As with all marketing, promoting your video requires an effective strategy and clear objectives. If you don’t know what you are hoping to achieve with your video how will you measure the success or lack thereof? Objectives can be as simple as driving traffic to your website, improving SEO or raising brand awareness through customers sharing the video.
Once you’ve decided on your objectives you need to think about how you will promote your video channel.
Use teaser trailers
If your video will form part of a larger promotion, you can create teaser trailers to heighten anticipation. A lot of big TV and film companies do this with soon to air offerings.
One of my favourite TV shows is Game of Thrones. TV network, HBO do a great job of releasing teaser videos for the show months in advance of its airing. They will post a clip on Twitter and Facebook and before long thousands of fans be will be tweeting #WinterIsComing. This is a line from the first season of Game of Thrones that fans now use to herald the coming of a new season of the show.
They also release posters that mirror the content of the videos. This type of promotion gives fans and content creators a lot to talk and write about building hundreds of pages across the web linking back to the HBO site and video channel.
Marvel and DC comics have similar viral video success with teaser videos of upcoming films.
So, early teasers can work providing you do them right and mirror the content across your channels.
Email marketing
If you have built up a strong customer email list, email marketing is a great way to promote your channel. You can email your customers to let them know your video is available. A good quality animated gif embedded in an email showing a few seconds of the video can be attention grabbing.
Pay per click advertising
You can pay for promoted ads on Facebook and use sponsored ads on YouTube to drive viewers to your channel.
Using Online display ads and a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can also drive traffic to your video.
Continued promotion
Once you’ve released your video the challenge will be how you continue to promote it days, weeks and months later.
You want to avoid making the content look stale for those who’ve already seen it but you do want to catch people who haven’t seen it yet. You can stagger your promotion using different channels.
If you promoted the video on Facebook last week, then you should use Twitter, this week etc. Months later, you can use the throwback Thursday hashtag to promote the video again. you can also use stills from the video, people who have yet to see the video and those how can’t remember where in the video the snapshot appears may well want to watch it.
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