Promotional videos, when done correctly, can be an effective lead generation tool and a great way to communiccate your value proposition. Your video or animated slide presentation needs to be created so that people actually enjoy viewing it. It should be fast, engaging, and include content that benefits the viewer. 

Video allows you to get your strongest message possible in front of people who wouldn't normally take the time to learn what your company offers or the benefits of your product. They can be produced for lesss than most sales activities and provide a great ROI because they can be used over and over. 

Target Your Messaging

Topics to consider:

• Who is the intended audience?
• What do you do? How does it work?
• What makes your company/product/service so unique, valuable, and special?
• Describe the competitive
• Explain how you differ from the competition.
• Do you want to position yourself against your competitors? By how much and how?
• What problems do people have without your solutions?
• Why would someone not want to buy what you're offering?
• Are there any misconceptions about your company?

RESULT: Your viewers hear an engaging, persuasive and targeted message that educates them and encourages them to learn more.

Persuasive Message based on a Solution Selling Model with a Compelling Call To Action

9 Steps for The Perfect 3.5 Minute Message

Tips to Get Your Video to Go Viral

1. Provide quality educational and useful content that benefits the viewer. 
2. Tell a story! People want stories. That's what all TV, movies, and books are. People are attracted to great stories.
3. Make it shorter. The first thing people check when they decide to play a video is to see how long it is. 10 minutes: no way. 2 minutes: I'll give it a chance.  
4. If you want your video to go viral on Facebook don't post YouTube links on Facebook. Upload the video to Facebook. Native Facebook videos get significantly more engagement. Facebook has decided to favor videos uploaded directly to Facebook. 
5. After you have made a concise, compelling video with a great story, share it with people who would care about what you have to say.
6. Take control over what social media crawlers grab when your video is shared by including the proper Open Graph tags on your site.
7. Use the right subject lines and titles. People like "How to" and "Lists" titles so use them. 
8. Leverage content blockers that forces users to share before they can view content.
9. Ask users to share. 
10. Limit social buttons to 2 or 3 and place them within your content.
11. Make it easy for viewers to share on social media and to forward to others.

RESULT: Increased exposure of the important benefits of your company, product, or service. 

Be Prepared for When Your Video Goes Viral

1. Know where you want to direct your traffic. Whatever you link it to make sure it is optimized to convert the traffic.
2. Email capture form.
3. Make sure people know how to contact you.
4. Respond quickly to request that come in.

15 Uses for Promotional Videos

Website Home Page
Landing / Squeeze Pages
YouTube
Social Media
Email Marketing
Adwords campaigns
Training & Education
Field Sales Visits
Distributors, Resellers, & Affiliates
Laptop Demos
Kiosks & Monitors
Review sites; Yelp and others
Directories
Press Releases
Banner Advertising

Need a video to effectively promote your business? Contact SiteHatcher for more info.

There are multiple benefits to adding videos to your website.

A few these benefits include:

• Videos on your site will help your pages to get higher rankings with Google.
  • To get the full SEO benefit your YouTube account should be integrated with your Google My Business account. Contact me if you need help setting that up.
• Video on your site will increase traffic to your site from additional sources
• Videos are "sticky". Users engage and stay on your site longer. Increased engagement also helps with SEO.
• Video is very shareable which will expand your reach.

For a sample video to embed, I'm going to use one of  Gary Vaynerchuk's YouTube videos. Keep in mind, you will get much more benefit from creating and uploading your own videos. When you upload your own videos to YouTube, you will need to optimize them. I'll go over that in another blog post.

How to embed a video

1. Click on the Share button under the video.

2. Click the Embed link.

3. Click the Show More link.

   • Select the video size

   • I recommend that you check the box to enable player controls and show  video title and player actions. Do not check the box for show related videos. (There's no telling what could be shown)

4. Copy the provided code.

5. Paste the code on your blog or website. See specific instructions for SiteHatcher and WordPress.

How to paste the embed code on a SiteHatcher website

(If you're adding video to your blog page skip to instructions below)

1. Add a component by clicking on the + sign
   
2. Click Standard/HTML in right column
   (1 in image)
3. Click on the HTML component
   (2 in image)
4. Paste the embed code inside the html component.  

Note: You can also click on the Audio/Video in the right column, select the YouTube component and then paste in either the YouTube link or the embed code. Using the HTML is 1 less click and you can also paste in the embed code from Vimeo, Ustream, and others as well as YouTube.

Adding video to your blog: 

1. Click on the Source button in the edit bar.
2. Paste the embed code.
3. Click button to Apply Changes.

How to paste te embed code on a WordPress website

1. On the edit bar click on Text - see image.
2. Paste the embed code.
3. Click the Update button.

How to set your video to Autoplay

I don't normally recommend setting videos to autoplay, but here is the

1. Paste the code
2. Add &autoplay=1" after ?rel=0
3. Be sure to put the " after the 1.

Example

• Before adding autoplay <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4fsYWXrGGcE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
• After adding code for autoplay <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4fsYWXrGGcE?rel=0&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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Bonus!

For your inspiration, I embedded the code from above that I used as a demo. Watch Gary Vaynerchuk's 2 minute video below for inspiration to help you to be consistent in posting to you blog and adding videos as well.