10 Best Video Marketing Practices and Resources

7 min readFeb 10, 2019

Updated: April 2021

Every year, video content continues to grow, and in 2021 video is expected to once again dominate the market.

Last year I quoted Hubspot in saying that video marketing is long past the status of an “up-and-coming” tactic” — and this statement is truer than ever.

In a survey on video marketing trends 57% of queried business owners chose YouTube as the most effective social media platform to distribute video content.

Our brains remember 95% of the information that we see in a video, while we only remember 10% of the information that we read.

People engage with video more than any other form of content (written, audio, images, etc.). In fact, YouTube has an average session duration of 9 minutes and 28 seconds. That’s more than many other social networks.

When asked about the best social media site to generate more interactions with video marketing content, 39% of surveyed business owners said that Facebook led the way. Instagram came second, with 32% of the answers, and YouTube came third place with26% of the votes.

Video marketing can help you tell your story in a more entertaining, educational and inspiring way while also connecting you more intimately with your audience and builds trust. 57% of consumers have said that watching videos gave them more confidence to purchase online.

It is also a boon for SEO efforts helping you rank higher in Google. You are 53x more likely show up on page 1 of Google if you have a video embedded on your website.

If it’s not already part of your strategy, get on board with video with these best practice tips.

1. Consider Your Purpose

Being clear about your purpose will help you create video content that resonates with your audience.

If you read any of my writing on social media strategy, you know I always start with the why before the how.

Do you want to showcase your product? Educate your customers? Help your audience to get to know you better?

If you can’t find a compelling reason to create a video then you will be wasting your time.

2. Tell A Story

If a picture says a thousand words, a video tells a million.

Storytelling is one of the most effective ways to communicate a message in any medium, and video lends itself particularly well to the storytelling format.

Create a story arc for your video— a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every engaging story has this structure, called the dramatic arc. It starts with something new, and increases tension with difficulties that the characters must overcome, often because of some failure or crisis in their past, and then leads to a climax where the story resolves itself.

Recommended Reading: Video Storytelling The Essential Guide For Business

3. Create an Emotional Response

Numerous studies have found emotional arousal plays a key role in driving social sharing.

Neuroeconomist, Paul Zak, conducted a study in which research subjects watched an emotive video of a father speaking about his young son who was dying of cancer. Taking blood samples of subjects before and after reading a story about a father and his terminally ill son, Zak found after reading their blood levels contained an increase of cortisol and also oxytocin the human bonding or empathy chemical

4. Make Sure Your Videos Work Without Sound

The vast majority of Facebook videos are watched without sound.

If you plan on sharing your videos on social media platforms, it is important to make sure that your videos still convey your message while muted.

5. Keep It Simple

“Bombarding your audience with too much information at one time never ends well — they’ll go elsewhere to find the answers.” — Wistia

Your goal should be clarity. You want to communicate a couple of simple ideas in ways that viewers will remember.

6. Optimize For Search Engines

The following tips come from Search Engine Watch:

Provide transcription to your video, so it will appear on search engines.
Optimize your video file metadata with related and user intent keywords on the video’s title and description.
Create a video sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.

7. Make Videos Mobile Responsive

The following tips come from Search Engine Watch:

Most videos are watched on mobile devices. A survey conducted by Facebook found that people are 1.5x more likely to watch videos on a smartphone than on a computer.

Use responsive video players like YouTube, Vimeo, or Brightcove. Those platforms will automatically increase or reduce video quality according to the viewers’ bandwidth.
Watch out for the text size, because a text that appears big on a TV screen will look small on a smartphone screen.
Adjust the video playing time according to your purpose. An hour-long behind-the-scenes video is suited for YouTube, while a 60 seconds teaser is best for Instagram.

8. Create a clear call-to-action

The following tips come from Search Engine Watch:

Make sure to include a clear call-to-action in every video that you post. Without a clear CTA, viewers will be confused and not sure of what to do next. If you want more traffic to your site, it’s your duty to make it easier for the audience to find your site.

Use YouTube End Screens (the last 5–20 seconds of a video) to include up to four clickable elements, you can send people to your website, your other videos, channels, or a particular landing page.
When posting on social media, include a CTA and a link that leads to your website or landing pages.

9. Use These Video Tools

There is a host of super low-cost video creation and editing tools out there.

Here are four of my go-to tools.

Adobe Spark is a free suite of apps that allow both web and mobile users to create and share visual content — like posts for social media, graphics, web stories, and animated videos.

Biteable is a desktop tool that bills itself as “The World’s Simplest Video Maker.” You can choose from a selection of pre-designed templates or you can build your video from scratch yourself. Biteable hosts a large collection of video clips and images (many of these clips are included with the free plan) to add to your templates. It also provides simple animation and claymation sequences to help you produce engaging explainer videos in just a few hours.

Ripl is a mobile app (iOS and Android) that lets you create short animated videos with professionally designed templates. It’s integrated with the major social media platforms, so sharing your final video is easy. Once you’ve connected your social profiles to Ripl, you can post directly to Facebook, Facebook groups, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. You can export your videos if you want to use them outside of your social media platforms.

Lumen5 is a desktop tool designed for bloggers to convert their blog posts into video. Simply input your blog post’s url and Lumen 5 will import the text and images from that post and auto-create your video. You can then edit it, swap out images, upload other images and add music before you hit publish. The video above is one I created with Lumen 5 from an original blog post.

10. Use These Free Stock Video Sites

Turn to one of these free stock video sites to source content for your video marketing.

Pexels provides over 3,800 high-resolution photos, collated from other free image sites — making it one of the largest free image directories. Pexels has also added a large library of stock videos to its site under the CC0 license ( so you can edit and use the videos for personal or commercial purposes without asking for permission or linking back to the original source.) Use the site’s list of popular searches to find the most in-demand stock video.

Videezy hosts a wide variety of high-quality video clips to choose from, in both HD and 4K resolution. It’s a freemium tool, meaning any clips marked with “Pro” are premium clips that are only available by paying with credits.

Stock Footage 4 Free has a wide range of video footage which comes with a royalty-free license, meaning you can use their clips without any fees. The videos on Stock Footage 4 Free are organized in categories, making it easy to find a clip that will fit your brand.