Quality always trumps quantity. Case in point: video content.

You can’t just churn out videos and expect to generate thousands of views overnight.

So, before creating videos, you must research and develop a plan, among others.

That said, this post discusses the best tips on how to optimise your video content from the ground up. In the end, you should be able to create well-researched, well-produced videos that’ll get you more views and clicks.

Let’s get started!

Determine Audience Persona

When creating content in general, you must have a target audience in mind.

Since you can’t make everybody happy with your business, zero in on people interested in what you’re offering. This group of people will comprise your target audience for your video content.

Knowing who the video is for allows you to create high-quality videos that resonate with people who are most likely to become your leads, if not clients!

To help find your target audience, you must figure out the qualities and characteristics your current customers share. You can do this by looking at their demographics and psychographics.

Factors to consider here are the following, among others:

  • Age – How old are your customers?
  • Job description/position – Where do they work, and what are their responsibilities?
  • Income – How much do they make in a month or year?
  • Interests – What hobbies do they have outside of work?
  • Pain points – What issues are they having in work or life?

To find out what these are, refer to your CRM system. First, profile all your clients and see their common denominators. You can even ask them to answer a survey answering questions that tell you more about their demographics.

Another way to narrow down your target audience is by looking at your Google Analytics. It shows you the demographics of your site visitors, assuming you’re getting tons of traffic from your website.

Research for Topics to Discuss

Next, target words or phrases your target audience searches for online.

They are searching for these keywords to learn more about the topic or find answers to their questions.

In this case, your videos must give your audience the information and answers they want. In doing so, you provide them with immense value, leading them to watch more of your videos and become customers in the long run.

To find terms relevant to your business that has lots of monthly searches, use a tool like Ahrefs. It shows you hundreds and thousands of keywords you can organise according to their search volume.

Filter the list for keywords with lots of searches and create content. The goal is to optimise your video content for these terms, so you appear on organic search results on Google and YouTube.

To increase your chances of ranking on top of search results, consider keywords with low competition. These are terms with low Keyword Difficulty (KD), which means ranking for them will be much easier.

Another way to brainstorm topics is by analysing your competitors. Type in your niche on YouTube’s search bar and see channels that appear on top. Check out the videos they’ve published so far and the topics they cover in each one.

From here, plot out which topics you must cover in your videos.

Identify Video Type to Create

To optimise your video, you must know which content types you should create. Below are some of the most popular ones:

  • Vlog – Short videos that allow influencers and personalities to share their experiences with their audience.
  • How to/Tutorials – These educational and instructional videos show people how to do something, complete with visual aids and easy-to-follow steps.
  • Live streaming – Video type broadcasted online in real-time. A great way to engage with your audience and answer questions as it happens.
  • Presentations – These are slide decks used in a conference in front of an audience. They are then repurposed as a video for public viewing.
  • Product video – They describe a brand’s item so the audience can fully understand how it works and how they can use them.
  • Social media shorts – 10- to 15-second videos that are engaging and have the highest chance of becoming viral. Leverage short form videos as they are easy to consume and process.
  • Webinar – Long-form video content that is recorded live with online attendees. Brands use this to educate prospects about their expertise. They also use this platform to promote and sell their products and services.

Knowing which video type is best for your needs enables you to make the most of your video creation efforts. Because the last thing you want is to create videos on a format or type that doesn’t align with your brand or your audience isn’t interested in viewing.

Leverage Tools

Your videos depend on your ability to communicate your message to your audience. And to do this much easier, use the tools and software at your disposal.

These help you create excellent videos faster and more efficiently. But, more importantly, they allow you to optimise your videos to make them more appealing to your audience.

Now, when it comes to suggesting which tools you use for your video content strategy, your choice depends on the type of video you wish to create.

If you’re creating video modules for your upcoming course, you can decide on best training video software that has features to make your job much better.

Webinars also require you to use a platform that lets you collect attendees’ personal information before the event, moderate the sessions during the webinar, and send a link to the video and other details once done.

Vlogs and social media shorts use smartphones to record videos. From here, there’s also a list of editing tools you must use to spruce up your presentation.

Ultimately, to know which tools you must use to create your desired video type, you need to know what your audience expects from this type.

Develop Your Script

Whether making pre-recorded videos or recording live, you need to structure your video to have a certain flow. This enables you to record your material with minimal errors and without getting lost.

