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Lights, Camera, Action: How Video-First Strategy Can Transform Your Marketing Efforts

by | Jun 28, 2023 | Newsletter, newsletters

At the end of 2021, I wrote a blog post advising how important videos are search results. In fact, I said that you should create a video first strategy in your online marketing for 2022. This is so important that I indicated we would be following our own advice and not only embedding videos into our blog posts going forward, but that we would embrace the concept of creating a video first, the repurposing the video content as a blog, podcast, and social media posts.

If you’ve been following this blog for more than a year, you know that didn’t happen. The concept is great: just shoot a video talking about your products or services. You don’t need a script, just start talking about all the benefits and features as if you were chatting with a customer who comes into your store. Then, use software like Otter.ai to transcribe the audio into a text file, and edit it as necessary to make it be an article or social post. Of course, you’ll embed the video into your posts as well, after uploading it to YouTube so Google can rank your content.

I still believe this is important, even I didn’t follow my own advice as often as I should have. Why? Because it works!

Here is an example to show you what I mean. I created this video for CarsAndLocks.com. It has been optimized for search results, and shows up on the first page of YouTube (owned by Google) for “mobile locksmith in Littleton.” But more and more, Google understands how important video is to search and often displays YouTube videos on the first page of the Google results as well.

search results example

Granted, the search results take a user to the video, not to the webpage. But a link to the webpage is in the video’s description. And, a link from YouTube to your webpage is considered to be highly valuable to Google, so you are building SEO juice for your site. When creating this link back to your site, we recommend taking the visitor directly to the page about the product or service being discussed in the video, and not your home page.

If you are interested in seeing what an optimized video looks like, here is the link to the one for Cars and Locks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtAyxPwGzzo

So how does this work for ecommerce websites?

Here is my recommendation:

  1. Ask ChatGPT or Bard to write you a video script from your product description for each product on your website. If you don’t have a complete product description, ask the AI to write that for you first. Tell the AI that you want your script to be SEO optimized.
  2. Create a video for every single product on your website from the script, using tools like FlexClip video editor. Yes, this sounds daunting, but it doesn’t have to be long. A 1-minute video is fine. And if you have a large catalog, you don’t have to do everything at once – start by doing one a week. You do not need to appear in the video – just show the product and read the script. Of course, if you can show your product being used, that is better.
  3. Upload the video to YouTube. In the description area, include a link to the product page for that video. A link on YouTube must start with https://
  4. Embed the video onto your product page. If you have a WooCommerce store, use the plugin, “Product Video Gallery for Woocommerce” to insert the video alongside the images in the gallery.
  5. Don’t have time to do this? Incentivize your customers to create the videos for you! User-Generated Content (UGC) is even more powerful than brand content, so leverage this however you can.

 

 

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