You made a video! So, sit back and watch the money start rolling in? Not so fast.
Making the video is just the beginning. Whether it’s an explainer video that outlines your company philosophy, a tutorial that shows customers how to use your product, or a hilarious commercial that boosts engagement, your video is useless if nobody actually sees it.
What you need is a distribution strategy. Your distribution strategy will get your video in front of the right people and help you realize a positive ROI from your marketing videos.
We get a lot of questions about why, how, when, and where to distribute videos. Some people seem to think that distribution is some kind of magic formula, but it’s really not at all mystical once you get clear on a few key concepts. This complete guide to video distribution will help get your videos seen—and, more importantly, seen by the right people.
Who are the right people?
Now is a good time to talk about the elephant in the room. You want to go viral don’t you? Don’t be embarrassed. Everybody does. It’s a natural part of the internet culture. We think that more views, more likes, and more shares automatically mean our video is better than someone else’s.
The truth is, millions of people can watch your video and all you get out of it is exposure. That’s probably not what you’re going for. People die of exposure, after all. (Okay, maybe that’s a different kind of exposure.)
If we’re being completely honest here, you want more than exposure. You want to perform the internet alchemy of turning marketing videos into money.
Step 1: Marketing Videos
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
Making videos into cash is about more than getting as many eyes as possible on your commercial. It’s about getting the right eyes. (Sorry if that sounds creepier than intended.) The right eyes are the ones that belong to people who will actually buy your product or service. So, Step 2 above isn’t just distribution. It’s strategic distribution.
For example, if you’re selling an enterprise accounting solution, and you share your video on Twitch (a platform for video game enthusiasts) you’re not likely to get many leads.
That might be an extreme example, but the point is valid: before you decide where and how to distribute your video, you need to know whom you’re distributing to.
This is where your customer personas come in. You might already have used your customer personas to help you make decisions about the content of your video. Now you can use that same information to put your video in front of those people.
Look at your customer personas and ask yourself:
How old is my ideal customer?
What are they interested in?
What problem or challenge am I trying to solve for them?
Where are they likely to spend time online?
If you did your homework before making your video, you already know the answers to these questions. If not, answer them right now in as much detail as you can. Then put your video in the places those people spend their time.
Let’s dig a little deeper into your options for video distribution platforms.
Where are the best places to distribute video?
Think of your video as a product. If you want to make your product accessible to consumers, you put it into the stores they’re likely to visit. You sell it in your flagship store of course, but you also distribute it to major retailers, maybe even to some local small businesses. You definitely put it on Amazon or some other digital marketplace.
You should be doing the same thing with your video. Start with your website. Your website is the equivalent of your flagship store. It’s the source of the product, so people should be able to get your product there.
Every video you make should end up on your website. This might mean you share it on your blog. It might mean you put it front and center on your home page. Or it might mean you create a customized landing page for it. That all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your video.
Storing all of your videos on your site gives you the biggest SEO boost. That doesn’t mean you need your own server, but it does mean you need to think carefully about how you can get the greatest SEO benefit out of each and every video.
You’re website is your primary distribution channel, but don’t stop there. Seek out other ways to get your video in front of your ideal audience.
Upload them on YouTube. While YouTube does take all the credit for any traffic or engagement your video sees on their platform, it’s also the single most popular video sharing platform in the world. According to its own reports, YouTube has more than one billion users watching about an hour of video every day. That’s a huge potential audience.
If you’re smart about how you use YouTube, you can increase your visibility while getting some of that SEO credit for yourself. More on that in another section.
Send them out in an email. If you already have an email list (and you totally should), this distribution strategy is a no-brainer. The people on your email list have already opted in. You don’t have to work as hard to convince them to watch. And if your video is relevant to them, you can get a 20% boost in click-through rates by adding video to your emails.
Finally, share your video on the Social Media platform where your target audience is most likely to spend time. Social media algorithms are increasingly favoring video over other media, so there’s a huge potential audience here.
These aren’t the only options for video distribution, but they should be the core of your distribution strategy. If you’re not using at least three of these for each and every video you make, you’re probably missing out on some serious traffic.
How do you host your video for maximum SEO?
Up to now, we’ve mostly focused on video distribution platforms. A video distribution platform is an online space where you can share your video to publicize it to your audience. This includes any of the platforms listed in the previous section.
But that’s only half of the equation. You also need a place to host your video. That’s where a video hosting platform comes in. Think of it as a warehouse where a product is stored until it’s sent out to stores.
