In this video, you’re going to learn WHAT is video content marketing, WHY you need it, and HOW to do it.  And for those who stay until the end, we’ll share one awesome tip.

1. WHAT is video content marketing?

Content marketing is all about publishing regular content that your audience cares about.  It can be text, images, infographics… anything that will resonate with your audience and connect with your potential buyers.  And everyone says that video is the most powerful way to communicate your message.

2. WHY do you need video?

3 reasons: people have all but stopped reading, as you may have noticed.  In fact, I’ve seen first-hand how my millennial interns consume blogs – they just scroll down as fast as they can “to get a sense” of the page – and that’s it!  They don’t actually READ what you may have spent hours researching and writing about. White papers? Forget about it!

Another reason you need video is: everyone can post on their blog, which means unfortunately that we’re way over-saturated with information and it’s increasingly difficult for your blog to rank high enough for anyone to see it.  When you publish a blog post, it’s not unlikely that you’ll start on page 40 or 50 of organic search results – what good is THAT?

And both of these points highlight why you NEED video: it’s the only medium where you can really engage with your audience – where else can they see your personality and start trusting you? – and it’s the only way for you to appear on the front page of Google search results.  

Because Google owns YouTube, and it shows preference for high-value video content.  If you’ve SEO optimized your videos and done your keyword research, you can “steal” tons of traffic from your more established competitors who are spending tons of resources on epic blog posts and have teams of writers.  

Now, if you’re not sold on the idea yet, just type up some of your ideal keywords and see who appears on the front page of the results: if you’re seeing video, that’s where you should be.  And if you’re not, you may very well have tapped into a unique opportunity: what if YOU were the only one on there?

3. HOW do I do video content marketing?

 Granted, you’re overwhelmed with all the marketing gurus preaching that you should be everywhere all the time.  Well, you only have limited time, money and resources, so how are you going to add yet another thing to your overworked marketing team’s plate?  

Luckily, there are definitely some tips and shortcuts you can easily follow to make things much easier.  Stay tuned and we’ll be covering a lot of those in future videos. At the very least, start watching competitors or brands you look up to and see what they’re doing on YouTube.  The big takeaway is that you want to start publishing one video a week consistently so you’ll start building a highly valuable asset for your company, start improving your ranking on Google results, and start engaging with your audience.  The key point is: get started sooner rather than later. It’s a race and you don’t want to fall behind with video.

And here’s our tip for our loyal viewers, who stayed until the end: to find out what your competitors are doing, you first want to create a comprehensive list of the companies you’re competing with, right?  Sometimes, that’s easier said than done… Here are 3 things to do.

Go to owler.com and enter your website’s URL, or one of your bigger competitors.  Owler will show you similar companies. The data on the site isn’t very reliable at all, but can find some interesting comps.

If that doesn’t work, type “relevant: [and your URL]” on Google search.  Or try one of your bigger competitors again.

And if THAT doesn’t work either, go to SpyFu.com and enter your URL (or one of your competitors).  SpyFu will show you which domains rank for the same organic-keywords and which domains are paying for the same ad-keywords.  Even if you thought you didn’t have direct competitors, this type of analysis can be very insightful.

So that’s the way to keep tabs on competition, and you’ll never get blind sided by them.