Monetizing Video Content
Six tips to drive direct sales and ROI for your video campaigns.
You’ve done it! After hours of planning, editing, chopping footage, and re-editing… you’ve launched a video campaign. Congratulations – but what’s next?
Video is one of the hottest (albeit toughest) forms of content a brand can create. Whether amateur or professionally developed, a quality, engaging video campaign can connect users with your brand and offer a valuable asset that can be used across a variety of channels. Think website, social media, and calls to action for other communications including electronic direct mailings (EDMs).
Videos require a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Marketers should understand the wide variety of options available to them when it comes to monetizing video content. Stakeholders may be satisfied with clicks, views, shares, likes… but surely nothing would get their pens signing digital projects off faster than proving that this content can actually drive direct sales and return on investment.
The following list identifies a few key initiatives that one can take up, specifically with YouTube, in order to monetize branded video content. I have to thank our friends at Fast Company who originally published part of this list.
Monetization Tip No. 1 – Home Page Advertisement on YouTube.com
Reserved for brands with a significant digital ad budget. However with over 2 billion video views per day on the site and a wide variety of segmentation available, this is a great way to reach a very large, very specific audience.
Monetization Tip No. 2 – Promoted Videos
Think pay per click search engine marketing. Features and promoted videos will display based on particular search keywords and are available via cost per click, where advertisers only pay when a user plays the video.
Monetization Tip No. 3 – Click to Buy
YouTube allows you to play specific calls to action on your actual video. An example given by Fast Company showcased that “Monty Python” snippets that directed users to DVD purchasing options on Amazon increased sales by 23,000 percent!
Monetization Tip No. 4 – EDM Call to Action
Instead of driving your customer base to a landing page or website, send them across to a video that promotes your product, service, or idea. Drive users to subscribe to your branded channel (see tip No. 5) to increase your video marketing reach.
Monetization Tip No. 5 – Branded Channels
Develop a channel specifically for your brand. Not only can you develop playlists with your own content, but you can also brand the page with logos, images, creative backgrounds, and more. Engage directly with followers via the YouTube dashboard, too.
Monetization Tip No. 6 – Display Advertising
Straightforward display advertising on top of videos. Effective as they allow for very specific segmentation, not only by market but also by video type, this allows you to drive click-through to your own channel, branded website, or landing page.
Stay tuned soon as we will review these same techniques as they apply to popular online video sharing sites in China, Youku and Tudou.
