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Whenever a new app or technology is released, marketers are among the first to experiment with it — and to start creating new content with it.

That’s because marketers are constantly competing for their audience’s attention — and often by the most innovating and engaging means possible.

And right now, that means creating video content.

There’s no getting around it — marketers must create video content if they want to broaden their reach and connect with audiences across platforms — such as on blogs, YouTube, social media, and search engines. 

Video content isn’t up-and-coming anymore. Audiences want to see more video content, and other marketers and publishers are creating more videos in response. In our 2017 State of Inbound report, nearly half of marketers reported they’d be investing in creating YouTube and Facebook videos in the coming year. And according to Cisco, video content will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic by the end of this year.

Are you ready to start creating video content as part of your marketing strategy? We’ll give you some ideas for videos you can film and offer up some tips for integrating them into your marketing.

20 Video Marketing Ideas to Try

Many marketers know that they need to start using video, but when it comes time to sit down and create one, they’re lost for what to do. Here are a few ideas for both pre-recorded and live videos that your business could actually use.

Pre-Recorded Video Ideas

Beginner

1. Create short “thank you” videos from your team to new customers or customers that you upsell.
2. Film a screencast demo of your product.
3. Create an animated GIF of how to perform a function of your tool.
4. Film 15-second testimonials from real customers and evangelists.

Intermediate

1. Film extended customer testimonials and user cases.
2. Create longer product demonstrations and whiteboard-style instructional videos.
3. Do a short introduction of the company, its mission, and vision.

Advanced

1. Create a full product demo.
2. Turn blog posts into short, how-to videos and summaries.
3. Film longer interviews with key members of the company.
4. Shoot live presentations performed by company members and add in their slides in post-production.
5. Create videos for each of your calls-to-action (one for “call us,” one for “sign up for a free trial,” one for “tell your friends and get free credits,” etc.).

Live Video Ideas

Beginner

1. Use Facebook Live or Twitter to broadcast from cool industry events you, your manager, or your CEO are attending.
2. Use Google Hangouts or Skype as a way to thank customers on a special occasion (one year of working together, etc.).

Intermediate

1. Hold a live Q&A / Ask Me Anything session with employees or visitors.
2. Live stream a conversation with a thought leader or influencer who is relevant to your audience.
3. Live stream relevant in-office events to showcase your company culture and thought leadership events.

Advanced

1. Show a live demo with your sales reps and include an open Q&A.
2. Film a live presentation with open Q&A.
3. Stream a “day at the office” with a company executive.

How to Use Video into Your Marketing Strategy

So, now that you have the topics and the inspiration to create video content, you might be wondering where to use the videos. In some cases, the platform is self-evident — Facebook Live videos have to be shared on Facebook. But you can invite people to tune in on Facebook Live broadcasts in advance — and you can embed the recordings outside of the platform, too.

Here are a few ideas for where to use video content up and down the funnel:

1) Leverage user-generated content.

Marketers are great storytellers, but customers can sometimes be more effective. By showcasing how products can be used, user-generated content (UGC) can be more convincing — and powerful — than traditional marketing videos. Encourage customers and fans to create user-generated content by asking for it — by hosting contests, giveaways, or otherwise incentivizing participation.

In the case of GoPro, its evangelists used the product to capture the content to tell a tear-inducing story of a kitten rescue, but just because your brand doesn’t sell cameras doesn’t mean you can’t use UGC as well. Ask fans to take photos, videos, or share content on social media about how they use your products and why they love your brand — it’s more convincing than traditional advertising anyway. This content can be shared on social media platforms, on landing pages, and in marketing emails.

2) Tell customer stories.

Happy customers are your best advocates, and we use customer success stories to inspire video content here at HubSpot. Our audience learns about similar success they can achieve with our products, and we can share the content with prospects and leads in marketing emails and on our website to let our advocates speak for us.

3) Invite the online community to in-person events.

