#1 Be realistic if you intend to use video in marketing.
Are you expecting to create a viral video? If you do how will it help your business in actual sales? Few videos actually go viral, most have a short shelf life of views and shares when you first push them in a campaign.
Consider focusing on video content that has a long-shelf life and will attract organic searches. These are generally informative videos intended to build trust and create product awareness. Videos that can be used in more than one campaign can extend the shelf-life also. Before you go too deep into your process you should also understand the difference between video marketing and video hosting.
#2 Keep videos short and professional.
Viewers only watch a few seconds or minutes of video before they lose interest. Provide value to the viewer up front. You want to establish your credibility and gain their trust.
#3 Create training videos for employees.
Videos are an excellent educational tool. One well made video can be repeatedly used to train many employees it can really leverage your valuable time. Poorly trained employees can cause significant damage to your product and reputation. Videos are a cost effective way to deliver high quality repeatable training.
#4 Create video user manuals or guides for customers.
This is a great way to develop and maintain your customer relationships. Videos that help customers use and maintain your products will lead to greater levels of satisfaction. It can also avoid expensive calls to your customer service department. If you choose to make these videos available to the general public (not restricted to existing customers) they can also help in pre-sales education.
#5 Carefully plan how you will host, share and update videos
You have to consider how will you host and stream your videos. You have three basic options:
- your own servers (expensive and technically very challenging),
- a paid hosting service or
- free hosting service.
Additionally, you need to consider if you want to control access to your videos (login and password protection) which might be very important for some content like training videos. The free option sounds obvious, but be careful.
More than likely the correct solution will be a combination of a paid hosting service and free hosting, depending on the content and purpose. The free hosting providers want viewers to keep watching more videos and will give them tempting ads so they watch other videos – potentially videos or ads placed directly by your competitors.