And this decade has seen a blindfold increase in the usage of videos as a prime way of marketing. 

A study done by CISCO stated that by 2022, video content would account for 82% of internet traffic.

So, video content marketing is a great way to help your brand, product, or services reach many audiences. 

But, with so much competition out there, deciding what video content you should create and getting your videos ranked on Google is tough.

To help you out, I’ll cover two aspects:

• Different types of videos you can create
• Tips to rank your videos on Google

Let’s get started.

Different Types of Videos You Can Create

Video content can greatly uplift your marketing strategy and help your product or service to attract more eyeballs. 

You can easily step up your business’ growth and conversion by creating different videos in different styles. 

To help you, here are 9 types of videos that you can create and use for marketing your business.

1. Interview/Q&A

Interviews or just a simple Q&A video can help your audience understand the basic theme of your product, brand, or service. 

It gives the audience a clear insight into your business or how your product may help them. 

Here’s how you can create a nice interview video:

• Do thorough research and prepare a questionnaire
• Reach out to industry experts through email, text or call
• Ask for their time and schedule the interview
• Choose the mode of the interview Online/Offline or Live
• Send them the questionnaire 
• Record video using a high-quality camera or software
• Edit your interview video
• Share it across all social media platforms

2. How to/Tutorials

Every new user or potential customer would like to know more about the usage of a given product or service. 

When they do so, they come across how-to videos and tutorials. These help them know how a product or a service will benefit them. 

So, creating how-to videos for your business can be very effective in attracting customers to your business.

Here are some tips to help you create how-to videos for your brand:

• Choose a popular topic or question
• Prepare a catchy title for your video
• Give simple instructions
• Keep it short and simple

Bonus article: Ultimate Tutorial videos Guide with Tips and Free Template

3. Social Media Shorts

Short videos have taken the internet by storm. 

Many celebrities and content creators worldwide have used these short videos to reach a wide range of audiences. 

The reasons they have been able to do so are:

• Short videos are easy to consume and share
• Short videos are a rage over social media

So, a brief video explaining your brand or just showing the efficiency of your product can leave a huge impact. 

You don’t need much equipment or expertise to create a short video. Just put in some effort, shoot a short video of someone using your product with a good camera, and share it with the audience.

I’m pretty sure it will generate a great impact.

4. Live Streaming

Live streams speak for themselves, with no tricks or shortcuts whatsoever. 

Brands can easily interact with their audiences and convey their messages with live streaming. 

A live video can immediately engage viewers, and it’s the most authentic way you can market or promote your product. 

You can do a short but important live streaming session with an expert in your industry. 

It can directly change the viewer’s perception of your business and motivate them to buy from you.

Read: How to record a live stream?

5. Webinar

Webinar marketing is an expert way of marketing your brand, promoting a product/service, or increasing brand awareness. 

Hosting regular webinars can showcase your brand’s expertise and improve your image among the target audience. 

And when that happens, you can convert a lot of viewers into potential customers. 

You can use webinars to share some exclusive information or solve specific problems. 

Also, when you want to let your audience understand how to use your product/service or how it may help them.

Bonus article: How to Record Webinars: A Simple 5 Step Process

6. Presentation

Whether for an entrepreneur or a marketing professional, an efficient and effective presentation can help your business grow.

Video presentations help overcome communication barriers and improve your marketing strategy. 

They can either be in the form of public representation or a seminar, or just a basic representation of your product/service.

To create one, follow these steps:

• Design PPT and record narration
• Synchronize audio narration with PPT slides
• Convert ppt into the video file
• Share on social media

7. Product Review

The product review video is the report card of the usability and accessibility of your product. It can greatly help generate leads and convert prospects.

The general public relies on product review videos, and good positive ones can build trust. 

You can start creating product review videos by making small videos of the users who used your product and their take on it. 

Even general reviews will help in improving your overall brand presence and conversions.

Bonus article: How to do product review videos on YouTube?

8. Testimonial

Testimonials are definite proof of the success of your product or service. They work as evidence or social proof of the importance of your product or services. 

Creating a testimonial video is easy. You just need to:

• Use good video equipment
• Avoid scripts
• Add emotional touch
• Keep it under 30 to 40 seconds
• Edit your video creatively

9. Contests/Giveaways

Who doesn’t love gifts, contests, or giveaways? 

Contests and giveaways programs in a content marketing strategy are a must. It increases engagement of your social media channels and builds trust among audiences.

Wondering how to create contests?

