Getting started with video content marketing is full of hurdles. Which team members should be the point person? Who is going to write and produce the content that we'll cover in the videos? Who is going to be the brand ambassador and how're we going to make sure they look good on camera?
Video content marketing takes planning, time, effort and money. If you want to do it right and get results, of course there are ways to start small, test to see if it's working out for you and upgrade as you go. This is our core approach. We help our clients figure out if and how to execute a video content marketing strategy in a way that it delivers a compelling ROI. We have found that the easiest way to get started, eliminate as many of the hurdles as possible and accelerate results is to begin by converting your most successful blog posts into video. Why? Because they are already scripted, which means that we can easily use an actor in our studio to deliver the content. That way you don't have to worry about which team member will be your brand ambassador and if they will look good or resonate with your audience.
Also, your blog posts are most likely already SEO optimized. That's important for rankings because YouTube automatically transcribes your videos and uses the same SEO principles as Google in order to rank your video. You're more likely to get early success with that type of optimized content than an interview or talking on camera off bullet points.
Another trick to produce content early on is to crowdsource it. You can do this by conducting interviews, so you don't have to come up with all original content all the time. Instead, you can interview industry experts or ancillary service providers on camera. The benefit is that, A, you're co-creating content. B, you can foster business relationships with channel partners because you get to know each other's business pretty well. C, you can get exposure to their audience because they will share their videos when published, which increases the reach of your channels.
An important thing to remember is that video content marketing takes time and requires consistency before the YouTube ranking algorithm picks up your channel and starts recommending your videos, and you start appearing organically on Google search results. It may take three to six months of weekly posting and promoting before you start seeing organic results. In order to stay the course, you want to eliminate hurdles, and the way to do that is by converting existing SEO optimized content into video and crowdsourcing content through interviews. Then as you start getting traction and seeing results, and you get more comfortable appearing in front of the camera, things get much easier. The important thing is to stick with it and the results will come.