It’s a tale as old as time and a truth everyone knows: content is king. But today, there’s no disputing that video content is the ultimate king of content forms—and for pretty much everything. According to a tech conference interview with Prabhakar Raghavan, the Senior Vice President of Google, almost 40% of younger people favor looking up queries on video-saturated platforms like TikTok and Instagram instead of using a more traditional search engine, such as Google or Bing. This means that producing video content is increasingly becoming the most effective way to reach and engage with your target audience.
However, some businesses are still wary of creating video content. The main reason for this hesitation is usually rooted in financial concerns: people think video creation is expensive and thus worry about a low correlating return on investment (ROI).
But video creation doesn’t have to be expensive! You can use this handy checklist to harness the full potential of your video content. Learn various tactics to grow your viewer audience and generate increased engagement so that you can effectively maximize the ROI of every video you create.
Increase Your Viewership
Viewership refers to the collective group of people viewing your videos. Increasing your viewership can help lead to beneficial results like increased brand awareness, sponsor and partnership opportunities, improved social proof, better search rankings, and so on.
Below is a list of approaches you can include in your efforts to improve your video content’s ROI. Check each item off as you incorporate them into your overall video content marketing strategy or content schedule.
Participate in Trends
Everyone loves a good trend—including your viewers! And if you want your company to be relevant and to achieve a higher ROI, your video content needs to be about something relevant. Thus, a great way to increase your viewership is by creating videos that engage with current trends! Don’t worry; this doesn’t mean you have to don your old gym clothes and try the latest dance challenge with your colleague—although it’s certainly not a bad idea (and please, always stretch first). You can also engage with trends in your content by creating a video of your company’s reaction to a trend or even your response to one video in particular.
Of course, you know what the people want to see. They want to see you and your colleagues trying to skip! Remember, creating goofy videos doesn’t equate to being unprofessional or uncredible (just ask Neil deGrasse Tyson).
Make Interesting Video Thumbnails
A video thumbnail is a small still image representing your video (usually with a play button overlaying the middle). This is just like the “judging a book by its cover” concept, only with videos. Think about it: when did you last choose to watch a video simply because the thumbnail intrigued you?
Consequently, a great way to get more people to watch your video content is by creating eye-catching, high-quality thumbnails. Consider using bright, contrasting colors, graphics, or text overlays to help your thumbnail stand out.
Optimize for No-Sound Viewing
Even though everyone’s always watching videos these days, it’s not always appropriate to have the sound on—and there’s no guarantee that people will have earbuds or headphones on them. It’s becoming increasingly common for videos to include some form of captioned text (i.e., not necessarily word-for-word captions), but optimizing your videos for silent viewing is a great way to give your content an audience advantage.
Plenty of tools can do it for you now, but it’s best to transcribe captions yourself to ensure their accuracy. If parts of your video (or the whole video) are best viewed with sound, indicate this in the video’s closed captions and the post’s caption.
Optimize for the Platform
With so many platforms available, it can be tempting to just mass upload your video to all of your company’s accounts simultaneously. Unfortunately, this is something you want to avoid doing. Each platform is different, so you need to tailor each video and its accompanying information for every platform. You can find a few tips for optimizing your video content for specific platforms below:
YouTube
- Post longer videos here
- Utilize YouTube’s tags and categories for each video
- Encourage users to like, share, and subscribe to your channel
- Organize your videos into logical playlists
- Post shorter videos here
- Make sure your videos are auto-play ready
- Upload videos in a square or vertical format for the best mobile experience
- Post shorter videos here
- Utilize Instagram stickers and interactive features, like polls, to enhance your videos
- Encourage users to like, share, and follow your page
TikTok
- Post shorter videos here
- Make an eye-catchy beginning to prevent viewers from scrolling to the next video
- Utilize TikTok features like stitches, duets, and trending audio clips to enhance your videos
Consider Other Platforms
As technology advances rapidly, new products and platforms have consistently been popping up left and right. And with the rise of low-code no-code (LC/NC) app development, it can feel like everyone and their old college roommate is starting a new platform—even your grandma!