Contests are possible on social media platforms. To begin with it, you must:

• Know your target audience
• Plan goals of your contest
• Prepare contest
• Choose a giveaway
• Prepare contest and determine rules
• Announce contest date/time and promote
• Publish contest timely
• Wait for response and track results
• Choose winners
• Create separate posts containing names of winners
• Distribute giveaways

Once you have created your videos, the next thing on your mind is getting them ranked on Google. Let’s make it easy for you…

Tips To Rank Your Videos On Google

It is very important to know how to rank your videos on Google. After all, your main goal is to get viewers for your videos. 

Remember: To make your video visible on SERPs, you must upload the video on YouTube.

YouTube is a product of Google. Therefore, Google would always prefer YouTube when ranking a video.

Let’s dig more and find out what else you can do to rank your video.

1. Use On-Page SEO Tactics

On-page SEO tactics can completely change the ranking of your videos on search engines. 

One of the most important things you should focus on is selecting the right keywords for your videos.

By adding your target keywords in the URL, title tag, descriptions, etc., of your videos, you can significantly improve its rankings.

Other SEO tactics that you can use for videos include:

• Compressing the videos
• Building backlinks to your videos
• Interlinking videos on your website
• Sharing on various social media platforms

2. Add Video Transcripts

Video transcripts are a written summary along with the video content. It behaves as a page copy, and the Google bot indexes it while crawling. 

In simple words, you can rank for more queries by adding video transcripts to your web pages.

Secondly, a transcript will connect with the audience more effectively as you provide both text and video-based content.

There are various ways to generate transcripts for your videos:

• Doing it manually
• Using an AI-based video to script
• Using YouTube built-in feature

But whichever method you use, make sure you use transcripts and get more traffic to your videos.

3. Use Structured Data (Video Schema Markup)

Google often displays video-rich results for websites that have embedded videos. That’s because of video schema markup.

Video structured data helps search engines understand your videos and rank them better. 

It provides additional information about the video, which the bots can otherwise not get. 

So, a video containing structured data can rank faster than a video without schema markup. 

Here are some essential video schema markup parameters:

• Video title
• Description
• Thumbnail URL
• Duration

To add video schema to your videos, you need to use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or Google Data Highlighter. The details are available here.

4. Add A Video Sitemap

Video sitemaps provide extra information to the google bots about your videos. 

It’s very similar to video structured data, and google suggests that you can use 19 different tags in the video sitemap, of which 7 are essential.

Here’s a sample video sitemap:

It requires you to specify the following for every video present on your website:

• URL
• Thumbnail URL
• Title
• Description
• Duration
• Rating
• Publishing Date
• Crawling Frequency, etc.

This information helps the search bots crawl and index your website’s videos better. 

With that, here are the steps to create a video sitemap:

• Code all video URLs in XML manually or using a sitemap generator
• Save your video sitemap
• Add it to your website’s robots.txt 
• Upload the robots.txt file to your website’s root folder
• Check for errors using Google Search Console
• Submit it in Google Search Console

5. Build Links To Your Video

Backlinking to your videos strongly affects their ranking potential. 

If the number of backlinks increases, the chances of your videos (present on your website) ranking on Google increase.

Typically there are multiple ways to gain backlinks to your videos. A few of them are:

• Vlogging as a guest
• Pinning videos on Pinterest
• Sharing videos on other platforms
• Using videos to answer questions
• Creating videos that attract mentions

You can use either of the ways to build backlinks to your videos and help them rank on Google.

Spot Your Videos

Once you’ve covered all the steps, you can see your videos ranked or shown on various platforms owned by Google.

On Google Search

Google is people’s choice; whatever people find good on the internet will end up in SERPs. 

Thus, one’s focus should always remain on quality content and, of course, on Google’s webmaster guidelines as well.

Here’s a simple checklist that can ensure a smooth transition in the SERPs:

• Title the video appropriately
• Leverage your video description
• Incorporate tags in your video
• Add speech caption

On Google Video

If your videos rank on Google, you will see them in Google’s videos section too. 

The only difference is that the google result page has various sections like news, images, books or videos, etc., as it contains various types of content. 

So, if the video makes its way on the google search results, it will be shown in the videos section.

On Google Images

If the video is marked up with structured data, your video results will also appear in the Google images section. 

Conclusion

Videos are indeed a really valuable tool for attracting more traffic to your website, and often small changes to the video content can make a big difference.

You can evaluate your progress with organic ranking fluctuations and optimize your videos accordingly. 

