“It’s not what you upload, it’s the strategy with which you upload.” -Will Keenan.

It needs to be said first: social video is incredibly important. But video is more than just uploading a video to YouTube or Facebook and hoping that the views and brand awareness will magically appear. Video needs to be tactically uploaded with the goal of providing value for your audience and presenting them with the opportunity to engage more if they choose.

According to G2Crowd, social video generates 1200% more shares than text and imagery, combined. But with the social media giants trying harder and harder every day to keep users scrolling on their platforms, it’s important for marketers to give the viewer an opportunity to watch more if they find that content valuable.

In this blog, we’ll cover some of the tactics marketers can use to present that opportunity to an interested audience. Whether it’s social media awareness, website engagement, or converting someone with a video, we’ll use real-life examples for how to use video to its fullest capabilities.

Social Media Awareness & Website Engagement

When it comes to finding a new audience for your brand, there is no better place to start than using social video. Video quickly communicates your messaging, whether it’s content or product marketing that shares your message in a matter of seconds.  Social media video is undoubtedly valuable, but needs to be run with a full funnel mindset.

With the walled-gardens of social channels, where users are meant to scroll for as long as long as possible, marketers need to optimize their video content for this exact hurdle. The data we collected from our State of Video Marketing report shows that the average Facebook view is :06 seconds. Compared to video on a website, where the average view is 4 minutes and 59 seconds, it’s vital to move those viewers that seek more information to a website where they can encounter a better user experience. 

For example, here is how Mailchimp employed this exact practice in their latest video series:

By placing a short teaser on Facebook, Mailchimp was able to move their interested viewers to their website to watch the 5+ featured episodes. They harnessed the power of video on social with a teaser and controlled the user experience by sending viewers to their website to engage even further.

By following best practices for social media video, Mailchimp has perfectly distributed their video content to be optimized for the user journey. It allows the viewer to get a glimpse to know if it’s a topic of interest, and the option to engage further. It allows Mailchimp to not only track more granular video metrics, but convert that potential person through valuable content.

Video Conversions

The next step in the journey of video is conversion. While video is often forgotten when it comes to collecting leads, it can become a source of leads with a few simple adjustments from marketers.

Collectors, or video lead generation forms, are one way of approaching a potential lead with the ability to sign-up be a subscriber or receive more information. Collectors can be skippable and dynamic, fully customized to match the mission of the campaign.

Hint Health, a San Francisco based healthcare startup, used collectors on their live and on-demand videos to measure results and impact of their video content. By creating a demand for their video content, at a conference where they featured industry speakers, they were able to use collectors to grow the impact of their videos. Through these collectors, Hint gathered 1,000+ leads from their event videos, despite only 120 people in attendance live.

The collector was shown before the viewer was able to watch:

By using collectors on their video content, Hint ensured that their viewers were their preferred audience, and were also able to measure the video engagement that these leads consumed. The conversion stage of video combines the behavioral shift to preferring video and best-practices of marketing.

By running video on social and driving traffic to your website to conversion forms, marketers can create tangible results from video. Instead of measuring vanity metrics from social, this strategy will create ROI for video that is typically reserved for other marketing channels.