Internet Marketing

8 Steps to Drive Traffic and Generate Leads Through Video from Start to Finish

8 Steps to Drive Traffic and Generate Leads Through Video from Start to Finish 8 Comments

Nate Schrader, a Content Specialist at Sunglass Warehouse, uses his math and art background to analyze marketing trends and create well tailored content to his audience. When he's not busy with things like polarized sunglasses and making eye safety tips cool, he brainstorms different influential ideas at his own site, NateSchraderIdeas.com.


Video MarketingGood videos are easy to market. Great, relevant videos, market themselves. It sounds obvious, but videos are one of those things that relies so much on a personal touch to the individual that it’s tough to find your starting point. But really, generating leads through video is just like creating any other piece of content except for a few technical things for search engines.

Let’s take a look at the big picture with a few examples so there’s more traffic of higher quality flowing to your site with the intent to follow-through in this eight stop process.


Step 1: Target the Right Audience

This is absolutely, positively THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP! Yes, it’s elementary Marketing 101 advice, but it’s often forgotten and costly to your bottom line.

Before you even consider ideas on who the video should target, ask if video is the right medium for your audience. Some demographics may be more receptive to a printable graphic or a step-by-step pictoral tutorial.

If you have a video-receptive audience, move forward to selecting a sharing-oriented audience and select one individual from that audience. By selecting one person for your video’s intentions, you will better achieve that connection with viewers in that group, who will be more likely to share the video.

Step 2: Choose a theme for your video

What was the last video you shared online and why? My guess would be three different reasons: you have a connection with the person owning the video and wanted to help push their content, it was helpful, or it was interesting.

Relationship building is another post on its own, but creating a video that solves a user’s need (like a tutorial) or is interesting (funny, engaging, out of the ordinary, etc.) will help them accomplish their browsing intent and probably share the video with other like-minded people aka their friends, coworkers, business contacts…

Step 3: Refine your theme with a little research

So you’ve chosen to make an interesting video or a helpful video. How do you narrow your focus? Other than your own opinions, the ultimate way in finding what your audience wants to hear is to ask them! Using social media and surveying your audience directly will further identify your audience and their interests.

After gathering the data, you can compile it into content. Even though it’s not video, my Sunglass Warehouse team ran a Pinterest contest and asked a question about Spring Break reading. After enough entries, we created a summer reading graphic with all their featured books. I (a guy, mind you) pinned it to my women’s interests board and it earned 30 repins. Not too bad for my audience doing the legwork!

Also, reaching out to niche bloggers for audience and topic advice is an underestimated weapon. Although a little time intensive, outreach with careful planning will help the bloggers feel appreciated enough to share your video later along with the helpful advice they’ll give.

For helpful videos intending to solve a problem, let’s take a look at a sunglasses content example in the works. A few idea outlets are:

  • Ask your customer service team what your customers struggle with. Our team reported customers wanted to know how to fix their sunglasses more than style advice.
  • Search YouTube and Search Engines for things like “guides” and “how to” + [your keyword]. “How to choose sunglasses” was a recommended Google search and YouTube yielded both “how to choose” and “how to fix” videos with over 15,000 views.
  • Search Yahoo Answers, Quora, and niche forums with “how to” + [your keyword]. Searching “how to fix sunglasses” led me to a well commented post on “how to fix scratches on your sunglasses.”
For interesting themed videos, there are probably way too many sites to list in a blog post. Consider where your intended demographic hangs out and gets their daily fill of the internet. Some good resources are:
  • The Chive, The Onion, CollegeHumor.com, FunnyOrDie.com, and other comical news websites
  • Current news websites or niche sites & blogs taking interests to the extreme. Think “National Geographic is to travel as _______ is to my website.”
  • Social media search engines like Topsy and Spezify
  • Searching YouTube and Pinterest’s “popular” categories. By searching “sunglasses” on Pinterest, we see most successful repins are extremely simple and have outfits containing sunglasses.

Step 4: Spy on your competitors

Spying on your competitors will give you a couple more insights for your video’s content. For one, you can search your initial idea, evaluate your future video’s competition, and decide whether to carry through on that idea or choose a different one.

Exploring YouTube for your SERP competitors will help you find their motives and see where their ideas can be improved upon. Looking in their site’s Q&A sections and help forums may also give you ideas if you have a similar product. Making a video of equal quality to your competitors probably won’t get you much traffic, but making a better, more helpful or more interesting video will raise your video above the rest.

