How to Increase the Reach of Employer Brand, EVP and Employee Story Videos

Congratulations! You’ve storyboarded, filmed and edited your first in-house video … now what? Video planning and production is the first step to getting authentic and engaging culture content in front of your ideal candidate. The next step may feel a little daunting, but it’s essential for making sure your video gets found.

Step two is to search engine optimize (SEO) your video. Don’t be alarmed, it sounds technical but really it’s quite straightforward and I’m going to break it down into a checklist of simple actions for you. Once you've SEO'd, you're ready to start promoting!

Pssst! What’s video SEO and why do I need it?

I’m glad you asked! Video SEO is simply optimizing your video to be indexed and rank on the search engine results pages for relevant keyword searches. Video SEO will also help your video appear in more of YouTube’s suggested videos.

To ensure your video has the greatest chance of success, the final step in the VideoMyJob editing process prompts you to complete each element of video SEO outlined below.

A step-by-step guide to video SEO

Make sure your thumbnail image is engaging

In the final step of VideoMyJob editing process, you have the option to select a thumbnail (video cover) design and choose either a frame from your video, or upload an image for your video thumbnail. You can zoom in and position your image within the frame. Think carefully about your image selection.

If you want to capture attention, build trust and connect with candidates emotionally, there is one simple thing you can do: put a (whole) face in it!

Use the zoom and drag features to perfectly position your cover stars and whatever you do, don’t crop heads or obscure faces with logos and play buttons! To avoid using that weird ‘you caught me with my mouth open’ frame, take a few posed photos during filming to use as your video thumbnail image.

Optimize your video title

You have two goals with your video title: include your target keyword and maximise your click-though-rate (CTR). Craft a compelling and accurate video title that makes people want to click play. But don’t be tempted to use clickbait titles. You might get more clicks in the short-term. But your audience retention numbers will make YouTube bury your video.

Experiment with keywords such as branded company hashtags, job family descriptors and employee benefits. Don’t forget to use your target keywords several times in your video script. YouTube understands what you say in your videos (mostly) and it helps them understand that your video is about that keyword.

Keep in mind that only your video title and cover display in Google's 'All' search results, so make them matter!

Optimize your video description

We recommend writing a 200+ word description for each video. Yep, you read that right, 200+.

Longer descriptions give search engines a deeper understanding of your video’s topic. Which in turn helps your video show up in search and as a suggested video on YouTube.

YouTube and Google's video search tab display the first 125 characters of your description in the search results, so try to make your first 125 chars attention-grabbing. Always add a full description for each of your videos, this should be your attention-grabbing intro followed by an excerpt from your video transcript or a bulleted outline of the video content.

Add any branded company hashtags or hashtags that are directly relevant to the department, office location, your employer brand or your industry.

Create a call to action

Don’t forget to give your viewers a clear next step after watching your video. While your video is processing you will be prompted to ‘add a link/url’ this is your call to action (CTA), usually this is the webpage you want your audience to visit after watching your video. It could be a job posting, a quiz, an event registration page, ideally the CTA directs viewers to a page where you can capture contact details or encourage an application submit.

You should also consider adding unique tracking code (UTM) to your CTA links, this way you can track the source of your web visitors to specific videos. Speak to your Google Analytics admin to ensure you have access to Google’s campaign and source reports.

Don’t forget to publish your video!

Once your draft video is approved, don’t forget to go back and publish your video. Make sure you set the video to ‘public’ if you want to reach the widest audience. Publishing your videos has the added bonus of turning on your video analytics. Only published videos track data such as views and watch time in the VideoMyJob app and dashboard.

Note: You can go back at any time and edit your title, thumbnail image, description, privacy settings or call to action in both the VideoMyJob app and web dashboard.

Video promotion strategies

500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. With so much video being shared every minute, you need to get serious about sharing and promoting your video. Content without the marketing is not content marketing – it’s just content. 

Luckily the VideoMyJob app is loaded with features to help you get your videos in front of the right people!

Announce new video content to your lists

Use the VideoMyJob Chrome Extension or in-app Email & SMS Campaign function to distribute the video to colleagues, stakeholders and talent pools.

Your contact lists should generate lots of high-quality views. The view spike can push your video to people’s YouTube homepages, which leads to more views!

Share your video on social media

Share your video to connected social channels via the app or download and share your video natively on LinkedIn.

Don’t just share to your official company pages, make it easy for employees to share on their own accounts by creating a central resource and easy-to-follow guides for sharing (think about branded hashtags, UTMs to track the impact of employee advocacy and any no-nos you need to consider).

One of the benefits of authentic employee-created video content is that your employees are more likely to share company content, your job is to help them to be successful at this.

Embed your video on your career’s site and job postings

Use the VideoMyJob Chrome Extension to embed links and easily add your videos to your website, career pages, blogs and job postings. Try to place your embedded video as close to the top of the page as you can. This shows Google that your video is the main piece of content on that page.

Increase your reach with a paid social campaign

Consider expanding your reach with paid social advertising on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook. VideoMyJob’s in-app Boost feature (Facebook and YouTube only) is a very cost-effective tool for promoting videos, you can set your budget, campaign duration and keywords in the app or via the dashboard.

A word on video quality

It’s probably worth mentioning that no amount of excellent SEO or video promotion will make a confused or poor quality video successful.

But what’s a ‘quality’ video? Well, technically a quality video is measured by a few key metrics like:

• Session time
• Watch time
• Audience retention
• Engagement
• Click through rate

But before you even hit record, you need to know why you’re making a video, who you are making your video for and what you want your audience to do as a result of watching your video.

If you need some help, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Planning Brilliant Videos, or video marketing expert Paul Finn’s Recipe for Engaging Videos.

And there you have it, a step-by-step guide to increase the reach of your employer brand, EVP and employee story videos. Follow this guide and watch the views and click-throughs for your next video soar!