Ready. Shoot. Aim. That’s the plot synopsis you create with your freshly produced video if you don’t already have a distribution strategy already in place.

Going into pre-production and shooting with a plan already in place often dictates how you’ll actually capture the story your video will tell. Here are some considerations that will help you plan the distribution part of your video strategy.

Pick a platform

You’ll need a video platform to host your video content. Of course, you can put it on your own website and call it a day. There are a number of reasons why this may not be a good idea, and you can read about 10 of them in this Medium blog post. Perhaps the most important is bandwidth limitations your own website may have (#1 in the article). Even video optimized for the web is a resource hog, and sites dedicated to video hosting offer better opportunities for SEO.

The most popular platforms are likely names you know:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Wistia
• Brightcove

Each of these hosting platforms has pros and cons, and many organizations choose to mix and match to take advantage of the platforms’ respective strength. For example, Youtube makes it easy to share your video to Social Media platforms – and it’s free. On the other hand, an investment in a Vimeo account banishes ads and pop-ups and offers higher quality display. This article from software company CoverKit does an excellent job of comparing these four platforms.

Home, sweet home

Rounding back to your own website – deciding where to place your video there is crucial. Be sure to put it in a place where it’s relevant, which may mean that it’s not going to be seen on your homepage. Google isn’t about popularity. It’s about relevance, and the search giant will penalize you just as deeply as it can reward you if you don’t help it determine the context of the video you put on a web page. Search engines have made it possible for prospects to get through nearly 70 percent of the buying process without interacting with a brand. How can your video help to move this process even deeper?

Your new video might actually be most useful as the highlight of a landing page – and not on your main website at all. Marketing software platform maker Unbounce cites a recent study by eyeviewdigital.com that shows a video used on a landing page can increase conversion by an astounding 80 percent.

Sharing is caring

Once you have your video hosted, you’ll be rewarded by each platform with a convenient URL that can and should be shared by everyone in your organization with everyone they know. Clients, for sure – but don’t stop there. Does this video help to explain why your organization exists or does what it does? Share it with every single person you know.

No need to be formal. Everybody in the company can get away with, “Hey, check out our new video!” and include the link. The storytelling in your video will explain everything. Maybe it might raise a few questions. Bingo. You’ve just achieved what every marketer wants: engagement.

This is one time when even a humble email can jump into the picture and emerge as a champion. Does your organization have a specific email signature format for outgoing messages? It takes just a minute or two to add, “Watch our latest video,” along with the URL. Stop for a minute and consider the number of emails your team sends or replies to daily. This is an often overlooked but powerful way to promote viewership of your videos.

Get noticed!

Planning to put YouTube into your platform mix? Remember that this is a search engine just as powerful as Google. In fact, Alexa ranks YouTube as the second most popular website in the world, right behind Google. Take advantage of YouTube’s promotability factor by optimizing your video. This probably doesn’t mean what you think. YouTube will do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to processing your video, so it streams without glitches when watched.

In this case, “optimization” refers to positioning your video to be found when people use the search function in YouTube. Keep in mind, too, that YouTube videos get preferential treatment and are moved to the top of Google search results. There’s some work to be done to make sure your video is suggested to people you want to reach. YouTube SEO isn’t difficult, but you do have to set some time aside to get it done.

According to SEO expert HubSpot, there are eight main steps to optimize your video for YouTube. Most can be accomplished using the YouTube dashboard when you upload your video. Not all are necessary, but each one adds upon the others.

Don’t forget social media – Facebook, in particular

Tech Crunch reports that 100 million hours of video are watched daily on Facebook. Getting your video in front of prospects has to include this social media platform – and some ways to go about it are better than others.

Social media marketing platform Falcon offers a comprehensive list of recommendations to prepare your video for optimal performance on Facebook. Some of it may seem counterintuitive. All that time spent finding the perfect music for the background and guess what? Digiday reports that 85 percent of videos on Facebook are watched with the sound on mute. So, you’ll have to add captions. Is there room? Keep that in mind at the start of video production, instead of bumping into it at the end.

