How to Add Video to Your Content Strategy

If you’re not already incorporating video into your content strategy, adding it in may sound like a daunting ordeal — but it doesn’t have to be.

Instead of developing a siloed video strategy, try looking at what you’re trying to accomplish from an overall content perspective, and then figure out how you can use video to complement your efforts.

Video content can fit into what you already have planned, help you create lasting connections with your audience, and move your metrics up and to the right. In this post, we’ll go over where and how to begin including video in your content.

Optimizing your existing content strategy

The first step to optimizing your content strategy with video is to assess your existing content to see where you stand. What do you currently focus on? What are your goals? How can video help support these efforts?

Figure out which parts of your content strategy could be expanded, which ones may not be as clear or focused as you’d like, and which ones aren’t getting much engagement or leads.

Chances are, your best content will provide a ton of value, have little filler, and get lots of shares and engagement. Anything that doesn’t fit should be assessed — it may need to be repurposed or recreated.

Look back through your analytics to see which blog posts are already getting some love, but have the potential for much more engagement. These types of posts can often serve as great starting points for experimenting with video.

“Look back through your analytics to see which blog posts are already getting some love, but have the potential for much more engagement.”

If you’re looking for other places that could benefit from video, consider one of the following types of content:

• Older content you’re planning on re-purposing
• Social media content
• Webinar registration pages
• Consistent weekly or monthly content
• Lead generation campaigns

Consistent videos for consistent engagement

Consistency keeps your business top of mind for folks who are consuming your content. If an ongoing video series can help you achieve your content goals, it’s worth experimenting with.

To begin, you can repurpose and expand upon concepts you have in other content pieces to create weekly or monthly video series.

With these consistent videos, you can answer questions from your audience, deep dive into different product features, or share recent news, while building relationships and brand affinity. Below is a great example from Rand Fishkin of Moz, who is famous for launching a weekly series on marketing and SEO called Whiteboard Friday.

These videos keep their audience coming back every Friday. They’re widely shared, and they help build trust between Moz and their community of viewers.

Videos to show, not tell

If you’re creating content that explains something to your audience, why not cater to all different learning styles with both written copy and video? Why not take the opportunity to liven up the information with a smiling face and some delightful background music? Many are familiar with the phrase “show, don’t tell.” With educational content, you can show your audience something and leave a memorable impression using several different types of video.

Product videos

Product videos are incredibly helpful for folks in the awareness or decision stage of the buyer’s journey. In fact, 95% of businesses who use video believe that it has increased user understanding of their product or service.

These types of videos not only clearly convey value, they also give you the opportunity to establish a human connection with your audience and show off your brand’s voice and style. We love this example of a product walkthrough video from Slack:

How-to videos

If they fit within your content strategy, how-to videos can provide your audience with lots of value. If you’re already publishing educational content — such as how to install your latest product, or how to use your product to level up — you can create quality videos for your audience to use, share, and engage with.

At Wistia, we create videos that teach our audience about production and marketing skills, so they can be successful with business video. Take, for example, the following video that’s included in our Library article about shooting overhead video.

This type of video content creates trust between the consumer and your brand. It can also serve as a vehicle for lead generation. With Wistia’s Turnstile feature, it’s easy to gate your videos and create larger campaigns around them.

“This type of video content creates trust between the consumer and your brand.”

Event invitations

Whether you’re doing physical events or online get-togethers, such as webinars or live chats, you can use video to grow your registration count. According to Wyzowl’s most recent video marketing survey, 83% of businesses who use video believe that it has helped them generate more leads. Adding video to your event’s landing page is no exception to this rule. We use promotional videos to add a bit of spunk to our invites and encourage people to register.

You can create a marketing strategy around your event invite video using email, social, and search tactics to spread the word. Plus, you video thumbnail can serve as a CTA in your promotion campaign. Through testing here at Wistia, we’ve found that on average, emails with video thumbnail images had higher click-through rates.

Get social

Odds are, you already have a social media strategy in place. You may post your blog content, photos of your team, links to interesting articles, or links to different areas of your site. According to Wyzowl, more than 65% of companies plan to incorporate more video across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn in the next year.

Creating video content for social media platforms can boost your engagement and share counts and spread awareness about your business.

The best social videos are the ones that are tailor-made for specific platforms. You can create short videos that highlight your company culture, introduce your audience to a future event, walk through a product feature, or simply make someone laugh.

“The best social videos are the ones that are tailor-made for specific platforms.”

You can even add social video to your lead generation strategy by gating these videos using a Turnstile and a Twitter Card.

I’ve never made videos before — isn’t it expensive?

Adding video into your content strategy does not have to be difficult or expensive. You can set up a video studio in your office and work it yourself — no fancy help required.

You can purchase a DIY lighting kit that will make your shots look professional for under $100. You’ll need a camera, but before you start shaking your head at the cost of a DSLR — try recording a video with your iPhone first.

According to Wyzowl, 89% of marketing professionals feel that video gives them a good return on investment.

Once you’ve created your first video — make sure you have a solid promotion plan in place. And, be sure you have a video marketing platform that can help you measure the success of your efforts. From there, you’ll be able to easily track and measure the ROI for all of your video assets. Think through potential lead gen campaigns and how much a qualified lead is worth to your business. Soon enough, buying a quality DSLR for your shoots will be an obvious win-win.