Many platforms, including YouTube and social media platforms, can act both as distributors and hosts. That doesn’t mean they do both things equally well. Each option has both benefits and drawbacks.
To choose the best possible host for your video, you need to consider:
- How big your budget is.
- How much technical expertise you have.
- What your goals are.
- Search engine optimization.
Budget, technical expertise, and goals are all pretty self explanatory. You need a solution that works within your budget, that you have the technical expertise to understand, and that meets your goals.
The fourth consideration might be a little less obvious. What does where you host have to do with whether or not search engines like your content?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of your organic traffic by catering to the preferences of search engines. These preferences include sites with valuable, high-quality content where users want to spend their time.
If you host your video directly on YouTube, Vimeo, or a social media platform, those sites get most of the SEO benefit. Plus, viewers are more likely to scroll to something new on the platform rather than shifting over to your site to explore more of your content.
On the other hand, if you host your video on your own site or a third-party hosting platform, you get the SEO boost. Your site’s ranking improves, it shows up higher in search results, and you get more of the right eyes on your site for longer.
Where do you host your video?
YouTube is a video sharing website that allows you to upload video and easily share it with the world. Its popularity is a double edged sword. Yes, there are more eyes to potentially see your video, but there is also more competition. While YouTube videos do show up in Google searches (usually pretty high up), most of the SEO benefit goes to YouTube.
You can regain some of that SEO magic by embedding your video into your website. Unfortunately, the player isn’t customizable, so it’s not going to seamlessly blend with the rest of your branding. Finally, while YouTube does offer some analytics features, they’re not as robust as other platforms.
Who should use YouTube: Large brands looking to boost awareness or small companies with smaller budgets that don’t have the resources for more customizable options.
Vimeo was originally built as a video sharing site for creatives, but it has expanded to include brands and marketing videos. The customizable player and ad-free format make it an attractive option. It offers basic analytics and, as of February of 2018, even social distribution tools. However, Vimeo also keeps much of the SEO benefit for itself.
Who should use Vimeo: Creative types who want more flexibility than YouTube offers and are not looking for a major SEO boost from their videos.
YouTube and Vimeo are fairly easy to use, but you’ll lose most if not all of the SEO benefit. The alternative is self-hosting or a third-party hosting service.
Self-hosting lets you use your own servers or a cloud server to host your videos. When self-hosting, you’ll get the best SEO benefit by embedding content with an HTML5 player instead of an iframe. Also, proper indexing helps get your video seen by search engines.
Make sure you submit a video XML sitemap to Google or the search engine of your choice. At bare minimum you’ll need a title, description, and thumbnail for each video. You can identify these with an on-page markup or a video sitemap. For on-page markup, Google recommends schema.org. A combination of on-page and sitemap will give you the best results.
Who should use Self-hosting: Tech-savvy companies with large tech budgets and knowledgeable teams.
Dig deeper into XML sitemaps on Google’s Webmasters site. Or, if your eyes are glazing over already, read on to learn about third-party options that let you keep your SEO benefit.
Wistia is a third-party video host that helps you share videos directly from your site. With an arsenal of features like appearance customization, clickable CTA, and in-depth analytics, Wistia is one of our favorite video hosts. Not only do they let you keep full SEO credit for your videos, they’ll even create a video sitemap for you.
Who should use Wistia: Companies with small to large tech and marketing budgets who want access to a full suite of analytics.
BrightCove is a third-party video host similar to Wistia. It tends to be more focused on mid-size and enterprise level businesses, with a quote-based pricing structure. But it still offers a customizable player and deep video analytics. You will need to create your own video sitemap, but you’ll keep all that SEO magic.
Who should use BrightCove: Medium to large businesses with fairly robust budgets and technical savvy.
By now it’s probably clear that we’re big proponents of third-party hosting. It’s the perfect combination of accessibility and ease of use.
What are some best practices for video distribution?
Website
Search engines have a big blind spot. They can’t see video. So, when posting video to your website, you need to add amplifying information that search engines understand. Captions, links to relevant topics, and a call to action all help the search engine understand what the video is about.
You might also include a transcript, which can be useful for both search engines and viewers. A viewer might flip to your transcript to review a part of the video or to verify that they understood something. And, believe it or not, some people actually prefer text.
Combining text and video lets you cast your net as wide as possible. You don’t have to stop at a transcript either. You can include an entire complementary blog post along with your video.