Here’s where you also have to start thinking mobile-first. On the mobile version of Facebook’s newsfeed, square videos (1:1) get 78% more space than landscape videos (16:9). So, you’ll need a specific square version of your video – especially when you consider that over 95 percent of Facebook users prefer to access the network with their mobile devices.

Choose to post a native video – meaning that you upload it directly to Facebook – instead of an embedded one, where you use your YouTube or Vimeo link. Forbes magazine reports that native videos in Facebook newsfeeds earn 10 times more shares than linked videos.

And then there’s Instagram

Engagement on Instagram is 4.21 percent, which is 10 times higher than Facebook and 84 times higher than Twitter. Sharing your video on this social media platform is a way to get it in front of eyeballs – but with a big caveat. You have only 60 seconds.

With a max of 60 seconds, you’ll need an abridged “Instagram version” of your video. Social media marketing software company Sprout recommends using square (1:1) or vertical (4:5) formats because Instagram truly is a mobile-first platform, and landscape videos (16:9) get less room on the screen.

Use of Instagram stories is exploding. Brands using Instagram report that up to 37% of their total impressions are from Instagram stories. These can be up to 60 minutes long if it’s live video, but just 15 seconds for prerecorded video. There are ways to slice and dice your long-format video for use as an Instagram story – but the question is: should you do it? A wiser choice might be to create a teaser and have your bio link to your video. Again, this gets back to pre-planning for alternative formats and versions that will need to be distilled from your video, so it can be used on a variety of platforms.

The folks at Instagram feel our frustration, which may be why they’ve included IGTV, which allows you to upload long-form videos. They can be up to an hour long. Your existing followers will be alerted if you upload a video to IGTV.

This is pure mobile play for Instagram and its owner, Facebook. Your videos must be in a vertical format – either 4:5 or 9:16. Business Insider produced an easy-to-follow guide to use IGTV. To get the best value from this new video promotion platform, you will need to plan ahead in the video production process because of the preferred 9:16 format – it’s a 90-degree change in the aspect that we’re used to watching video because it’s meant to be watched on a smartphone screen without having to turn it sideways.

Professional sharing

Facebook for business. That’s how many people think of LinkedIn. Hootsuite reports that 94 percent of B2B marketers make LinkedIn their top choice to distribute content. The upside to this social platform is that it has a straightforward algorithm, unlike Facebook’s rather frustrating and mysterious one. Post a video to share and there’s a higher likelihood that those in your network will see it – and then share it.

Native video can be up to 10 minutes in length. These video posts tend to have three times the engagement of text posts. Like Facebook, best practices recommend that you design for an audience that will mute your video, so include closed captions.

Promoting your video with ads

Prospects may need a few nudges to ultimately commit to viewing your video. Whether they initially interact with you on a social media platform or do so because of a display ad, you can stay in front of them with retargeting. HubSpot wrote an excellent article that makes it easy to wrap your head around this effective marketing technique.

The most important takeaway is that remarketing is a way to nurture further interaction from a prospect who’s already aware of you. Statistics show that retargeting ads are 76 percent more likely to get clicks than regular display ads. Even more impressive is the heightened brand awareness this process generates. Retargeted ads lead to a 1,046 percent increase in branded search.

We’ve already talked about the specific formats required or social media such as Facebook or Instagram – which means you should determine ahead of time if you plan to promote your video on these platforms. You’ll need the appropriate assets that likely will be captured during pre-production.

Put your video to work

Video supercharges engagement. A video embedded in a sales proposal has been shown to increase engagement by 18 percent. Our brains are hardwired to respond optimally to visual information, and we can process it 60,000 times faster than what we read.

But, it’s got to be seen. That awareness starts with a strategy, and some of the distribution venues will dictate how you approach video production. The pre-planning is worth it because it makes getting it in front of people all the more easier.

Learn how we can help you use video to connect people to your brand through meaningful stories that are formatted precisely to take advantage of the specific online platforms you select.

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