By Meghan Bardwell, marketing consultant for Heinz Marketing
On Wednesday, we hosted our 2nd webinar in a 3-part series: The Road to Content Creation: Planning, Platforms, and Distribution.
With Matt Heinz hosting, Chris Donaldson of HandCrank Films and Tyler Lessard of Vidyard shared some great tips on content marketing distribution and how to incorporate video into your plan. Check them out below.
Content marketing trends
- 75% of users visit the marketer’s website after viewing a video (Digital Sherpa)
- Website conversion rate is nearly 6x higher for those who take advantage of content marketing than those who do not (Aberdeen)
- 73% of marketers are producing more content than they did a year ago
Discussion Highlights
Matt: Tell us a little about your company and what are you doing to drive innovation on the content marketing front.
Chris: 2 things all marketers are trying to do is develop credibility and relevancy to our audience—creating an authenticate voice. At HandCrank, we help create engaging video that relates to your audience. Digging deep into story—who you are, what you’re about—but more importantly, knowing what the audience wants to hear. We try to help you understand your audience, then connect you with them through video.
Tyler: At VidYard, we’ve developed a platform that helps marketers track viewers online, identify them, track through sales funnel, and help convert them. We’ve seen great success with B2B companies and those who are using video as a core part of their marketing activities. I’ve had the opportunity to work with marketers around the world and what they’re doing with video and talk about best practices in video marketing.
Matt: Talk about what goes into content planning and development. Many people see video production and time-intensive and expensive. How can we speed up the production of video without the traditional requirements?
Chris: One company that’s really great at using video as a customer acquisition and retention tool is Zappos. They’re able to create videos quickly and inexpensively in-house. They do that by creating a very strong editorial calendar, looking ahead several quarters and finding content to fit with upcoming themes and topics that they can distribute on social, video, blog. Look at how you can develop small pieces of content over the long term. Video can seem intimidating and inexpensive, so start small and take baby steps.
Matt: Marketers are learning the hard way that if we built it, people won’t necessarily come. Can you talk about the importance of distribution?
Tyler: YouTube is a very important channel for video content. We encourage our customers to use it to get the highest ROI from video. However, your primary site is the best real estate. We put our videos on YouTube to get people, but when we actively promote the content, we drive people to our site. When we produce a video asset, we create a whole campaign around it, using different pieces for different channels and cross-referencing each other.
For the full discussion, watch the webinar here.
The final webinar in our series on content marketing airs this Wednesday (4/23) at 9:30am. If you haven’t already, register now! Driving ROI and Leads Through Content Marketing
