How to give videos a life beyond YouTube

In our last post, we covered essential video content merchants should produce to directly impact conversion and boost sales. But there’s another reason to invest in video beyond directly-attributable revenue: video can have a marketing impact that goes far beyond creating a channel on YouTube.

That isn’t to say YouTube should be overlooked as a marketing opportunity. It’s the second-largest search engine after Google, according to MarketLive partner Invodo, and traffic dwarfs any other video sharing site, with YouTube attracting 154.5 million unique viewers in May, compared with 60.4 million on Facebook, the next largest property, according to comScore. With that kind of massive audience, YouTube is an essential part of any merchant’s video strategy. And depending on the target audience, videos should be adapted and shared on other social video platforms, from Facebook to Vimeo.

But merchants shouldn’t stop there. When it comes to maximizing the marketing potential of online video, there are a number of ways to use videos to promote merchant brands. Among them:

SEO fodder. While the long-term prospects for the effectiveness of natural SEO are gradually dimming, it still behooves merchants to make the most of the content they have — and that includes optimizing video content for search engine visibility. Merchants should:

• use schema markup to designate video content, making it easier for search engines to parse.

• to ensure Google and other search engines can catalog video content.

• integrate sharing tools so that viewers can “like” and link to videos easily, giving merchant content increased visibility on the social networks that can help boost SEO relevance.

• include other relevant content on the page. Creating video landing pages that not only encourage sharing, but include descriptive titles and captions, other value-added content and links to products can all help boost relevance.

The search results for makeup application videos give prime positioning immediately below paid campaigns to links Google recognizes as video content. While YouTube listings (included a Bobbi Brown branded video) lead the pack, TotalBeauty.com also makes the page one listings with a link to an optimized video page.

Email content. Using video, merchants can boost engagement with email campaigns. The word “video” in the Subject: line can boost open rates up to 20%  and produce a two-fold to three-fold increase in click-through rates, according to the Email Experience Council. And with the advent of HTML5, which is currently supported in iPad tablets, iPhone mobile devices and Hotmail, among a smattering of other clients, merchants even have the opportunity to deliver inline video messaging that allows shoppers to view the clip without needing to open a browser.  Links to relevant product demonstration videos can be embedded in transactional emails so that customers can quickly access information about how to use the products they’ve just purchased, while a “welcome” email series can feature brand-focused videos, highlight helpful video buying guides and advice, and spotlight product videos of best-sellers. Brookstone recently featured an inline video for its remote-controlled drone helicopter. The video demonstrates the ease of assembly and the functionality of the app used to pilot it, along with the quality of the images taken by the drone’s onboard camera, in a more impactful format than a bulleted list of attributes.

Tablet highlights. As mentioned previously, more than half of tablet owners report watching video at least once in the past month and nearly 1 in 10 watch video daily, according to comScore, so featuring video on the tablet-specific version of merchant sites or on tablet apps is a wise move.

In-store information. Merchants can make their online video libraries available to shoppers in physical stores through QR codes or short links on signage. Shopper kiosks can also feature video content, while store associates equipped with tablets can respond to questions about products with video buying guides and product demos.

How are you using video beyond the eCommerce site and YouTube?