3 Ideas for Adding Calls to Action to Video Marketing Content

3 Ideas for Adding Calls to Action to Video Marketing Content:by Brendan Cournoyer
Online video presentations are valuable tools for content marketing. But are you doing enough to engage your viewers AFTER they’ve finished watching? The following call to action ideas could be a good place to start.
Content marketing is about more than just increasing traffic and pushing brand awareness – it’s about driving more business for your organization. To do that, it’s important to utilize compelling calls to action that encourage your audience to take the next steps toward lead conversion, sales – whatever your primary goals for that content might be. (Mark Sherbin shares some great insights on the different types of calls to action to consider over at Content Marketing Institute.)
I’ve written before that everything marketers create should have a strategic purpose, and video marketing content is no exception. One option is to surround your videos with compelling on-page calls to action, such as in the sidebar of your webpage or in the description field of your YouTube videos. But you can also include calls to action directly within the videos themselves.
How? Here are three call to action ideas to try with your next batch of marketing videos.
Call to Action Idea No. 1 – Link to your YouTube videos. Once a video is posted to your brand’s YouTube channel, you can add various video annotations for viewers to interact with. These are basically short messages that pop up during specified parts of your video. (You can actually get very creative with how these annotations appear, but a simple message/link format is the easiest to implement.)
Since annotations occur within the video player itself, they are much more likely to capture the attention of your audience. YouTube annotations can include links to other YouTube videos in your channel, making it easy for people to view more of your content.

Call to Action Idea No. 2 – Link to your website. You can also embed clickable links and buttons directly to your video for users to interact with. Unfortunately, you can’t link to external webpages (like your own company site) using YouTube annotations. You can, however, include calls to action for any webpage you’d like when creating and hosting video presentations with Brainshark.
Using this method, marketers can easily add calls to action to Brainshark videos that drive viewers toward additional content, product demos, contact pages and more.

Call to Action Idea No. 3 – Promote activity beyond the video. Sometimes, your calls to action won’t require your audience to click-through to another page or video at all. For example, say you’ve created a video to promote a webinar, event, white paper, eBook, or anything else that requires a web form. You could embed your video right on the registration page, and have the video’s speaker encourage viewers to sign up, or even promote participation by having an arrow point to the requested web fields.

Learn More: Marketing with Brainshark Video Presentations