These days, when it comes to online marketing, video is king. YouTube is the second most-visited website on the Internet, with several days of content uploaded every single minute. More than 50% of people watch online video content daily, and video generates more than 1,000% more shares on social media than text or images. Marketers need to be creating videos, and they need to be doing it well.

Working with WordPress offers excellent opportunities for companies looking to maximize their video content.

Customize

Plugins and open-source tools can provide increased flexibility for videos hosted on WordPress. A multimedia encoder such as Player.js lets you add scroll features, a resume button, and a progress bar – all small improvements that make it much easier for customers to engage with your content on their own terms. No one enjoys an autoplay video that can’t be paused. It’s guaranteed to get customers to navigate away from a page and not come back.

Incorporate other platforms

Complement your WordPress-hosted video content with new, fast-growing formats such as livestreaming, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Live. These relaxed formats allow for a different style of content-making that may not fit with your more structured video content, but can be a great supplement to it.

Vary the style

Think about the different styles and genres of video content, and how each one of them might work for you. The more variety and interest you can create with your videos, the better. No one wants to re-watch the same thing over and over again. You might want to interview an expert for one campaign, provide product tutorials or a ‘how-to’ for another, and provide testimonials in another. If you’re going to think even more outside the box, you could even bring in an animator to create fun, animated videos for you!

Optimize

You need to make sure your video content is being shown at its best once it’s hosted on your site. Make sure it’s in the correct format and resolution. If your filming equipment can’t do this for you, try video conversion tools. These video content heroes can convert video into more web-ready formats and file sizes in just minutes with no loss of quality. You can also use YouTube embeds, although we don’t recommend this option for WordPress sites as they’re not easy to customize.

See the whole picture

When creating video content, you need to remember that while the video itself is crucial, it’s also just one part of your overall marketing strategy. You need to create video content not just because video performs so well, but because it works for you. Don’t just create random videos. Make them useful, relevant, and engaging, or your customers won’t watch. You also need to think about how video works with other elements of your marketing campaigns, where it sits on your web pages or socials, what text or images you need to support it, and what messaging app you use to promote it.