Try as we might, marketers simply can’t invite our entire audience to join us for a live, in-person event. And when that happens, live broadcasting options on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram are great opportunities to invite a broader audience to participate in an event — virtually. Live streaming content and then reposting it on different channels is a way to make your audience happy — and to repurpose content, too. For example, The INBOUND Studio repurposed this Facebook Live interview with actor Jeffrey Tambor on Instagram and YouTube.

4) Share behind-the-scenes looks.

Going behind-the-scenes is a neat way to give loyal fans and audience members a unique perspective on your brand personality or product. You can do this live or with ephemeral messaging on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, or you can create a pre-produced video like the one below that zeroes in on something audience members might not know much about. This content can make for great social media fodder, or you can use it to build rapport with leads and customers trying to learn more about your brand during the conversion and closing process. 

5) Explain concepts and products to your audience.

They say a picture says a thousand words, and sometimes, video is the best platform to explain a concept or define a term for your audience and users. Videos like these are helpful, easy to digest, and go a long way towards helping people succeed using your product or service. Videos like Asana’s below can be used on YouTube to capture search traffic there, or can live within blog posts or your company’s knowledge base to help out customers.

6) Say thank you.

Saying “thank you” can go a long way, and it can even make for compelling video content. In the short and simple video below, Warby Parker provides a personalized customer service experience that makes the customer feel special, acknowledges feedback, and serves as a mini-advertisement — since the employee is talking about making a customer happy. If you’re just getting started, filming short thank you videos can foster customer loyalty and build brand awareness on YouTube.

What marketing videos are you going to start making this year? Share with us in the comments below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

As a B2B texting software, one of our main goals at Text Request is maximizing value, both for ourselves and our users. That’s what led us to focusing on organic traffic.

Billions of people are looking for answers or solutions to their questions or problems, and we’re trying to add value. So we saw organic search as a symbiotic relationship we could tap into.

As the guy responsible for our content and SEO, I’ve only found one “secret” to growing organic traffic. I’ll share this secret in a bit, but first I’ll walk you through the steps we took to grow our organic traffic 120% in 5 months, and what we learned through it all.

Start With Small Changes

We started making changes at the end of December 2016, and the first step was making technical updates to our website.

• We properly configured our XML sitemap, and uploaded it to our Google Search Console so Google could crawl our site more easily.

• We updated our International Targeting inside Search Console to focus on the U.S. (which is where our target audience lives).

• And we increased our site speed, because we’d seen how much speed affects traffic and engagement over previous months.

Image Credit: Think With Google

Then we adopted a new content strategy from Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz). The strategy is: find the best piece of content on your target keywords or topics, and create something 10X better.

So that’s what we did!

Starting in 2017, we looked at what content was available on our target search terms, and then created content we thought was 10X better. It worked! But the question we had to answer first was: What does 10X content look like for our market?

Create 10X Content

The most powerful pieces of content bring in traffic, leads, and backlinks. They’re normally what add the most value to everyone, and that became the essence of our content — add value to everyone.

We said, “Okay, everything needs to be 10X content, and that means it has to be valuable for three audiences.”

Me / Text Request

If this doesn’t add value to me, how can I expect it to add value to anyone else? It became important to make sure we could do two things with all new content:

• Use it to inform and direct company discussions.

• Link back to it in other relevant content on our site.

Our Targets

To bring in our targets, we had to provide something valuable, something that answered their questions and provided solutions to their problems.

An important piece in this: we had to know our targets’ wants and needs. Thankfully, our team has spent countless hours talking with and learning about our customers. Otherwise, this would have been much more difficult!

Our Competitors

Brands are always looking for information that validates and promotes their position. We thought if we created this content, our competitors would use it, and come to see us as leaders in the space.

This was a bit of a long shot, but it’s working! Nearly all of our competitors, and brands in similar niches, link to our content, which strengthens it and helps more of our targets find us.

If it sounds like this content takes a lot of time to create, it does. That’s why we only publish every other Tuesday. But we do publish high-quality content regularly, and it’s paying off!

