Video Content: 6 Tips to Maximize Your Investment

Developing video content doesn’t necessarily need to be costly – but it can be. Whether you’re going for “high-end” production quality or low-end practicality, intelligent transportation marketing professionals need to be smart in how they plan, produce, position, and promote their content to generate solid ROI. Here are tips from several TMSA members for ensuring your video investments are strategic, relevant, memorable, and purposeful.

1. Be intelligent with the process as well as the video product. Before you pick up your camera, consider the role video should play in telling your brand’s story, along with the steps required to produce, position and measure your content. Proactive planning will help you make smarter decisions about how to use, deploy, leverage and repurpose the video content you generate.

2. Work backwards: What’s your ultimate goal? Whether it’s brand recognition, lead generation, or any other marketing goal, make sure every video has a purpose. And don’t fall into the “views trap.” All too often, video success is measured by views rather than actual actions taken by the right prospects or customers after they’ve watched. Make sure to include a meaningful call to action (CTA) that directs viewers to take the next step on the buyer’s journey you hope they’ll take, and create landing pages that will guide their journey toward ultimate conversion.

3. Develop a simple outline and script. Oftentimes, video content can get bogged down by overly complex concepts, complicated jargon, or too many things coming at the viewer. And follow these fundamental guidelines for an effective video approach:

• Keep the dialogue conversational to ensure the video comes across as compelling and natural rather than forced or stuffy.
• Have your talent speak in short, concise sentences to emphasize key points that are easy for your audiences to grasp.
• Coach your talent if you’re doing interviews with employees, customers or other key stakeholders. You may even want to develop key bullet points that they’re comfortable with – yet discourage fully written scripts that will make them sound robotic and make their delivery less conversational.
• Avoid industry jargon unless it’s appropriate, and use simpler words.
• Get comfortable with the content to be delivered before you hit “record.” This helps your presenter to avoid any words or phrases he or she might stumble on and also will help you to determine how long the recorded segments are likely to run.

4. Leverage your social channels as well as your website. Know your buyer personas, how and where they like spend their online time, and which channels they prefer. Then use this information for making decisions about how to use video in your social networks to create the best potential for audience engagement. After this assessment, you’ll be able to determine if you should share your videos everywhere or only in certain social channels.

5. Maximize SEO. Make sure to include a transcript and tag your work. While this could change with emerging technologies, current search engines don’t index video content as effectively as text. Develop a full transcript of the copy included in your video, which ultimately will help the content overcome this SEO shortfall. Also add relevant tags, titles, and descriptions to the meta data of your video content to help your video content to be associated with your target keywords. Then, of course, get them indexed to rank for relevant content searches.

6. Leverage influencers, subscribers, and followers. Send an email to your audience that you have new video content for them and ask them to help you spread the word – and provide them with a forum to give feedback. Make sure to include a screen capture and link to your videos.

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