It happens to the best of us. You invest heavily in a video, then get little to no engagement. Why? Often, it's because you forgot the one thing necessary to find success with content: your distribution and promotion plan.
With a video content distribution strategy, you can follow a process that ensures better engagement on your video content. Otherwise, you will share your video once or twice, and potential customers will miss it. It may not rank, and it definitely won't deliver any ROI.
Starting Your Video Content Distribution Strategy
With strategic distribution, your team will follow the same process to upload, distribute, and embed every video you make. You can create a customer-centric video content distribution strategy using:
Together, these documents tell a story about the content your customer values. You can use this information to create a distribution plan that fits your audience.
Step #1: Selecting Video Sharing Platforms
Each video platform has a unique personality and will require a following a few best practices. Here are the best performing platforms and how to use them for video.
Vimeo
Vimeo has over 70 million creators such as entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and teachers. If you're creating human interest stories or videos that appeal to the creative industry, Vimeo is worth considering.
After uploading your video, you can optimize it for better performance, with a few steps.
- Assign credit and tag collaborators, such as a director or editor on Vimeo.
- Upload a custom thumbnail.
- Write a headline and description that conveys the purpose of the video.
- Add categories and tags to your video, in Vimeo categories like Tech, Education, Leadership and Business, and more.
You can use Vimeo to track your video performance by views and shares or upgrade to a paid membership for more comprehensive reporting. Vimeo also gives the option of hooking up your account to Google Analytics.
YouTube
YouTube has a community of over 1,300,000,000 active users. After you create a channel and a brand account on YouTube, you can upload your first video. From there, you should check off a few best practices:
- Upload a custom thumbnail, with large text summarizing the content and a bright or white background.
- Write a 200+ word video description with your keyword in the text and a headline that will compete with other videos ranking for your topic.
- Select six to eight tags, including one focus keyword, two or three alternate versions of that keyword, and a broad keyword.
- Choose one of their end screen templates to direct to another one of your videos or a playlist. (You will not be able to link externally from your call-to-action unless you're in the YouTube Partner Program.)
Then, you will use YouTube Analytics to track the performance of each video and create custom reports to let you know how well your videos are doing.
Facebook
Currently, Facebook content gets 10xs more shares than YouTube, so there is a lot of opportunities here. For the best performance, I would make a few adjustments to make to the video file before uploading.
- Create a custom thumbnail and insert it at the beginning of your video file. YouTube lets you upload a custom thumbnail, but Facebook does not.
- Add captions to your video file. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of Facebook captions (which can be challenging to use.)
- Edit the duration of your video. A length that tends to performs the best for Facebook is around one or two minutes.
When you're ready to upload it to your page, you can go to "Videos,"All Videos" and click "Add Video." You will select the file, and a screen will pop up where you can:
- Write a description around 84 characters. The description text will also be what appears when you share the post on Facebook.
- Draft a title that will grab their attention are they're going through their news feed.
- Select six to eight tags with one focus keyword, and a few versions of that keyword.
- Choose a CTA with the "Add a Call to Action" option to direct the viewer to the next step.
- If you do not add a thumbnail to your file, you can choose from the options that Facebook provides.
You can track performance on the actual video, such as shares, likes, and comments. However, a more accurate way to track Facebook video metrics is through the video insights.
Google My Business
If you have a business listed on Google, you can upload a video to Google My Business. For your current listing, all you need to do is to go to "add photos or videos," and upload your asset. Before you add the video to your company listing, you must:
- Adjust for length, as your video cannot exceed 30 seconds. You want to showcase the actual service or product your brand sells within that 30-time frame.
- Your video also needs to show the actual place of business, or the people that work at your company.
Otherwise, Google will remove the video as it does not pertain to the actual location or employees of the business.
