Most businesses want to grow. Most businesses grow by making more sales. Making more sales means making more money. Easy peasy, right? Well, when it comes to trying new marketing techniques to make more sales, it’s easy to spread yourself thin, following the latest social media trends or reading too many blog posts promising the “one secret to doubling your sales.”

Even if they all want to grow, businesses are different from each other. What works for one company may not work for another. Still, if you’re looking for a medium with a proven success rate, it’s time you start producing videos.

Videos’ results are not exclusive to a specific industry or audience. Virtually every niche can reap the benefits of high quality video content that drives sales and maximizes marketing efforts. Over 50% of marketers who have used videos in their campaigns say that video yielded the highest conversions and ROI. Maybe it is easy peasy.

How Do You Increase Sales Through Video?

Produce more content.

While quality and value are important, content creation is often a numbers game. The more high-quality content you create, the more opportunities your audience has to interact with your content and go further down the funnel.

Producing more video content doesn’t have to be as daunting of a task as it seems. If you’ve written blog posts, designed infographics or done case studies, you already have the material you need to produce more videos. Repurposing existing content into video will expose that content to new audiences. Plus, you can test how that content performs in a different medium. You might find that engagement on your video far exceeds the views or engagement on your blog posts.

Build a presence on YouTube.

YouTube is a perfect place to start your video monetization journey. If you already have video content but aren’t on YouTube, drop everything and start uploading. The platform’s built-in audience of viewers likely already has people looking for the exact content you’re creating.

Creating content for YouTube is easier than you think. Hosting videos on YouTube you’ve already produced elsewhere is a great way to bring them back to the surface and turn your channel into a comprehensive resource for people in a specific niche.

When using YouTube, it is key to optimize your posts to make sure you’re getting the most exposure. Research keywords that will make your videos more visible. Optimize your video thumbnail and description. Push your video to your most popular social channels. These practices will put your video in a great position to reach new potential buyers—and further establish your brand authority.

Once your YouTube channel has grown, you can even monetize it by running ads on your account or using affiliate links to make sales.

Host Facebook Live sessions.

Using Facebook Live as a promotional tool is another proven way to get in front of your audience candidly and add a more humanized approach to your marketing strategy. Many companies are using Facebook Live as a way to promote new products or launches, share stories with their audience, and hold Q&A sessions to create more transparency and close the communication gap between themselves and their users.

Facebook’s algorithm has also been shifting to favor video and Live sessions, so the more often you host a Facebook Live, the more Facebook will prioritize showing your content to your audience. Using scarcity tactics can also help make quick sales, like giving viewers the opportunity to receive a discount if they purchase within a certain time frame.

Use video in your emails.

Email marketing itself has a great ability to nurture and convert audience. Pair good email marketing with a solid video campaign and you’ve got the tools to rapidly increase sales. Video content in emails converts three times higher than emails with only text and images, and it boosts open rates by almost 20% and click-through rates by 65%.

There a few strategies up you can use to incorporate videos in your emails. If you’re able to tackle a more technical process, you might want to try embedding videos directly into your email. This makes it more convenient for people opening the email and viewing your video, reducing barriers. However, it does run the risk of your emails being sent to spam by some email providers. To avoid this, you can create a thumbnail image of the video and link to the video on your website or on a landing page instead.

Use video for live events.

When you’re attending events or doing live presentations, there are a few ways to incorporate video to make your presentation or displays more interactive. With the rise of virtual reality and augmented reality, hands-on video content is a great way to attract people’s attention. VR and AR provide your audience with more control and more active viewing. These types of presentations are a bit more technical but are a guaranteed way to stand out among a sea of static displays.

If you’re presenting at a live event, it’s always a smart idea to record your pitch or presentation and repurpose that content as sales content in the future. You can even take interesting sound bites and turn them into short, digestible content for social media or YouTube.

Create custom videos for prospects.

We’ve talked about producing video content to share with your audience as a whole, but using videos to reach out to individual clients or prospects creates a hyper-personal touch to help connect with new accounts or close deals with old ones.

These types of videos shouldn’t be generic promotional content aimed broadly at social media or your email list. It should be something you create specifically for one person or organization, targeting their unique pain points and offering custom solutions. Producing a short series of personalized videos for a potential client that addresses their needs specifically will allow your organization to show that you understand them and know how to help. These videos don’t have to be large, costly productions. Just creating a simple video message or presentation of your case is enough to make an impact.

How Do You Measure Your Efforts?

When tracking the efforts of your videos and how they relate to sales, it’s important to know what numbers and data to look for. Analytics can be overwhelming, but monitoring a few key areas can make sure your video campaigns are actually working.

Track conversions.

As the key to driving business, conversions are a great indicator of effectiveness. Your conversion rate is the the percentage of people who completed an intended action after watching the video. If you notice your conversion rates dipping, there are ways to improve the conversions with little tweaks. Make your CTA compelling and clear through action-oriented words. Place your content is on the right platform to reach the audience you’re targeting. Finding this information requires a bit of research and surveying, but it will give you the highest return on your video investment.

Measure engagement rates.

If you want higher engagement from your audience, just ask. Your audience needs something to interact with during or after your video. To measure your calls to action more accurately, track analytics on the video and run A/B tests to figure out what engages more viewers. Also check that you are posting your videos at a time when your audience is actually active and online.

Additionally, if your engagement rates are low, it probably means your watch rate is low as well. Viewers who are engaged and enjoyed the video are more likely to purchase. If your videos are on a website or landing page, you can improve your watch rates by aligning video content with page context to make sure everything the viewer is seeing around the video is relevant and of value to the viewer. Make sure that you’re using analytics to provide insight into where the viewer stops, rewatches, or skips through the video.  From those insights, you can optimize your videos, both now and in the future.

Don’t get caught up on vanity metrics.

While those pieces of data are valuable, some aren’t. Getting a lot of views, likes, and comments is exciting, but they don’t always mean much for your bottom line: making more sales. If you have a very specific audience or precise message, getting 100 views by potential customers could be far more valuable than 100,000 views from the general public.

That said, more views means does mean more opportunities for conversions. Optimizing things like your thumbnail selection, the size of your video, and its placement on the page can make a positive impact on your view count. It’s also smart to experiment with different variations of these factors to determine what works best.

Ready to create quality video content that brings you more sales? We’re ready, too. Reach out today, and let’s get started!