Don’t worry; this doesn’t mean you must post daily or make a company profile on every new social platform that emerges (although you really should support your grandmother). What you should do, however, is pay attention to what platforms are popular, what platforms are becoming obsolete, and what platforms your target audience uses the most.
All the same, joining new platforms helps build your company’s online presence, and thus helps improve your odds of successfully increasing your viewership. So if your company profile is only on a few platforms, take the time to experiment with others and see how your views compare.
Increase Your Engagement
Before diving into this part of the checklist, it’s important to recognize that engagement and viewership are closely connected within your overall video content marketing strategy. This means that viewership and engagement work together to deliver results, and one can affect the success of the other.
Back to the matter at hand, you know what engagement is! Engagement encompasses how people interact and connect with your company’s brand. Thus, it’s logical that increasing your engagement can also lead to increased viewership—and vice versa.
Increasing engagement can also help increase your video content’s total views, reduce viewer drop-off, increase how much your content gets shared, improve your social proof, increase your click-through rate, and more.
The checklist continues below with a list of tactics you can apply to help improve your video content’s ROI. Check each item off as it gets incorporated into your overall video content marketing strategy.
Use Call-to-Action Overlays
Most videos include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the content. However, you can take your video marketing strategy a step further by using CTA overlays to help drive your ROI even higher.
CTA overlays are interactive features that appear on top of videos and then collapse into smaller versions of themselves. Moreover, they’re a great way to drive users to your website or a landing page. Consequently, CTA overlays are an excellent tool for increasing engagement, conversions, and, ultimately, your video content’s ROI.
Create a Strategic Posting Plan for Video Content
To achieve a higher ROI for your video content, you need to establish a posting schedule that takes advantage of when your market reach is at its broadest and most receptive.
It’s in your best interest to experiment with the various aspects of your posting schedule and see if you can identify any optimizations to implement. Remember, experimenting is only beneficial if you can attain measurable results, so be sure to define clear metrics and objectives as you test different schedules.
You can find some questions, considerations, and tips below to help guide you as you devise a strategic posting plan for video content. Keep in mind that this checklist is a more involved process and will take some time since you’ll need to collect and analyze data. Furthermore, you may find that creating sub-plans for video content anchored in a particular topic or theme is a better way to modify your overall approach.
| Question | Considerations | Tips |
| How often do you post? | Weekly? Daily? More than once a day? | If you plan to post more than once a day, be careful of overdoing it. Several posts can annoy audiences and may result in people unfollowing or unsubscribing from your content. |
| What time(s) of day do you post? | Early morning? Afternoon? Dinnertime? Late-late at night? | You might find that some of your videos perform better at certain times of the day than others, which should be capitalized on. Pay attention to both when you post and the focus of your video post. |
| When is your target audience most active? | At dawn, while they’re at the gym? Late afternoon, during the workday “slump”? | Align your posting schedule with your audience’s activity habits. If your audience is comprised of younger people who stay up late, don’t post videos first thing in the morning because they won’t see them! |
With an optimized video posting schedule, your video content can achieve higher levels of engagement and viewership. In turn, this will help you maximize the ROI of every video you create.
Achieving a High ROI
The great thing about video creation is that it doesn’t have to be an expensive endeavor that will keep you up at night worrying about the ROI. By taking strategic, actionable steps to increase your viewership and audience engagement, you can work towards improving your video content’s ROI.
Remember, video content is a fun way to connect with your company’s target audience and reach new viewers. Use this checklist to guide your video content marketing strategy; you’ll maximize your ROI in no time!
But in case you’ve already got your hands full, J&L Marketing is here to help lighten the load! Our team specializes in creating video content tailored to several platforms that yield measurable results. We’ll help you substantially improve your viewership, increase audience engagement, and drive higher ROI. Together, we can maximize your company’s ROI for video content.
You can learn more about J&L Marketing’s vision, values, and what we do by visiting our website here. Are you ready to transform your videos into powerful, revenue-driving assets? Contact our team today to discuss how we can help propel your business’s video content to new levels of success!
