Creating a Video Marketing Strategy for the Holiday Season

The holiday season is an untapped source of video marketing potential.

Not only do the holidays offer countless content opportunities, but people are more likely to buy into your product, service, or creative vision during the holidays than any other time of the year. According to Ezoic’s ad revenue index, November and December amass the highest digital ad rates of the entire year!

Online video content offers you the chance to capture much needed ad revenue and traffic. It’s critical that when November rolls around, you’re fully armed with a content strategy to battle your way through the season’s high marketing traffic.  

So, how should you tailor your video content to take advantage of the holiday’s boundless marketing potential?

 

1.    Be Preemptive: What Drove Engagement Last Year?

 

Audiences will re-consume your content if you give them added value.

The holidays offer an excellent opportunity to streamline your marketing campaign, once you determine what content garners the greatest ROI. Using tools like Google Analytics, gather data to measure last year’s engagement to reflect on what worked and what didn’t.

 

Then the fun begins. Based on the metrics you gathered from last year’s campaign, you can reframe your best content and target the right audience. In doing so you can begin to understand what type of content resonated in the holidays last year to optimize your video content for 2019.

 

They’ve most likely already seen what you’re going to show them, but you can be sure they’ll want to know what the experts say is the most important or best content to remember into next year. The more holidays that pass, the more successful your video marketing strategy will be.

 

Analyze, streamline, implement, and repeat.

 

2.    Get Creative: Now that You Have the Data, Re-Envision Your Content!

 

When it comes to strategizing content for your video content, the ball is already in your court — during the holidays viewers are naturally more likely to not only click on seasonal content, but to continue watching.

 

Lifestyle videos garner particularly high engagement. How-to videos that are holiday-themed, or at least allude to the holidays, tend to have fewer bounce rates during this time of the year.

 

Some things to keep in mind when generating content:

 

  • Don’t Hard Sell! The secret’s out. We’re not the only ones who know that the holidays have marketing potential. It’s a bit of a double entendre: while people are more likely to engage with videos during the holidays, they’re also more likely to be wary of the oversaturated market and innumerable ads targeted in their direction. Make sure your message is more authentic and personalized to your intended audience. What’s the message you want to deliver to viewers during this special time of year? Hard selling rarely works; this is even more so true during the holidays

 

  •  Be politically correct. Christmas isn’t the only holiday! Be aware that not all your audience members may celebrate the same holiday. In fact, you can easily offend those who do not celebrate a particular holiday. Go broad in your messaging, referencing the “Holiday spirit”, for example, to allude to the festivities without inciting backlash.

 

  •  Call Them to Action! We all know that the CTA is important at any given time of the year. Yet, during holidays, the CTA is peculiarly perplexing to navigate. Usually we’d advocate for being as direct as possible in your message. During the holidays, however your audience is already on the lookout for the hard sell and will avoid this with a blink of an eye. The key is being transparent, yet subtle at once. Consider using a call to action that invites your viewers to download a free eBook, or incentivize them with additional reading material.

 

What if my business or service is incompatible with the lifestyle videos?

 

Even if your asset is more abstract, there are ways to boost engagement. Offering a ‘holiday discount’ is the most calculable. However, viewers also see value in information. For example, now would be a fortuitous time to offer a free informative email series. Or, run a niche PPC ad campaign using the holiday as an apt prompt.

 

3.    Get Logistic: Factors That Can Cause Viewers to Bounce

 

If you have stellar content, it’s all too easy to forget about the small details. When it comes to video marketing, even one of those minute details can make all the difference in your CTRs, bounce rates, and overall ROI.

 

Things like a slow video load time, and redundant ads are some reasons viewers bounce. If you’re not aware of these potential quagmires, your revenue loss is bound to stack up. Other things you should also consider: video length, delivery method, and text on screen vs. voiceover.

 

As discussed earlier, running analytics on previous campaigns is the best way to determine which of these factors is the outlier causing your video engagement to flop. Set up an A/B test to decipher the issue. Testing a video with a voice-over vs. a video with script, for example, could render eye-opening results.

 

Of course, these logistics are a given for any video marketing campaign, but they’re especially true during the holidays when the video marketing pool is so saturated.