Wistia
Wistia isn't the same kind of video platform as the others since the video won't appear or get searched for on Wistia. Instead, you host the video there and embed it on a website page, a blog post, or a landing page, etc. Here's why Wistia needs to be a part of your content distribution:
Once you have the Wisita video, you can craft a blog post with your video. You should follow the best practices of a blog post, with an enticing headline, optimized metadata, and excellent content and writing that follows a consistent narrative. You can even add a transcript of the video, using a video transcription tool.
Step #2. Add To Your Marketing Efforts
Once you have a video uploaded to the right places and in a blog post, you want to embed it across your site and in existing marketing collateral. There are a few places to add video within a marketing or sales strategy, such as:
- On website pages that support your current customers, such as frequently asked questions, or any content regarding troubleshooting around that topic.
- Within prospecting efforts through LinkedIn, Twitter or email (if the video talks about the benefits of your product or service.)
- On your landing pages for a trial or demo, which can potentially increase landing page conversions by 80%. You can also add video to the corresponding thank you pages.
- On website pages such as belief pages, about us pages, or pillar pages, as long as the video discusses your brand at a higher level, or the services you provide.
- Within your homepage content strategy. We use a video on the Lean Labs homepage that runs through all of our clients and demonstrates some of the previous work we've done.
Videos can also enhance old blog posts that discuss any relevant subject matter. You can use historical optimization to find the content that would benefit the most.
Step #3: Repurposing and Promoting Your Video
An excellent video content strategy will incorporate a few social media channels, playing to their strengths to get the most engagement from your videos. You should base your channel selection on where your customer wants to engage and have conversations relating to your industry.
A few places that are great for repurposing video include:
- You can embed your video into a SlideShare on LinkedIn, using the code from a Facebook, YouTube, or Wistia video.
- You can clone and edit your video file into a fifteen-second clip for Twitter, and direct visitors back to the full-length video, or a sixty-second clip for Instagram.
- Extract your audio file to make a Soundcloud track. If you're crafty enough and have the time, you could even turn this into an ongoing podcast, and hook up your Soundcloud playlist to iTunes using an RSS feed.
- If your video could help answer a question or concern, you may have an opportunity to share it on Reddit or Quora. If you are not active on these channels, invest some time in building authority before sharing your stuff.
- You're already telling a story in your video, so you may as well turn that story into an article. You can embed the video and post the article on Medium, or embed the video in an article on LinkedIn Pulse.
Lastly, if you can master the art of pitching content, you can establish content partnerships. You can guest post for another blog, or co-host a podcast, and mention and share your video. To find sites to pitch to, use Buzzsumo to search for sites that discuss any similar subject matter.
Step #4. Sharing Your Content Continuously
Many people share a video a few times on their social channels, then move on to different content. Your customer may be using various social channels every day, and miss your content if you only share it once.
You can share the content repeatedly by:
- Similar to creating a custom video email signature for every employee, you can use videos that talk about your brand, your company, or your team members, and add it to your signature for a while.
- You should share your content over and over through ongoing social scheduling. HubSpot has a handy guide to optimizing your social publishing, to improve your social strategy even further.
- Almost every social channel has an option to pay and boost a post. Create a schedule to promote your content once every other week or so. You can spend $20-$30 and still get incredible engagement.
Overall, minimal sharing leads to low engagement and views. Even if you're only using a few social platforms, you want to share the content as much as possible.
Getting The Most From Video
With video, you want to get the best possible ROI as you can. It's a significant investment, and you will spend a ton of time, energy, and resources on creating the perfect video. That's why creating a video content distribution strategy is so beneficial. You can feel confident that your video is getting the best possible reach, and on the channels your customer is using.
You can also use this distribution strategy for EBooks, blog posts, podcasts, and more. When you create an overarching inbound marketing strategy, it's easy to repurpose and reuse your ideas and strategies into various forms of engaging content. If you want to learn how to increase the reach and the engagement of all your existing content, lower production costs, and master content distribution check out our repurposing toolkit.
