For as long as video has been around, we've been using it to advertise products and services. Video often enables you to establish emotional connections faster than text does, so it can be a powerful tool to boost conversions and attract more website users.
The best way to convince visitors to become members on your site is to break down what's in it for them. Using video enables you to show visitors what your products or services can do. Combine that with great marketing copy, and you have a winning combination.
In this article, we'll talk about why promotional marketing works and show you some examples of membership websites that use it to their advantage. Then we'll cover three methods for using promotional videos to drive more signups. Let the cameras roll!
Why It's Worth Using Promotional Videos to Market Your Membership Website
Promotional videos are everywhere online. You can't go through a few Instagram stories or navigate through your Facebook feed without running into at least one of them.
Although they can be annoying sometimes, we can't deny that promotional videos work. Having a video that promotes your membership website makes it appear more professional, and it's a quick way to drive home the benefits a membership offers.
Videos also enable you to target users who might be more open to video marketing than to other channels. Moreover, there's always the chance that your promotional video might go viral and help you drive dramatic growth to your website.
Slack, for example, launched a wildly-successful promotional video when it was still a new service. Now it's one of the most popular tools for coordination within companies.
Disney+ offers a more recent example of an excellent promotional video. The mouse might need no introduction, but even established brands need to do some clever marketing when they launch a new service.
Of course, you don't need to run a multi-million-dollar business to benefit from promotional videos. There are plenty of online services that enable you to create videos on a budget, so your membership website can take advantage of this crucial resource.
3 Ways You Can Use Promotional Videos to Drive Signups for Your Membership Website
For this section, we're going to assume you already have a promotional video for your membership website ready to go. Your job now is to market it effectively, so the video gets a chance to grab as many people's attention as possible.
1. Take Advantage of Free Video Platforms
When it comes to free video platforms, YouTube is king, with 73% of the market share all to itself. That means uploading your video to YouTube gives it the best odds of finding an audience.
If you don't have a YouTube channel with a sizable following, however, it can be hard for a new video to gain traction. Without a fan base, you'll have to rely on YouTube searches. That means you need to consider video search engine optimization (SEO):
In practice, that means taking a few steps to maximize the odds of YouTube users finding your video. To do that, you can:
- Use a target keyword within the video's title.
- Optimize your video description.
- Tag your video with popular keywords.
- Choose the right category for your video.
- Upload an eye-catching thumbnail.
If you've conducted SEO for your membership website, you should already be familiar with most of these techniques. The only difference is that now you're using YouTube instead of a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.
2. Publish Your Videos on Social Media (Using the Right Hashtags)
When it comes to social media, you'll run into a similar problem as with YouTube. Without an established following, getting your video to gain traction can be difficult.
To maximize the chance that users will find your video, you'll have to rely on hashtags. Luckily, hashtags work much the same for most popular platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Choosing the right hashtag works similar to using keywords. If you select a popular hashtag, more people might find your video in their social media feeds.
The more popular the hashtag is, however, the more content it will point to. So your video can get lost in all the noise. That's why you see so many posts with multiple hashtags instead of only one.
As a rule of thumb, you don't want to use hashtags that aren't relevant to your video, because users might flag it. If you don't know where to start, check out which hashtags your competitors are using in their own posts. You can use that information as a jumping-off point.
It's also important that you don't use too many hashtags. Studies show that posts with nine hashtags get the most engagement on Instagram, for example, so it's best to research each platform carefully and aim for an optimal number of hashtags.
3. Include Videos on Your Membership Website's Landing Page
So far, we've focused on social media and video platforms. However, it's important that you don't forget to upload your promotional video to your membership website's landing page, as well.
Your landing page's primary job is to convince users to become members. The way it does that is by breaking down the benefits of membership. Great copy goes a long way, but some users are more responsive to video marketing.
Including your promotional video on your landing page is a simple way to increase user signups. To add a video to your WordPress website, we recommend that you upload it to YouTube first, so the large file doesn't slow down your landing page's loading speed.
Once your video is on YouTube, you can take its link and paste it on its own row using the Block Editor. The editor automatically recognizes YouTube links, and will embed the video right away.
This approach saves you some bandwidth over uploading the video directly to your website. Plus, if you're already using YouTube for marketing, you can kill two birds with one stone. As for where to place the video, we recommend that you put it front and center on your landing page, so it's one of the first things your visitors see.
Conclusion
There's a reason businesses invest so much money in commercial and online video ads – they work. If that's true for some of the most successful companies today, there's no reason you can't make promotional videos work in your favor as well. Your budget might be smaller, but that makes every additional signup you get as a result of your videos more valuable.
If you're looking to boost your membership numbers using promotional videos, here are three approaches we recommend:
- Take advantage of free video platforms.
- Publish your videos on social media (using the right hashtags).
- Include videos on your membership site's landing page.
Do you have any questions about how to use promotional videos to drive signups? Let's go over them in the comments section below!
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