because it makes it harder for a search engine (and a user) to know what the video is about.

Videos that appear most commonly in the search results are ones that follow the “how to” format.

So think about your own organisation and question what types of topics people want to learn more about and format those into ‘how to videos’.

But it’s not just ‘how-to’ videos that rank well.

If you’re looking to generate sales by having really good reviews, testimonials and walk-throughs, this can be done with video too.

Create a Series of Videos to Keep People Engaged on YouTube

YouTube is getting smarter.

Most often, users venture beyond the original video that brought them to YouTube, thanks to “Related” and “Suggested” content. YouTube plasters their site with recommended videos to ensure that you stay a while.

How does YouTube determine which videos get recommended?

The answer to that question has something to do with a semi-complicated (and semi-secret) algorithm.

One of the biggest factors of ‘said algorithm’ has been the view count. If a lot of people clicked a video, YouTube figured that it must be relevant and worth watching. The problem was that there are countless misleading thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and keywords out there (like a quick shot of a woman in a bikini to use for a thumbnail in a video that has nothing to do with bathing suits).

YouTube’s latest ranking system has a pretty smart way around this problem: If people click a video but don’t actually watch it, the video’s views are valued significantly less.

This is good news for everyone, except the blackhat marketers.  

YouTube’s new algorithm will benefit you, both as a user and a content creator.  As a YouTube user, you can expect higher quality and more relevant content to be recommended.  

For example, after watching a music video, I clicked a related video of a band I had never heard of.  I actually liked the new band and was convinced that YouTube might understand my musical tastes better than most of my friends.

As a marketer, you can create a series of videos on related content that can encourage people to keep watching your channel even after the first video ended.

Maybe you have a YouTube video titled “10 Things Car Salesmen Don’t Want You to Know.” When someone is done watching, YouTube might suggest them another one of your videos, “How to Get Maximum Trade-In Value For Your Used Car at the Dealership.” 

Live Webinars For Lead Generation

The good thing about video content is once you’ve created it, it stays wherever you host it, ready for people to find.

But what if you want to create video content that isn’t evergreen?

You can do this through live video or webinars.

The good thing about live videos is that it encourages people to interact with you.

Most live webinar videos allow the audience to ask questions and give feedback.

You’ll be surprised by how many people choose to do so.

And the results of doing this?

Well for starters, you’ll find that your brand becomes less of a business and is able to connect with your audience and users on a more personal level.

In a report by GoToWebinar, they discovered that 75% of B2B marketers use webinars to generate the highest quality leads for their business.

When it comes to creating your webinars, you need to think carefully about the topics you’ll discuss.

You don’t want the structure to be too regimented as this means there’s no way for the conversation to deviate away – if that’s what the current audience wants.

But at the same time, it’s good to have some sort of loose structure so that you don’t go off on tangents.

One of the greatest things about webinars and other live videos is the ability to save to watch later.

Not everyone will be able to make the webinar during the ‘live time’, but may want to come back at a later date to watch and listen.

Saving your webinars to allow people to return to them in the future is paramount for long-term success.

Repurpose Your Content to Videos

One of the problems people face when they begin to use video marketing within their business is coming up with ideas about what to create.

The good news is that you don’t need to come up with new ideas – at least not at first.

You probably already have a website full of great content and this can be repurposed into video content.

We’ve already established that people like to choose how they consume their content.

If you have a blog post that performs really well, ranks high on search engines and gets shared across social networks – you have a great opportunity to repurpose this content as a video.

That way, people who prefer to watch videos have access to the same quality content as those who prefer to read blog posts.

On the Neil Patel blog you can see there is a post that walks the reader through how to create content that goes viral.

It’s an epically long post at over 4500 words!

Now, some people will have time to sit and read through this post picking up all the useful actionable ideas that are covered.

But what if you don’t have time?

You can watch the video version instead.

Neil repurposed the content from his blog post to create a personal video that talks you through some of the strategies covered in the original post.

If you look closely at the stats, you’ll see there are 192 comments and over 27,000 views.

The great thing about this is he didn’t need to create new ideas – he simply used the ones he already had.

It’s quickly becoming clear how powerful video can be when you supplement it with your current strategy.

Become an Authority Source and Break Down Complex Ideas

If you can confidently talk about a specific topic – the general consensus is that you know what you’re talking about.

If you want to become an authority in your industry, you can achieve this through video.

Having a process of consistently creating top-quality valuable videos will put you leagues ahead of your competitors.

If we take the search term “SEO” as an example.

As you can see it’s extremely difficult to rank for this term. Ahrefs tells us that you’d need around 259 backlinks to your page in order to rank in the top 10.

That’s a lot of work involved.

So instead of trying to compete with the sites who have already achieved this, why not use video as your medium of choice.

If we search for the same topic on Youtube, we can see that the results include Brian Dean.

Now when you do a normal Google search for “SEO”, Brian doesn’t show up on the first page.

What’s interesting though is this video has generated 100’s of thousands of views. This is the exact type of content that can help you become an authority – especially in a niche where the top 10 search results are super crowded and saturated by companies with more resources than you.

Final Thoughts

You should now have a clearer idea as to how your top competitors are using video marketing and the kind of results they generate.

Use the strategies listed above and start implementing video into your marketing arsenal.

Whether you want to use video to generate new leads for your business or become an authority, there’s a way to do it.

See what benefits your organization will gain when you start implementing video!