What is video seeding?
Promoting and distributing your video, which has the potential to be viral, is video seeding.
Video seeding is paid promotion for your video content; it is a marketing strategy wherein the video often appears as promoted advertisements in most video sharing or social media sites.
Why video seeding?
Every business has a marketing strategy, or rather every business should have a marketing strategy. Earlier, it was largely only content marketing but with the slow and steady boom of video trends, video marketing strategy has been in the rise for the past 10 years. Thus, businesses had to add another vertical to their strategical advancements, the video sector. What was different with the video sector was its global reach, and immediacy in terms of connectivity with the Internet. And, as always, a new medium sells like hot cakes, so trends turned toward videos being used to express ideas, views, etc. Thereon, with the popularity of YouTube, “viral videos” started to become a phenomenon. Anything that is out-of-the-box, funny, unthinkable passes off to be “viral”.
Business marketers took opportunity at this phenomenon. Although the line drawn between a business video and a viral video is pretty clear, the process in which it is distributed is of utmost importance in marketing; after all, viral videos too are at the end of the day being marketed word-of-mouth, through most viewed/popular videos, or by being written about in blogs/articles, etc. So what exactly is this process of distributing the videos, methodically? It’s Video Seeding, indeed!
How to Seed Videos (A Step-by-Step Process)?
Create a Powerful Video
No one else knows your business better than you and your team does. All your marketing efforts lies on what you create. So create a video that influences, interests, and informs your target audience. In this mix, you will be giving them new information, inspiring them to take action, and marketing your business, all at the same time. When you focus on creating the video, do not deviate from the core idea - your business must be the highlight, revolve all other elements around the idea of using your business. Your video should be so powerful that it creates a non-existent need among your target audience, driving them to patronize your business model. You could achieve this by listing your business use cases and centering your video script around it. Know that you don’t need to directly emphasize on your business. You could use your portfolio or projects completed; center your video around it and simply place a watermark of the name of your business in it. That’s it, it will garner much attention.
Distributing the Video
To get noticed and get those meager likes and shares, you host (upload) your video online, in a common space (I will discuss about sharing your videos specifically to influencers in the following paragraph). Identify video hosting websites for businesses. Now upload your video in all of them. This is because you need maximum attention, so full throttle. When you do so, your video starts to trend in the respective websites; although to not a widespread extent, your video establishes firm ground in foreign soil. This is a crucial step, so make sure that you have covered maximum number of sites.
Promoting the Video
Now that you have established presence, it is time to promote it. And, this you would do wisely. There are two ways you can promote your content: paid or free. Paid content is where your video is displayed in promotional advertisements on websites by your video hosting service (for example, YouTube or Vimeo). When the user is on that website, depending on their search history, the video will appear as a snippet. Whether they choose to watch or not is the proof of the pudding.
Another method of promoting paid content is by analysing top influencers. Now, who are these top influencers and how do you determine them in your niche? Top influencers are normal people who are passionate about your niche. They are the ones that are most active in blogging or participating in forums related to topics of your niche. These are the people you need to look out for. As their blogs and forums are the areas of interest that will be followed by your target audience. So by connecting with a concentrated group of influencers, you are reaching a large target audience. Depending on the influencer and his/her popularity, you either pay them directly or reach out to them through email, requesting them to feature your content and converse about it (for free). Note that an influencer in your niche is an established person in the space and his/her opinion will be taken seriously by your target audience. Remember that when you email them, do not do a bulk-send operation. Take the time and individually mail each one, maybe highlighting their individual strengths and what aspect of their activity in your niche interests you. This ensures a personal touch and they are rest assured that you have painstakingly taken the time to go through their contributions. Gently form a relationship and seed videos to your influencers. This is how you slowly start to seed your videos, one at a time.
Normally, a viral video, by nature, doesn’t need video seeding to go viral. Due to its viral content, it will become “most watched” just by likes, shares, and word-of-mouth advertisement. But where’s the challenge in that? The challenge lies in taking a normal but creative video and making it viral. One that has real value, one that has a story to tell. The best way to organically grow your video marketing strategy is by video seeding.
