Video is no longer an expensive luxury
It was only a decade ago that video content was considered an expensive, pie-in-the-sky luxury for many businesses, involving big budgets, detailed scripts, pre-production meetings, film crews, lighting, location set-up, and so on. The old-school “Hollywood” approach has the potential to be a massive, expensive undertaking - $20,000 - $30,00 to shoot a few days of video is not unheard of. Coupled with the cost, video content was something that many business could only invest in every 1, 3, 5 years, etc. And often, by the time a video was shot, and edited and published, you had the risk of ending up with stale content before you'd even paid the final bill.
Inbound video is a re-imagined process that changes everything about how you capture content - the speed, the script, and the production in a way that complements Inbound Marketing. Using an Inbound approach, all you require is a decent smartphone and a simple mic and tripod set-up to create video content that is accessible, affordable and quite frankly, an essential tool to any marketing campaign. There's no more high overhead costs required, or lengthy editing delays to deliver effective, engaging content on a regular basis. When you start to view video content with an inbound marketing approach, you will realize that the cadence at which your video content is published is incredibly important. As important as your regular blogging or social media schedules.
Build authority and ranking with regular content
On the technical side of things, publishing regular video content (along with your blogs, social and other content offers) send more signals to search engine platforms like Google and Bing that you're creating engaging, relevant content on a regular basis. This help build your authority and ranking in search results. Not to mention that a video is 50 times more likely to appear in the first page of search results - a compelling reason alone to publish content on a regular basis.
Video in itself can be highly effective, but when you combine good SEO with valuable content, that’s when the real magic happens - the elusive "Inbound Unicorn" - content with both a high average position and a high click-through rate.
Now, video alone won’t be your website’s saving grace. Publishing video should be viewed as a cyclical process:
- Video gives you a boost in rankings, which allows
- More people to see your site, which means
- More people will click on your link
This is, in essence, the definition of the Inbound Marketing Flywheel. When you give your customers value for consuming your content, you attract customers that are engaged, delighted, and in turn, attract even more customers.
To make the most of flywheel concept with video, your content must be high-quality and, most importantly, engaging to your audience. Low-quality or irrelevant video can be more damaging than simply not doing video at all, and cause your page rank to plummet. At first, people may see your site in their search results, but if your video content doesn't satisfy their intent, they'll quickly exit your page - telling search engines that your site isn't valuable.
Stay relevant with your audience
On the less technical side, the cadence of content is often overlooked in content strategies, but it holds so much intrinsic value:
- Regular content connects your audience with who you are
- It helps humanize a brand or a business
- Video, in particular, can add a storytelling element to your brand as a whole, connecting a piece of content with your customers or audience.
Publishing video content on a regular basis allows you to address today's opportunities and challenges, and stay relevant with your audience. Take a look back at some of your older blogs posts or videos from two or three years ago. Yes, you may cringe when you revisit some of them (we know we have, and have deliberately not linked them here for your viewing pleasure...), but, the topics addressed at the time probably centered around the products and services you were selling back then. Or a specific buyer persona. Since then, you've likely learned and evolved along with your buyers and your products and/or service offerings may have evolved as well. Having a regular cadence to your video content ensures it stay's aligned with today’s needs.
To harness the full power of video integrated throughout your marketing cycle, and keeping your video content aligned with your overall strategy, you need to be continually creating fresh content to speak to different buyer personas at various states in the sales funnel. For example, if you only release one video every few months, you can really only hit one buyer persona in one phase of their buyers' journey at that time. You could be missing out on reaching other large segments of your prospects. Having a full tool box of relevant video content, as you likely have with your blog library or twitter feed, gives you the capability to reach buyers at all stages at any time in your overall inbound campaign with just a few simple clicks.
Get more bang for your buck with Inbound Video
Advances in technology have effectively slashed the investment cost of branching into video - for the same price of one traditional video, you can now create 10-20 high-quality videos, delivered on a regular cadence over the course of a year that are timely, relevant, engaging and integrate seamlessly into your overall Inbound Marketing strategy.