 

The stakes are high during the holidays. With so much competition, having top-notch content based on qualitative data is essential. A keen video marketer will recognize the lucrative potential of the season, and be prepared to ring in the New Year having met all sales goals..

 

How to Circumvent Youtube Firewalls to Leverage Your Marketing Campaign

How You Think Youtube Works

Many assume that once they publish a video to Youtube that is rich in content, traffic will organically be driven to their videos. It’s nice, albeit rather idealistic, to believe that quality content will get a high number of views, organically. There is some truth to this. If you’re churning out amazing content on Youtube it’s bound to gain a decent following.

How Youtube Actually Works

Unfortunately, the process is not quite so straightforward. YouTube makes it difficult to have easy access to viewers which, in turn, makes it difficult to get these viewers to convert. YouTube has full control over what viewers are exposed to, even if they’ve subscribed to your channel. That means, based on their algorithms, viewers may be only seeing a mere fraction of what you publish.

“YouTube dictates when your customers will see your videos.”

On top of that, YouTube wants users to stay on YouTube. This means that YouTube isn’t going to support you taking your viewers off the site and over to your website or landing page. Meaning, quite simply, no sales for you. Most detrimental to your video marketing plan is that YouTube does not allow you to add a CTA to your videos to capture emails, effectively making it impossible to capture leads.

While viewers may enjoy the video and be entertained, they will not necessarily be driven to follow on with the opt-in button. There also isn’t much flexibility in customizing videos to render them better produced because of restrictions that limit the capacity of video to be used as a promotional business video.

“YouTube doesn’t allow you to add a CTA to a video to capture emails which means you lose control of your audience.”

Let’s not be too hasty to vilify YouTube. After all, the video mogul is offering a free platform for anyone to post videos, so long as they are without offensive content. No matter how much you admire or detest the video hosting giant, it all comes down to a simple truth: YouTube, as a business, cares about themselves, not your own business.

How You Can Combat the Youtube Paradox

To make your embedded Youtube videos marketable, you need to look outside of Youtube. That’s where ConvertPlayer comes into play.
The first step to take after producing a video is embedding it onto your site. If your video is hosted on Youtube or Vimeo, this step is quite simple. In either platform you can retrieve the embed code under the “share” section. Once you attain the embed code, you can begin optimizing your video with a CTA, and other marketing tools that bring exponential value to your content.

Using Convert Player, you can equip your videos with perhaps the most powerful marketing asset of all: a CTA.

First, you’ll want to determine the intent of the Call to Action. Do you want to capture an email lead? Do you want to prompt a direct purchase? Keep in mind that you need to establish a relationship with your user first. Gaining credibility is the most lucrative asset to your business. You don’t want to overdo it and ask for too much information unless you’re providing a LOT of value, upfront.

Next, you need to think about the length and content of the CTA. To create strong copy keep it short; people don’t want to be overwhelmed with too much text. You need to be as specific as possible. For example:

Download the eBook Now
Access the Worksheet Now
Subscribe Now

By doing so, your client knows exactly what he or she is signing up for. There is a thin line between being too vague, and too assertive. Clearly stating what the offer is avoids both extremes.

You should also ensure that your call to action is directly related to your video content. People are highly unlikely to click through on your CTA if it’s unrelated to your video.

Other factors that often get overlooked when creating a CTA: physical size, market location, colour and font all have an impact on whether your viewer clicks.

Despite all of the above, some CTA’s may not be as successful as you projected them to be. The only way to find the right combination of words and stylistic approach is to TEST, TEST, TEST, and TEST again.

Convert Player also allows you to equip your videos with Pause/Play buttons, thus making them more interactive for your viewers. Video optimization tools like ConvertPlayer will also strip embedded videos on your website of Youtube promotions. Other optimization features include: the ability to skip ahead, mobile compatibility, unlimited video use, and ultra-fast streaming. Convert Player is also incredibly easy and straightforward to use, making it friendly to any user.

Youtube stipulations don’t have to stymie your video marketing campaign. Exploring external optimization tools that allow you to capitalize on videos listed on your website is the only way to seriously leverage your video campaign.