Video Marketing: A Complete Guide

Here’s a fun fact: video marketing is the future. But I’m already talking about it today, and I want to teach you how to do video SEO right. This involves all video-sharing platforms, including social media.

In this complete guide, I’m going to cover:

1. How to determine the right content to target
2. How to get videos ranking on Google & YouTube
3. How to promote your videos to customers

With a foundational layer of information about all three of these topics, you’re going to position yourself to start producing video like a champ.

Why Video Marketing?

Video is surging in search results right now, both on desktop and the increasingly popular mobile platforms.

Video SEO can help you rank your HTML page higher on the Google SERP. In fact, video content shows up in the normal search results and it can rank really well on YouTube. That’s a homerun if I ever saw one!

Take my SEO reporting video, for instance. Look up “SEO reporting” on Google and you’ll see my blog show right up.

The same goes for the video I made about SEO reporting on both Google and YouTube.

This video has had people coming in for what feels like forever. It just goes to show that video marketing is a really, really powerful system that ranks all over the place.

How Do You Determine the Right Content for Video SEO Marketing?

You can start with video SEO by asking yourself a few key questions:

• Who is your customer?
• Where do they spend time online?
• What do they search for at the beginning, middle and end of their journey?
• What content do they like when they’re not looking for your services?

Lisa Stone once said, “Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell.” I couldn’t agree with that more.

Tools to Help You Set the Stage for Video Marketing

Fortunately, there are a lot of tools to help you do video SEO right. Let me run some of my favorites by you.

If you’re trying to figure out who your customer is and where they spend their time online, check out:

• Google Analytics Data
• Google Benchmark Report
• Social profile data
• Consumer reports
• Pathmatics, Similar Web and Spyfu
• VidIQ

These are all very powerful tools. Use them all together for an amazing peek at the various types of places your customer is hanging out, as well as the type of content they’re looking for. It’s crucial to review all the data that these tools have to offer so you can make your strategy foolproof and robust.

If you want to learn what customers are searching for in the beginning, middle, and end of their journey, check out:

• SEMrush
• Google Question Hub
• Also Asked
• Answer the Public
• Google Search Console

SEMrush in particular showcases valuable keywords and keyword variants. The platform lists all the most important questions (including those in the upper funnel and other queries that are important for your brand).

Question Hub is yet another step you can take to find all those juicy unanswered questions. Use the questions to your advantage by creating a video on them and getting your content ranked right away.

VidIQ provides a ton of data. They offer a score so you know how well your videos are optimized when you’re putting them up. That way, you can get a million views on a video (like I did here:

The VidIQ tool will also show you how much your video has been shared. Plus, there’s a comprehensive overview of YouTube so you can see all your competitors, trends, and most viewed videos—and you can audit your actual channel.

Once you do this, you’ll really be able to see what your audience wants you to create content on.

Anything that shows me keyword opportunities is a great tool for me to discover topics for videos. I want people to be able to find my content, and search is the discovery I need. With more exposure, everyone wins.

If you want to know what content your customers like when they aren’t looking for your services, check out:

• Google Analytics Interest Reports
• Influencers in your industry
• Customer favorite media sites
• Ask your customers
• Popular social media content

Knowing What to Create for Video Marketing

Once you’ve done all that data-digging, you’ve really figured out the entire media landscape. Then, it becomes time for you to start thinking about what you need to create for each individual website.

For this, consider:

So many folks don’t think about this stuff and just spray videos out into the ether.

In fact, I did that for a very long time. Nowadays, I do this here and there, but I get noticeably poorer results. It really is the best course of action to plan your content so you’re making something unique for each site.

Take my own content for example. When I do digital marketing news, I see that 3–10 minute videos do extremely well on LinkedIn and YouTube. But paste that same video onto Facebook or Instagram and it fails.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

People aren’t on Facebook and Instagram for digital marketing news. Plus, those videos I made for other sites aren’t native to these additional platforms. Cutting the video down into something that’s short and snappy (and a bit more entertaining) would do better.

Step-by-Step: How to Approach Video SEO Marketing Creation

With all these moving parts, it makes sense to think about this whole video SEO marketing process as none other than conversion optimization.

It’s also important to remember those story platforms. Story selling really means lots and lots of stories. Frankly, stories have proven to be quite the marketing challenge. But now that they’re on all the major sites, we need to feed them because they create tremendous exposure.

Video Marketing Should Have Ad Strategy, Too

A lot of people think an advertising strategy around organic social media is bad, but I strongly disagree. In any ad campaign, you have a:

• New audience
• Middle audience
• Warm audience
• Hot audience
• Past converted audience

You want to be promoting your best stuff to audiences based on where that content should be hitting them in the journey. This could mean the upper funnel, lower funnel, or anywhere in between.

Whatever content you’re creating, you want to push that to people through advertising (not just posting it and hoping it sticks like al dente spaghetti noodles).

Learn all about this by using audience options on Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and more.

Best Practices for Video Marketing

Here are some best practices for the marketing side of things:

Your goal here is to get someone to interact ASAP (ideally within the first 30 seconds) and you want them to watch the full video. These best practices will help with that.

What works in Google & YouTube for Video SEO Marketing

Did you know that 50% of buyers now check YouTube before even making a buying decision? That’s right! It really is a place you have to be if you want to win.

Plus, you can post on YouTube & get ranked on both Google & YouTube in hours (even as little as an hour).

Take my SEO webinar on how to rank in 2021 for example.

This video has an HTML page that ranks. It shows a video on the Google SERP, which ranks at the top of mobile results. Google does the work of pulling out key moments. We also used this video to create micro clips for social media, our podcast, and even lead gen!

If you want to rank on YouTube and Google, keep these tidbits in mind:

• The more popular your YouTube channel, the better you’ll rank.
• The less competition, the better you’ll rank.
• The more on-theme your channel is, the better you’ll rank.
• The quicker you get in for new topics, the better you’ll rank.
• The more niche the keyword or hashtag, the better you’ll rank.
• The more optimized your page and video, the better you’ll rank.
• The more comments, likes, embeds and views, you guessed it—the better you’ll rank.

Employ These Steps to Maximize Your Video SEO

You want to choose a keyword to base your video off of.

After shooting the video and editing it, upload the video to YouTube and optimize the following:

• Your title (60–70 characters)
• Description (5,000 characters)
• Thumbnail (the MOST important 5–6 words you’ll write; make ’em high impact)
• Tags (niche, middle funnel and overall theme tags)
• Related videos (use a consistent template)

Now, you’re ready to embed the video in your blog. Be sure to send it to a writer to create a corresponding blog post. While you’re at it, optimize the blog for the same term.

For maximum reach, promote the video as much as possible (you can use micro clips for social media and story distribution). Don’t fear ads, and consider including the video in a newsletter. Try to gain channel subscribers and add the video to popular playlists.

The Bottom Line on Video Marketing

What now? Start making videos, of course!

Video marketing is so powerful. It’s growing rapidly, with no signs of slowing down.

Short-form video is the most powerful marketing medium right now. You really must align with a good video editor, ensure your topics are relevant, prepare a script or outline and be ready to watch your presence grow as you pump out content.

Keep in mind: If you don’t want to be on screen, you don’t have to! You can always use someone else or simply use a b-roll. Whatever the case, no poor content allowed in your video SEO marketing strategy.