Step 5: Make the Video

Finally, you’ve got your theme and now it’s time to create the video. Remember, speak to one individual – usually videos are viewed with one person behind the computer screen. The more you can address that individual and keep them in the conversation, the warmer and more appreciated the viewer feels until they melt into Video Sharing Land.

Step 6: Turn Viewers into Site Visitors

Finally, the step you’ve patiently awaited. To get your viewers to come to your site, here’s a few strategies:

  • Talk about an incentive to visit your site, like a giveaway or a free guide or ebook
  • Present the user with a coupon code in the video or in the video description
  • Stop the video abruptly and encourage viewers to visit your site’s video-hosting page to watch the full version or “see more.” Curiosity is a great way to reel viewers in.
  • Use pop-up links (in moderation! They can get annoying.) that relate to products mentioned.
  • Use call-to-action language, like “Come learn more” or “See additional helpful videos on…”
For more technical information, take a look at this sleep kit video as an example.

You should:
  • have a great, frequently searched term in your title. “How to fall asleep anywhere: The Emergency Sleep Kit”
  • Allow comments below your video. Great feedback for the next one!
  • Send your video’s script to YouTube and write up a video site map for your own site (or find tools that do it for you) so search engines can read more about the video’s content and feature your video in search engine results pages
  • Post the video on your site before YouTube! Rather than the YouTube page ranking highly, your video page will receive all the first time traffic that search engines will value. We posted a complete sleep kit product review PLUS the video on our blog before uploading to YouTube.
  • Place links to relevant landing pages in the first two sentences of the YouTube video description along with a call to action. This way, all viewers will see the links to your site, not just those wanting to read the entire description.

Step 7: Push your video throughout the web

Just like a great infographic or written article, a video needs many homes for the chance to be shared. Remember reaching out to blogs for advice earlier? They’re interested in how you’ve interpreted it and would probably like their audience to know about it, so be sure to contact them.

The Yahoo Answers pages and forum questions? Those people would be interested in a helpful video too, along with comment sections on related YouTube videos. Other niche blogs and perhaps even StumbleUpon (for the right content) are all great places to house your video and get the word out.

Step 8: MAKE IT COUNT!

Hooray! Visitors are coming in and you’re seeing the fruits of your labor. Now you need a welcoming landing page for all those new visitors and turn them into buyers. Redesigning the landing page, adding email signups fields, having a sale, and setting up retargeting strategies are all ways to turn your visitor into an eventual buyer. You may have to research more on conversion optimization, but it’s a valid point not to be left out of the main purpose of your video.

In summary, driving traffic to your video is all about relevant ideas through research, appreciating the viewer, optimizing it for search engines and YouTube, pushing it through the interested influencers, and having your site ready to receive the traffic. If I left anything out or you view things differently, feel free to comment! Good luck and let’s make the web’s video content a better place!

Image Credit: Stuart Miles

Nate Schrader, a Content Specialist at Sunglass Warehouse, uses his math and art background to analyze marketing trends and create well tailored content to his audience. When he's not busy with things like polarized sunglasses and making eye safety tips cool, he brainstorms different influential ideas at his own site, NateSchraderIdeas.com.

8 comments

  1. Thanks for these great tips!
    I agree that we often forget to target the right audience. It is very important for our business. I think that video is a poweful tool to get new leads and new sales. Thanks!

  2. I like the sentence “Great, relevant videos, market themselves”. To target the audience should be the first step of this process. To choose the best theme and to push video on web is also really important. Thanks for valuable tips.

  3. I just love this article, thanks!
    I will print your steps and take them one at a time before producing my videos series.
    Research is key- we tend to think we know what our target market wants;)
    Thank you again!

  4. All great tips to consider when producing videos for your business. Narrowing your focus and what you want to share with your audience is key. Keeping your video short and to the point is another way to spark interest, build curiosity in exchange for your visitor to click a link in your YouTube video description. This is a great way to keep your visitor moving towards learning more about you and how you are going to help them solve their problem or provide a product they are looking for. Thanks Nate for sharing these tips!

  5. thank you for sharing this interesting and helpful post with us, it has answered somany of my questions thank you.

  6. Really great article – certainly not the typical video ‘how to.’ Other than disagreeing with the notion that great videos (or great anything) market themselves … I found lots of useful information here! Thanks.

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