3 video marketing tools and techniques to help multi-media marketers plan, manage and optimise their video marketing to reach more viewers.

2018 was predicted to be the year of video, having seen a 17% increase in usage in 2017, however, marketers reported a drop in ROI from video marketing in that same year. This prompted me to look at the reasons why video content might not be performing as well as expected, and to suggest video marketing tools and techniques that will help marketers to plan, manage and optimise their videos for better results.

That said, it’s important to note that ROI shouldn’t always be the main driver behind creating video content. Video marketing can be used to drive traffic, increase brand awareness, educate and inform, to sell, to increase customer engagement, or simply, to entertain.



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A few reasons why video marketing might fail

There are many reasons why video marketing may fail to live up to expectation. Here a few I have seen. The tools we cover in this article can help address this:

No clear objective or strategy

Poor video quality

An incoherent story/ narrative

Not enough eyeballs

No focus, key message or call to action

No search optimisation or keyword specification

The content is uninteresting

Videos are too long

You might notice that budget wasn’t included in the list above. Budget should never be the reason why video marketing fails. Even with the worst camera, or no advertising budget available, you should still be able to get creative and use whatever free resources you can find online to craft a compelling video that will help you meet your objective(s).

So instead of showing you step-by-step how to make a video, below are 3 free online video marketing tools and techniques to help your videos reach more people.

So instead of showing you step by step how to make a video, below are 3 free online video marketing tools and techniques to help your videos reach more people.

Free video marketing tools

Google Analytics

This seems like a no-brainer, but have you linked your youtube channel with Google Analytics? Just as Google Analytics tracks your website performance, it can also track your YouTube channel’s performance and referral sources. While Youtube’s own internal analytics is constantly improving and more/better data becomes available, you’ll be able to do much more with the data collected on your Google Analytics account as it will recognise your YouTube channel -as a website.

Instructions for how to link your YouTube channel with Google Analytics are in the video below.

Bonus hack: When sharing a link to your youtube channel by email or social media, add ?sub_confirmation=1 to the end of the URL, and it will create a ‘Subscribe’ popup when people land on the page. Try it below. https://www.youtube.com/user/smartinsightstv?sub_confirmation=1

Social Blade

Social Blade is a fantastic tool to use for planning videos, video titles, video keywords, and more. It also provides you with insight into your competitors’ channel performance, video performance, keywords, and gives you estimated earnings per video, along with predicted earnings.

Install the Social Blade Chrome extension and get live insights into every video you watch, as you watch it.

When choosing your next video project, and choosing a topic, first search for the top-ranked videos on that topic, open the video, and use the on-page data provided by the Social Blade Chrome extension, to develop your title, keyword and description strategy. (You will soon see why some videos perform better than others, just by looking at the data behind each video and spotting your own patterns and trends…)

Keyword Shitter

Don’t be put off by the name, as it really does do what it says on the tin, -and that’s exactly what you want. Keyword shitter is a ‘no frills’ tool that allows you to enter a keyword, then serves up nearly every combination of possible searches associated with a said keyword. You can then copy and paste all suggested keywords, or filter out negative keywords according to your preferences and targeting.

Side note: In addition to using this tool for video keyword tagging, you can also use it to develop titles for copy and content writing.

Keywords Everywhere

This tool is very similar to the Google Adwords tool, in that you copy and paste all your keywords in, and it displays the popularity of each keyword, depending on which country’s search frequency you’re after. This helps you to narrow down your keywords, to select the ones that are perhaps less competitive but will help you rank your content much faster.

The tool is also available as a Chrome extension and Firefox add-on. Whenever you use google search, it will instantly show you similar searches by other users, keyword suggestions and the average number of searches per word, and per month, with competition ranking for each.