The 80/20 Rule Still Applies

Even following these criteria, it’s been difficult to know exactly what will resonate with our audience before we publish it.

It doesn’t seem to matter how much keyword research and competitive mapping we do. The 80/20 rule still applies. If you’re not familiar, this means about 80% of our traffic comes from about 20% of our content.

I don’t think this means we should change our strategy, but that we have to keep producing to find what’s most helpful.

Revamping Existing Content

We’d made some technical updates to our site and started publishing 10X content, but we still had a bunch of older blog posts that needed help.

They weren’t 10X content, and my understanding of SEO had evolved a lot in the time since we started posting. So we saw revamping existing content as an important part of our SEO strategy.

I started asking myself questions as I reviewed each post, like:

• Can I tell this story clearly with fewer words?

• If I wrote this today, would I still feel comfortable publishing it?

• What graphics would support this?

• Is there any new research available on this topic?

• What articles are related to this one? What can I link to?

Responding to questions like these kept me from just spot editing, and made sure each piece began adding real value to everyone.

Over the five month period, I was able to revamp 55-60 of our posts, and I’m confident that made a huge impact on our organic search traffic.

Getting Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors for organic traffic, so they had to be part of our plan. From December to May, we grew our total number of backlinks by about 60%, which, in addition to driving referral traffic, boosted our standing with search engines.

Our backlinks mostly came from 3 places:

• HARO: About one in six pitches were published with a link to Text Request.

• Guest Posts: We wrote for other publishers, and occasionally had a freelancer contribute on our behalf.

• Earned Links: We used a lot of research in our content that other brands found valuable enough to link to. This was the biggest source of our backlinks, which I took to mean we were doing the right things.

Our Results

In December 2016, we had a total of 10,663 organic sessions. In May 2017, we had 23,483 organic sessions, meaning that our simple four-point strategy more than doubled our traffic in only 5 months!

I think it’s important to note, too, that our bounce rate and time-on-page both improved during this process. Clearly, if you create 10X content, everyone wins.

In poor practice, we didn’t set any goals or milestones before implementing our strategy. That’s something we could have done better. Although, we really didn’t know what would be realistic.

It’s safe to say, though, that these results exceeded my expectations, and I’ll be thrilled to keep them up moving forward!

What We Learned

It Takes Patience

Anyone in SEO will tell you results take time. As an agency friend of mine said, “The results of SEO work done today might not become apparent, and might not be discovered by search engines, for weeks or even months.”

I have to agree. In Search Console, I’ll regularly see where we finally “got credit” for a backlink months after it was published. I believe our record is a press release that took two years, four months to register.

It’s possible — even likely — that a significant portion of our results came from things we did well before this case study. During the case study, our results still came in stages.

January’s organic traffic was 45% higher than December’s, but February had flat growth. March was up again, April was flat, and in May we peaked at 120.2% growth.

Then there were publishing cycles to deal with. Ours is three weeks, but guest posts could take anywhere from five days to two months! I felt like I was always waiting for something.

Sometimes you have to keep your head down and stick to your plan, even if you aren’t seeing immediate progress. It can take a lot of patience to grow organic traffic, but that patience pays off!

Our 1 “Secret” to “Hacking” Google

People, myself included, often get too caught up in the minutia of SEO to see the bigger picture.

SEO is commonly thought of as a set of technical laws. When you follow them, Google rewards you. When you disobey, you will be punished.

But every algorithm update focuses on one key concept: adding value to Google’s users.

Search engines care most about the people using their site to search. So when you add value to their users, you’re rewarded with traffic.

The thing is, value comes in many forms. Website speed adds value, especially since 40% of viewers leave a site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds.

Page engagement adds value, particularly since most viewers spend less than 15 seconds viewing a webpage. If you give people a reason to stick around for longer, to keep scrolling, and to click through, Google will send more people your way.

When done right, 10X content is powered by this “secret.” If things are fast, engaging, helpful, and enjoyable, everyone wins. This is how we were able to quickly grow our organic traffic, and it’s how you’ll be able to grow yours, too!