We are looking at video marketing for a client today and this also includes shooting a video for one of their scientific products. We can take the footage on their premises and then create a nice voice over with subtle effects and highlight the selling points where necessary. So, what do we do when the video has gone through the shooting and editing processes?

The first thing to remember is that all types of video marketing should be targeted and optimised well. You should ideally place the video on your site in a strategic location. This means close to text which mentions terms related to product demonstrations or applications. You may also choose to create a specific landing page for the video and this can also form part of any advertising or PR activity. This will allow you to track the visitor levels effectively and to monitor conversions through someone filling out a form or clicking on another link. The tracking and reporting can be carried out using google analytics or another tool.

If you are going to place the video on your site, you should make sure that you do three things:

1. label it
2. describe it
3. transcribe it

Basically, make sure that you have text around the video so it not only explains the content well, but it gives the search engines something meaty to index. Also, try to provide internal anchor text links on other pages back to your video pages and make sure that you add the word ‘video’ in your anchor text too! If you have added a voice over then why not add a transcription to the page. You have probably typed the script anyway so a few simple tweaks to it will look good on the page. This will automatically add great content for the search engines.

As you may already know YouTube is the second largest search engine and can be a very powerful tool for your business. The beauty of YT is that you don’t have the video sitting on your server and this can save valuable space and bandwidth. If it is served and streamed from the YT site then it is their server that takes the strain – and it seems to cope very well indeed!

If you add videos to YT, you can add your url in the first line of the description. This creates a live link back to your site – just make sure that you add your web address early in the description part. You can also use their annotate tool to overlay text on the video and this can be picked up by the search engines too. Add as much information as you can and it will increase the chances of your video being noticed. It seems that the amount of views, interest, votes and comments can make a difference to where your video is positioned in the search engine results – they seem to reward videos which appear very popular, so putting the work in at every stage can make a huge difference in many ways!

The opportunity here is to set up multiple levels of video marketing on several different channels including your site, YT and sites like Vimeo. You should also look at specific video sites in your niche and get those sites to upload your videos. This will create many opportunities to shout about your production and will enable you to reach a much bigger audience. Video done well can be a major selling tool, as well as offering variety and a positive visual impact to your web pages.