First, outline the draft of your brief. Then, brainstorm as many ideas as possible while keeping them on point with the story or goal you wish to communicate.

At this point, don’t worry about making the perfect outline. Instead, your goal is to flesh out the script with the best possible ideas.

Once you’ve exhausted your creativity, choose which among your ideas flows well. This allows you to create a narrative or presentation suitable for your audience.

Next, turn the outline into a script. For example, if you’re creating product video reviews, you want to segment it into different sections, such as the introduction, the product’s different use cases, testimonials, and others.

For webinars or live streaming, flesh out your outline with points you must bring up during the video. Listing them here allows you to point them out in the video and not forget them.

Also, be wary of the transitions for each section and ensure that they flow seamlessly. It will help if your video editing skills are also on point here.

Finally, tie loose ends together by editing your script. Clean up the language to ensure that the words you’ll say and topics you’ll bring up in the video will engage your audience. More importantly, they should convince them to sign up for your services or buy your product.

Promote Video

Having optimised videos following the tips above is one thing. Because, as good as your videos may be, people won’t be able to view them if they don’t know they exist.

So, you also need to optimise your marketing campaign to ensure your videos reach your target audience.

First, you must determine which tactics to employ first for your campaign. While executing all techniques is ideal, you only want to focus on a handful of tactics that will generate the most visibility for your videos.

As mentioned, you want your videos to reach the top of organic search results. To do this, you must observe video SEO tactics, such as:

  • Include your main keyword in the video’s title and description.
  • Create a compelling thumbnail to increase the click-through rate.
  • Use the most popular video files before uploading to your preferred hosting platform.
  • Add a transcription in your video to help search spiders understand what your video is about.

Another great way to promote your video content is via email. It has arguably the highest conversion rate among other marketing tactics, so find ways to leverage email marketing as part of your video marketing strategy.

But you must first build an email list that targets your audience to become your subscribers. From here, you can bring them down your sales funnel and turn even the most fairweather subscribers into clients.

When sending emails to segments in your list, a good email practice is to always be professional from the very start. Then gauge their level of interest in your content. From here, you can be more personal with your emails because you have already built a rapport.

Finally, social media is another place to get in touch with your audience through the videos you create.

This is where vlogs and social media shorts work the best, as they’re designed to help you establish an online presence. These video types also make you more personable and relatable to your audience.

On the other hand, brands focused on promoting their products and services can leverage social media to amplify the reach of their video efforts.

For this to happen, they must generate many engaged followers organically, which can be achieved with a consistent social media editorial plan.

Consider Video Localisation

If you wish to target a specific region with your videos, you want them to be tailor-made to people in that region. In this case, you must localise your video.

Let’s say you want to tap into a new market in a different country. To help people in that location understand what your video is about despite it being recorded in a foreign language, use subtitles, dubbed, and others.

This is vital in today’s globalised world. With more people accessing video content worldwide, you want to make your videos accessible to everyone.

And, by implementing localisation in your video efforts, you can optimise your reach even further without much effort.

When deciding on getting voice actors to record a dubbed version of the video, hire video game voice actors as they’re more expressive and can modulate their voices based on what you wish for them to achieve.

Monitor Results

Checking your analytics is part of an effective video marketing strategy.

From your video hosting platform, you should be able to get access to these metrics, among others:

  • The number of people who viewed your video.
  • The sections in our video users spent the most time on.
  • Time they left your video.
  • Other videos of yours users clicked on after watching the first one.

All these metrics let you see which of your videos are the best and worst performing.

For the best videos you have, emulate the process of creating them onto your upcoming videos to replicate their success.

Considering the underperforming videos, consider scrapping them or optimising them, depending on the best course of action.

Using insights from your previous videos, you can optimise your upcoming and even your old ones if the need arises.

Upon launching your next campaign, monitor it and see if the changes you made positive efforts in its results. Regardless, keep testing and tweaking your campaigns to get more conversions from your videos.

Conclusion

Getting the most out of your video content is the first step towards a successful video strategy.

Again, the number of videos you can publish in a period isn’t as important as the quality of the videos you produce. However, focusing on optimising your videos to the best of your ability enables you to achieve higher retention, click-through, and subscriber rates.

And you can optimise your video creation process by following the abovementioned steps.