Video can supercharge your lead gen. Here’s how to do it right…

Incorporating video into your marketing strategy is a no-brainer if you want to generate more leads and revenue for your business, demonstrate return on investment (ROI) and keep up with your competitors.

Why is video great for lead generation?

Lots of people think video is mainly for brand awareness. While this is true – and there’s a lot to be said for bitesize, social media focused content, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to video marketing.

Research has shown:

  • 83% of video marketers say this medium helps their lead generation
  • 89% say it delivers good ROI
  • 80% say video has directly contributed to higher sales
  • 71% of B2B and 66% of B2C marketers use video

The value of video creation is beyond doubt, but to really get the best out of it you need to make a plan and take a structured, strategic approach.

Here are some of the key steps to success in video marketing:

Know your goals

What do you hope to gain from video marketing? The answer to this question will be instrumental in planning, producing and measuring the success of individual videos.

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Establishing a clear goal for every video you make will provide valuable structure and focus for your production efforts, and also help you decide on relevant success metrics.

Overhead image of a desk with various people working with papers and computers

Provide value

Generating revenue is probably one of your ultimate goals with video marketing, but being too ‘salesy’ in your videos can prove counterproductive, especially if you’re looking to shar them on social media. There are many reasons why people love to watch videos, one of which is that they can get something valuable out of it – usually education, entertainment or a solution to a problem.

They don’t – generally speaking – watch them to hear a business talk about itself or make a sales pitch. The only possible exception to this is bottom-of-funnel customers who are ready to make a purchasing decision.

Every video you produce should be guided and informed by the answer to this question: how does it provide value for the viewer? If you succeed in delivering something valuable, new leads and revenue generation will follow naturally.

Optimise

Just as it’s vital that you use effective SEO techniques in your written content, you should put search optimisation at the heart of your video marketing too.

All the time, hard work and investment you dedicate to producing amazing videos will be for nothing if nobody sees them, so do some research and come up with a plan for making your video content easily discoverable in search.

Some of the key principles of SEO for your blog and other written assets also apply to video. For example, you should:

  • Include keywords you’re hoping to rank for in your video titles and file names
  • Optimise the descriptions that will accompany your videos on sites like YouTube
  • Tag videos with keywords that describe their content and context

Measure results

Tracking the right metrics and measuring the results of your marketing is essential if you want to demonstrate ROI and justify further investment in particular channels and content types.

Where video is concerned, you can build a clear picture of how your assets are performing by tracking key metrics like:

  • View count
  • Number of social shares, comments and likes
  • Call-to-action click-through rate
  • Bounce rate
  • Time on page

Using metrics like these will give you a data-driven view of where your video marketing is delivering returns and where you might need to tweak your strategy to get better results.