How Video Can Bolster Your PR Campaign - 10 Yetis Insight

It’s hard to escape video content, especially with the popularity of social media continuing to rise and the sharing of clips of cats being cute, people being stupid and various life hacks, to unsuspecting friends and family members never being easier. Video is completely unavoidable so, you should be thinking to yourself, why am I not using this media format, which could potentially be seen by millions, in my PR and marketing campaigns?

Video could be doing wonders for your clients and it’s my job to convince you to venture into the unknown so, let’s get cracking and analyse just how video can bolster your campaigns:

If Links Are Your aim, Video Should Be Your Game

Let’s be honest, the main aim for many businesses in this digital age that are looking to try out PR, is that they want to improve their SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) which means they will likely solely be measuring PR campaign success in the amount of links they receive per story.

Links, as many of us PR peeps know, are becoming ever more challenging to achieve for our clients, whether this be due to news agencies website policies or just because there is no reason for the journalist to add a link back to your client’s website (additional content here is key). It's always worth asking to get links added but it could well be time to mix-up your approach and do things differently.

Accompanying video content, as long as it’s relevant, can be an amazing way to get these links through to your client’s website. How, you may ask? It’s simple: just create a landing page where the video can go, populate the landing page with text that supports your story and send this page out to journalists.

They will be far more likely to link back to your client’s website if the video is hosted here as it gives the publication’s readers a reason to visit the site and comes across less promotional then just linking through to the homepage.

Stand Out From The Crowd

Journalists receive hundreds and hundreds (…and hundreds) of stories every day, especially if they work for one of the larger publications like the Mail Online or Daily Mirror, so you need to be offering something different to even have a shot at one piece of coverage.

Many of those working in digital PR will be using materials such as infographics, online tools or long-form articles to do this but, as video usually takes a longer time to plan, takes more manpower and money to put together, there will be many agencies out there that are hesitant to explore it. This gives those who are willing to dip their toe into this medium an edge and almost guarantees you a look-in from even the hardest to please journalists.

Endless Creative Opportunities

Exploring a new form of media opens up creative doors that would have previously been sealed shut and can be an incredibly fun experience for your team.

Brainstorming how best you can approach your video content to support the press release you may already have in your plan is the best way to encourage out-of-the-box thinking from your team.

Video can also open up endless story angles; for example, if you were to explore a social experiment, how the general public acts can completely spin a story from the supposed angle to something completely different.

Alongside opening up creative opportunities and possible story angles, filming in different cities across the UK enables you to strengthen your story with regional press, increasing the chance of coverage in specific areas.

Monitoring Has Never Been Easier

If you do upload your video to platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo before embedding them onto your clients landing page, it’s easy to monitor just how many people have viewed the video, which is awesome when you’re trying to share the success of the campaign to your client (alongside the abundance of links you’ll have already achieved).

The Numbers Speak For Themselves

As well as being easy to monitor, there has been huge amounts of research into the success of video campaigns. In 2018, Wyzowl and HubSpot released some insights in their State of Video Marketing Report, all of which make video as a supporting media for press stories hard to ignore.

They found that, 76% of marketers who have used video have reported a growth in traffic and 80% have seen that dwell time on their clients website has increased.

It was also uncovered that over 8 in 10 people (85%) wanted more videos from brands in 2018.

Some Examples From The Yetis

We have successfully dabbled in video for multiple clients, resulting in some incredible results. Examples include –

Female VS Male Drunk Driver Social Experiment (midrive.com)

Just recently we set up a hidden-camera stunt wherein we hired one female and one male actor to act drunk and try and get into their cars to see if random passers-by would help them get into the car. We did this in four different cities across the UK to give the story a regional hook. The story, with accompanying video, got over 100 links through to the landing page on Midrive’s website within the first 24 hours.

Dogs in Hot Cars Social Experiment (Confused.com)

We teamed up with the RSPCA for our client, Confused.com, to see how many people would stop to help a dog left in a car on a hot day. We placed a realistic looking dog in the backseat of a vehicle with blacked out windows and played realistic dog noises to alert passers-by. Only four out of 100 people stopped to help the ‘pooch’.

This story received 40+ links on sites with a high DA.

Video can be a perfect addition to pretty much any campaign you may have in mind and we do urge you explore this medium yourself. If you have any questions for our PR or video team, please do reach out.