Search Marketing Sage

Marketers are increasingly looking to video as a major content marketing priority, making video marketing their top area for investment in 2012. It will continue to be a top priority in 2013, with video considered an effective content marketing tactic by 58% of marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s report 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

With the right strategy in place, video content can be a highly effective content marketing tactic. Whether you’re already creating videos, or want to start creating them, it’s important to make sure they’re properly optimized for search. We’ve created this checklist of video SEO tactics to ensure they get the search engine exposure they deserve.

As the curtain closes on another year at Search Mojo, we like to take one last look back at what made our year interesting – and our blog posts here on Search Marketing Sage are an excellent reflection of that. We write about the new things we as search marketers are learning about each day so we can pass that knowledge on to you, our awesome readers. And because of you, 2012 was the most successful year yet for the Search Marketing Sage!

We’ve compiled a list of our top 30 blog posts on search marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing and content marketing for 2012. These were the most popular posts of the year, judged by your visits and feedback. We hope you enjoy these (and even learn something you didn’t know before), and here’s to a successful 2013 for all of us!

Video is getting a lot of play lately as the marketing content du jour. And for good reason – video content amps up your marketing in so many different ways. Did you know:

• Videos get a 41% better clickthrough rate than text-based content on search engines?
• Shopping site visitors who watch a video are 64% more likely to buy than those who don’t?
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the web?

Video has a huge impact on search marketing, whether it’s outranking text content on Google or boosting landing page conversion for a PPC campaign. To find out more about how to leverage video content for search, join us this Thursday, December 6 at 2:00pm ET for a free webinar, Video Saved the Marketing Star: Amping Up Search with Video Content. Search Mojo’s President and CEO Janet Driscoll Miller and Account Manager Jessica Davidson will show you why you should be including video as part of your content and search marketing strategy, and share with you some useful ideas for leveraging video. This webinar will cover:

• Best practices for getting your video content ranked in search engines
• How to use rich snippets to get a higher clickthrough rate
• How to test video in your paid search campaigns
• How to measure the success of your video content

Update 12/20: Did you miss the webinar? Watch Video Saved the Marketing Star: Amping Up Search with Video Content in its entirety here! Check out the preview below:

Most people covet that number one position in search results, but what if there was another way to attract similar click through rates and traffic without obtaining the number one position? That is what video thumbnails in search can do for your site. As Brian Massay noted, video thumbnails can “make a number three ranking perform like a number one ranking.” With a video thumbnail appearing next to your website, the result stands out next to those without thumbnails, even those with higher rankings. 

This morning’s session at Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Forum in Austin is Integrate Video into Your Marketing to Intensify Your Reach and Engagement. We have a full lineup of speakers today:

C.C. Chapman- Founder, Digital Dads
Jon Schroeder- Multimedia Producer, Crutchfield
Tim Hayden- Chief Strategy Officer & Partner, Blue Clover Studios
Ekaterina Walter- Social Media Strategist, Intel

First of all, Ekaterina Walter explains why marketers should care about video. It’s a highly consumable “content companion” that is becoming a preferred medium.  Consumers are actually starting to reach out for how-to information in a video format.  Plus, the number of videos viewed (not searched for) is now greater than searches conducted on all search engines.  (I would add that search engines know that video is growing, and it is becoming more salient in search results- further fueling consumers’ exposure and adoption).

Jon Schroeder launches into his video strategy at Crutchfield.  The company puts its videos on YouTube and Facebook; it tweets new videos as well.  Its YouTube channel is approaching 2 million views over the course of 2 years (a long-term strategy), and fans like to interact with the content.

A few years ago, Crutchfield employed a “book report” format which was highly scripted and contained significant motion graphics and effects that took a lot of time to produce.  The video length was long, because the content was filled with every technical detail of a product.

The video team changed to what Jon calls the “BBQ approach” that explained products in a level of detail that would be adequate at a BBQ.  It was more conversational, with a relaxed vibe and much less scripting.  Jon offered a few tips…