The most obvious and important aspect of getting your video content seen on the web is to have great content.  I have always been a believer in the “content is king” dictum, and it is even truer than ever in a “pull” media world.  You can read my earlier post about what makes for engaging content, here.

Great content is the most important thing, and mostly what the purveyors of content occupy themselves thinking about and figuring out.  But it’s not everything.  There are two other essential elements to a successful content strategy, which are less often discussed, but just as important:  Promotion and Delivery

Promotion

Nothing attracts an audience without paid promotion.  That goes for books, plays, movies, TV shows, and anything else you can imagine.  Just take a look at the amount of money the networks commit to promoting a new series they plan to broadcast, and you’ll get an idea of how important promotion is in the media world.

So if you want your content to be seen (and that is the point, isn’t it?), then you need to plan for (and budget for) promotion.  Which is not to say that you can’t get some nearly “free” promotion on social media.  That doesn’t hurt, and can gain your videos some traction.  But it’s not enough.  So assume that some money will need to be spent on paid search, display ads, and even some traditional media.  The media mix will depend on your intended target, and that’s a big subject all by itself, which I can’t get into here.  But there are plenty of pros out there willing to help you figure out a Promotional plan (for a price).

And for those who are certain that their video will go “viral” and attract millions of views without any paid promotion … get off the pipe.  It’s extremely rare.  And if you examine the darlings of the viral video phenomenon, you will usually see a significant effort to start the ball rolling with paid promotion.  If the video then takes off and garners a considerable amount of earned media exposure, then you’ve scored and can consider it a great success.  But if you don’t give it some promotion to start, it’s very unlikely it’ll get much attention.

Delivery

The last piece of this puzzle is actually delivering the videos to the consumers.  Since this is an area that is mostly technical, it’s not top of mind for most marketers.  But it’s essential.  Yes, you can load the videos up to a YouTube channel and hope for the best, but I’m talking about a marketing effort that makes engaging content one of it’s pillars, but that also includes direct-purchase or consumer relations aspects.  Which means you’ll want to serve the videos from an owned portal of some sort:  either a dedicated microsite, or an adjunct area of the main web site.  Syndication to other sites doesn’t hurt (YouTube, et al.), and that can help drive traffic, but again, that’s a separate issue all on it’s own.

You will need to plan for the possibility that your videos will achieve significant scale (just in case the effort is successful).  That means that you could be serving a couple of thousand requests one day, and then a million the next, with no advance warning.  So you need a server technology partner that will provide the scaling necessary in real time, and the technical infrastructure to keep your site online no matter what.  I learned this during one of my first forays into the online video realm.  We produced a number a very good videos for the client’s site, but the client insisted on serving them from their own internal company servers.  This didn’t work very well.  If the consumer actually chooses to come to your site and clicks on a video, they expect it to play without much delay, and without stopping every 10 seconds to buffer.

How many times would you think someone is going to return to your site if they have an unsatisfactory experience there the first time?  My guess would be never.  So not only do you lose the potential positive outcome from that interaction, but you probably lost that individual forever.  Bad move.  Don’t cheap out on the delivery.

There are a couple of acronyms that you need to learn.  The first is DSA, for Dynamic Site Acceleration.  I won’t try to explain the technology here, but suffice to say that there are companies that will make sure your site behaves responsively as the bandwidth usage increases (Akamai & AT&T seem to be leaders in this area).  So if you do get a lot of traffic, it won’t slow your service to a crawl.

The other is ABR, Adaptive Bit Rate technology.  With the importance of mobile access increasing, this has become a hot issue.  Basically, the companies selling this technology have a way to figure out what device the consumer is connected with (operating system, screen size, bandwidth), and then serve them the file that will produce the best visual experience based on those parameters.  That may be a somewhat less than optimal version of your content, but it beats a spinning icon waiting for the content to download.  My own (admittedly ad-hoc) research suggests that most people will give up on it and click away within 10 seconds.

As a guy I heard speak in NY recently said, these are “high class problems”, and will only become an issue if you get a lot of traffic.  But isn’t that why you created the content in the first place?  Consumers are getting used to first-rate experiences on-line no mater how they are connected, and so the bar keeps getting raised.  You’ve got to keep up with those expectations, or re-evaluate your strategy if that’s not feasible.

Figuring out how to get consumers to watch your content (promotion), and planning for the day when your videos get a million hits (distribution), are absolutely necessary in the early stages of project planning.