We went live on LinkedIn discussing video content marketing strategy for 2023.

In case you missed the session, here is the recording of the same. Please move to 1:52 for the conversation to start.

• Camille’s personal experience with Video content (starts at 1:52)
• An example of one of Camille’s favorite video content (4:32)
• The evolution of content consumption in different formats (7:50)
• The different areas to use videos in our marketing strategies (10:30)
• Game plan with videos for 2022 (13:25)

Video content consumption has been on the rise over the last 3 years and we can all be sure that the trend will continue in the upcoming year as well.

With this in mind, I wanted to understand how different brands are preparing to use this trend as a part of their marketing process.

So, I recently hosted Camille Trent who is a Content marketer at Dooly, to join me on a LinkedIn Live session and talk about her plans on using videos as a part of their content marketing game in 2022.

We went through a series of questions to understand how Camille’s personal experience with videos unfolded over time, the understanding of the audience’s reception to the video content, and how to put all the learnings to the best of their use in 2022.

Here is a quick transcript of our conversation on video content marketing strategy. If you decide to contradict my above statement about the video and decide to read the text instead (Make no mistake, the text is still interesting!)

Camille started out in the advertising industry by writing copies for B2C and B2B companies for ads, video scripts. Later she started focusing more on the B2B tech companies writing copies and reviewing them for multiple content formats such as videos, voice-over, ads, blogs, etc.

Slowly her career moved towards content marketing where she started focusing on distributing the content in addition to creating them.

Sooner she was into understanding the different ways the content channels worked, the different types of audience each of these channels attract, and how to distribute content effectively via the same.

Camille has had a 360-degree experience in the early stage of her career in the content marketing game from writing, editing, distributing to the marketing game.

Though she has been experimenting a lot with written content which also happens to be her strong suit, her experience with videos especially on LinkedIn is still in the growth phase.

Her recent tryout with LinkedIn videos has shown surprising results compared to the engagement in other formats. This led to more experiments and trials on the way.

I am pretty sure this live session added to the list of positives to do more experiments with LinkedIn videos.

Videos have evolved over the years to match the different preferences set by consumers of the content. When it originated it was very common to see videos that range from 30 minutes to an hour on average on Youtube. But today things have changed a lot.

Each platform has a preference over the way they want the content to be formatted to suit their audience. Youtube loves content that is ideally 20 minutes long to better optimize for ads. Facebook loves videos that are 5 to 10 minutes long for the same reason. There is a new kind of format for short portrait videos that ranges between 15 to 60 seconds to consume on the go.

While we talk about the video game in general I was curious to understand Camille’s perspectives in the way she optimizes her video content based on timeline and channel.

The long-form content still works, as long as you can deliver value. People are open to consuming in-depth information and these people are significant to your business. As long as you can create engaging content that can deliver value consistently throughout the content, you can win with them.

But to expand your reach to all segments in the market you have to use the distribution methods. Content distribution is vital to complete the content marketing cycle,

Most people do it wrong by just reposting the same content across different platforms. But you have to start optimizing the content for the platform before you share the same.

This helps you operate efficiently in the content creation process and in better ROI.

Reemphasizing again here the importance of content distribution and repurposing the content again here.

You have to start with long-form content – a webinar, a podcast, an interview, anything. This way you can loop in an influencer to help you create your content in the long-form.

With this, you can repurpose the same to multiple formats of content. Since the long-form content will help you get all the information you need you can later impart the information and the credibility on your content preferences both in paid and organic marketing.

This has helped us in the past effectively. How to get more ideas from authentic information and how to use them effectively. These are the questions you need to get the answer to.

It is going to be a package of all the things we have discussed so far. But more importantly to focus on the one important thing – whether it is a podcast, interview, or video.

Master one channel and try not to get too caught up in multiple channels and formats.

The game plan is to get started with one channel, create some long-form authentic content in the same, and later repurpose the same to different channels and the audience.

Camille Trent is a household name today amongst all marketers with her constant daily dose of value-added via her social platforms.

I wanted to host Camille for her enthusiasm in learning and unlearning new things each day in the content marketing space.

This conversation had some key highlights worthy of giving a shot for anyone who is into content marketing.

• Focus on one channel, master it and then move
• Create one long-form content and then repurpose it to multiple short-form content
• Personalize your content according to your audience and the channel before you distribute them
• We all start by writing choppy copies but you have to do them anyway to become better at it.

Hope you guys found this useful. You can check our upcoming series guests here. If you have someone in mind we should host next time, do drop me a message here.