As we all know, you need to optimize landing pages to ensure they perform; the same is true of video content. With a little customization, your content will have a much higher chance of driving business.
This strategy is particularly important during the holiday season when the online space is most competitive. To help, we’ve listed some key steps you can take to fully optimize your video ads for the holidays.
Design your videos with the time of year in mind
A strategic and purposeful video will guide leads through your sales funnel, enhancing conversion rates. To ensure this, however, you need to align your concept to suit the holiday season and your specific goals.
To do this, first determine:
- The emotions you want to evoke (and why)
- Any actions you want your leads to take
- Your target buyer personas
When you understand the answers to these questions, you can create focused, actionable videos that suit the holiday season and the issues it can create for your buyers (e.g., needing to find the right gifts). You can then appeal to your audience’s pain points with holiday-themed pre-roll video ads to ensure they will take the actions you want, such as buying a product or registering for a webinar.
Always have a lead-capture method
The email gate and lead-capture form are just as relevant for video content as written versions. Many sales and marketing resources are available to explain extra actions like this. Consider including an email gate in your video content, as these will go wherever you may share your content. This reach could include social networks, meaning access to more people, so you will want a simple way to identify the leads that are interested enough to provide personal information.
If you have the option to build contact forms that can be added at the end of your videos, do it! This method allows you to collect multiple fields of information.
When creating video lead-capture, consider these best practices:
- Keep the information fields minimal when setting up an end-of-video form to avoid annoying potential prospects.
- Use email gates on content that targets users lower in the funnel. An email gate requires buy-in, so you’ll want to make sure the leads have been warmed up with quality un-gated content before attempting to gain their personal information.
Ensure calls to action and a lead follow-up method
The importance of a call to action at the end of your video cannot be understated if you want to increase leads. Every video you release should have specific calls to action that can include:
- YouTube annotations indicating different resources
- A short link directing viewers to a landing page
- A direct prompt from the host
Remember, your CTAs should be direct while offering different options for your buyer personas to reach out to you. In many cases, decision-makers may not be ready to purchase, so always use at least two CTAs:
- A CTA for leads ready to proceed
- A CTA leading to more persuasive content
Don’t forget about your SEO
SEO is important to ensure that custom videos of your products are search-friendly. However, as SEO can be a little tricky, here are some key pointers to ensure you have the basics covered:
- Keywords and descriptions: Perform some initial research on the words you want to rank for. These words will need to be specific to your industry and in a clear phrase format that works with your video’s title and meta description. Always think about a phrase that people are likely to search for.
- Multi-platform promotion: Embed your video on your site, get it on YouTube and post it on social platforms, but remember to change the title. You don’t want to cannibalize your SEO, so small changes like this are important. It is important to monitor your unofficial presence on platforms as well, as you may need to get a video removed from YouTube. This removal may become necessary when a brand’s ads are ripped and uploaded to YouTube by random users, meaning potential buyers won’t find your ad on your brand’s channel.
- Transcripts: YouTube and Google will not extract all of the words from your videos, so search engines won’t accurately nail the subject matter. Transcribing your video to turn the text into a blog post will significantly help your SEO. This approach will alert search engines about the context, qualifying your relevant content.
Always analyze and plan
As with all marketing, analytics are crucial for your video content marketing. Detailed data on how your videos perform is vital to help you learn more about your prospects’ digital behavior. When you have this data, you can make more informed decisions about future content.
Who is watching specific videos? How long do they watch them? Which topics resonate? You can modify your content strategy to improve its success when you know these things. One of the best metrics to track is average attention span. If you lose prospects 20 seconds into your videos, the intros are too long.
The holiday season is a busy time, and people have a lot on, so their attention is likely even more restricted than usual. Understanding if your leads are truly engaged and identifying which parts of your content strategy need improvement is important, and your audience’s digital behavior is the key to getting these answers.
Optimize for success
As you can see, some basic optimization is key before releasing your videos, especially during the holiday season. Your content is created for lead capture and sales enablement, and SEO, measurement, and a little extra thought can create a big difference in your video performance and success. As always, JumpStory provides stock images of real people and emotions to include in your video content to ensure it is the best it can be.
About the author
Nina is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. Nina starts the day scrolling through her daily digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she’s on vacation.
