We had lunch with our friend Adam from Wistia today. Wistia is a video hosting service that provides some seriously good analytics to help their clients understand viewer engagement with their online videos. Adam and his fellow Wistia pals regularly make the case for keeping things short with online video. This time was no different. “Forgive me if I sound like I am lecturing,” he mentioned at one point, “but research shows conclusively that viewers will not watch online videos that are long.”
In a nutshell, his advice for everyone who intends to use online video for marketing purposes was this:
1. Keep it short to ensure maximum engagement.
2. Scatter bits of video across your site and optimize it to enhance your site’s SEO.
3. Refresh your website regularly with video and other content to make Google happy.
4. If the purpose of your video is to make your audience do something (sign up for your email list, make a donation, attend an event), make sure you deliver a call to action within the video to help move them to that end result and to assess the effectiveness of your video in the pursuit of that goal.
Many of us create a piece of marketing content, and then share it with the world without a way to quantify its effectiveness. In other words, we create it, distribute it, and then “hope” for something good to happen. Adam suggested that if a marketing activity is only based on hope, and there is no way to analyze how successful it was, then we probably would have been better off not doing it at all.
Taking Adam’s advice, here is my call to action! If you’d like to get periodic video marketing and production advice, go to the bottom of our homepage and sign up for our e-newsletter.
Photo: Search Engine People Blog