Blog
If you’re embedding a video in your blog, don’t just drop the video and run. Include a short blog post that complements the video. It doesn’t necessarily have to rehash the same topics that the video already covered.
In fact, the most useful blog posts dive deeper into the topic or pose a question that’s answered in the video. Make sure you also include titles, descriptions, and a short write-up as discussed above, both for SEO purposes and to help convince readers to watch.
YouTube
If you do decide to use YouTube for video hosting, you can keep at least some of the SEO benefit by making smart choices about what you post. Instead of uploading a full video, share a short teaser with a link to your website where the complete video can be found. Or, post the first video of a series and invite viewers to your page to watch the rest.
To avoid having your website and YouTube posts look like duplicate content (search engines hate duplicate content), make sure that the text surrounding your video is different from the text used to describe it on your website or blog.
When posting to Twitter, include a short, snappy intro and relevant hashtags. Make sure your video has a clear call to action that invites people back to your website, or at least encourages them to follow you on Twitter.
According to a Digiday article, one company found that about 85% of its Facebook videos were watched without sound. While one company’s results do not a trend make, most of the marketing industry agrees that silent video watching is the norm among Facebook users.
So, if you’re posting to Facebook make sure to include closed captions. Facebook has a built in tool that will help you create them. Take advantage of it and make sure that viewers aren’t missing your message.
The same holds true for Instagram. Assume that your video will be watched without sound. And, just like on Twitter, you’ll want to include a snappy description and relevant hashtags to help your video pop up in users’ feeds.
Video came late to LinkedIn. The platform only introduced native video a couple of years ago. Before that, users had to share links to other platforms. Yet, like everywhere else on the web, video is becoming more popular on LinkedIn.
Just like on your blog, you’ll want to include a catchy headline and a quick description to encourage people to watch. Links and hashtags can help too. Noticing a pattern here?
Even Pinterest is getting in on the video movement. According to one of their own studies, 75% of Pinterest users say they’re likely to watch videos on the platform. Videos that tell stories and tutorial or how-to type videos perform best.
Pinterest is actually a great place to post your video if your goal is sales. Pinterest users are known to be more primed to buy than users on other networks.
When distributing via email, shut off auto-play. There’s nothing worse than surprise sound, especially in a shared office. While including your video in your newsletter is a great idea, you can also add it to your signature, or email a link directly to users who have shown interest in similar topics in the past.
What’s the whole point of distribution again? ROI.
The ultimate goal of all of this distribution is to get a positive return on the investment you made in your video. To measure your ROI, you’re going to need to keep track of relevant metrics.
A relevant metric is one that is tied directly to your goal. So if you want to raise awareness of a product or issue, you’ll want to track views and shares.
If the goal of your video is to make more sales, your job is a little more complicated. You’ll need to start with average sales before the campaign and measure them against sales after the campaign. You might also look at how many people click a “Buy Now” link or request more information from the sales department.
The different video hosting platforms have various tools to help you track your metrics. If you’re not meeting your goals (or not meeting them fast enough), tweak your distribution strategy to bring you closer to your ideal results.
What tools can help with video distribution?
In addition to the hosting platforms and social media platforms we talked about above, there are other tools for video distribution that can streamline your process.
Buffer helps you manage your social media accounts by scheduling posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. This tool saves you from having to post to each one individually when you’re ready to distribute a new video.
Outbrain promotes your videos (and other content) on websites like CNN, Time, and other media leaders.
Taboola, similar to Outbrain, helps get your video in front of the right eyes.
StumbleUpon is a social network that recommends content based on user preferences.
Edgar reposts your archived content to social media to make sure you get maximum exposure for your videos
Get your audience to do your work.
One of the most valuable distribution channels is your existing audience. Word of mouth (or, in this case, a share on social media) is one of the best ways to grow your audience.
If you’re creating interesting, engaging, and relevant videos, people will naturally want to share them with friends and colleagues.
Your job is to make it easy for them to do so. Make sharing as effortless as possible. Include a share button on your on your blog or website and embed it as a CTA in your YouTube, BrightCove, or Wistia video. Give your viewer every possible bit of help to show them where the share button is and what you want them to do with it.
And make sure to always include a CTA that lets viewers know what you want them to do next. Something like this: “Before you can distribute anything, you need to make a video. Contact us today for a free quote.”
It’s that easy. So, let’s get started.
