At GenNext Social Media Labs, we just finished development of our own high tech video studio and editing suite after experimenting with video for several of our own projects as well as our clients. This is a very effective strategy if used with the right keywords and content.

Like all your distributed content, the end goal of your video content is to get indexed and drive traffic back to your website or blog.  Video is also a great way to educate your potential customer and develop a trusted relationship before getting they even reach your site.

We are still learning and experimenting, but here are 5 keys that we found critical to making video marketing work:

1) Production and Content

• Like all aspects of social media marketing, you need to be consistent and persistent to achieve your goals. That means you will need to integrate video production into your workflow and regularly create and distribute videos tied to your overall keyword and marketing strategy.

• High definition video equipment is not very expensive. We found B&H Photo to be the best source for equipment with the best prices (they also seem to be the most referenced source by experienced video marketers). Adding on lights, microphones and a few other accessories can give you a nice video studio that will make it easy for you to create videos on a regular basis. You and your staff can do this without professional help if you want. The key is easy access so you will make video creation a part of your business marketing.

• Your customers are searching for answers to questions. That is your best opportunity to engage with them in a non-sales way and be the hero by helping them better understand their problem and solutions. Educational content is key. Even better, answer their questions in video format.

• We like two different approaches to launching a video aspect to a social media marketing campaign. First, identify the 20 most burning questions you know your target customers have and answer them in videos that are 30 seconds to 2.5 minutes long. Second, create a mini-course using videos to address more complexed, high involvement questions your target customers may have. With either of these strategies, use the other videos in the series to get target customers to opt in to your list.

2) Distribution

• Market your videos where ever and whenever you can.
  • Don’t be overbearing, but you can use videos in a resources section of your site and create a You Tube Channel.
  • Rotate various videos in your email signature, blog posts, social media sites, autoresponders and social bookmarking locations.

• Don’t depend on just one distribution point to promote your video.
  • Tubemogul and Traffic Geyser are great video distribution and sharing platforms that automate distribution of your videos to You Tube and many more video hubs. This makes video distribution easy…even better, track-able.

3) Engagement

• Create landing pages for videos with a summary of the content.  Also, have a comments section to encourage feedback and participation.

• Make the videos easy to share. If they are really informative, people will send them around. I am sure you have been on the receiving end of some great videos.

• Prompt action in your video. Get the audience to do something that will get them more engaged with your brand. Here is a great Copyblogger post that covers this subject very well.

4) Marketing Strategy

• The content, including scripts, subject matter, headlines and keywords should be a continuation of the other parts of your social media strategy. The goal of your social media implementation is consistency and control. All external links with anchor text, directory publishing and content should be pulling in the same strategic direction so you win the positioning in your market.

• Make video content planning a part of your overall content planning process to ensure it all works together.

Video marketing is another layer of your businesses overall social media marketing mix. It’s not a magic bullet, nothing is. Once you have some of the other basics working for you, like your blog, web 2.0 pages, regular forum participation and article publishing, it’s time to start to put video marketing into your workflow.

Have you done any video distribution yet? How is it going?