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In a recent study that Twenty Over Ten did of 215 financial advisory firms, we found that those firms who reported getting six or more new clients per year often incorporated video into their digital marketing strategy. I’m Samantha Russell from Twenty Over Ten and today I want to walk you through best practices when incorporating video onto your advisor website or using videos in your blog posts.

But first, let’s take a minute to talk about why video helps you propel your business and grow much faster. There’s a few reasons:

Number one: videos can be much easier and simpler to digest and to get to the heart of what it is you’re trying to convey. It’s a lot easier for someone to watch a quick video to learn about you and your firm than it is read lots of paragraphs of texts.

Another reason is that through video we’re able to communicate and pick up on all of those nonverbal pieces of communication that are so important to building rapport and communicating in an authentic way. And if you think about it, for most people when they’re choosing an advisor today, they’re not just choosing based on credentials or how well you can invest their money, but they’re really looking to work with someone that they will like and someone they can trust, and it’s incredibly hard to know whether you’ll like someone or be able to trust them just by reading about them. But a video helps convey that person’s true personality, it puts a face to a name, and it helps you to build rapport much quicker. So those are just some great reasons why you’d want to include video in your strategy.

Now, when it comes to what kind of video you should be creating and where we should put the video I have some tips for you:

Number one: when you’re thinking about video there’s two different types that you will want to incorporate. There is the more branded video, which would be something you create once. It’s going to last a while. It is more formal – you talking about your firm, why someone should want to work with you, who you serve, all that good stuff. And that would appear right on the homepage of your website. So a quick example: here we have wealthkeel.com’s website, and you can see here when we land on the website we are going to see a video and we see Chad Chubb, the advisor’s face, we see his logo and that he does financial planning for Gen X and Gen Y physicians and their families. So if we watch this video it’s going to be a quick overview of Chad talking about who he works with and the types of services he provides. That’s not going to change day in and day out, right?

On the other end of the spectrum, we have video that is more of what we call a vlog, or a video blog. And so for those types of videos you’re going to be changing those pretty regularly, right? You’ll record them on one particular topic and do a much more deep-dive into that topic. So here from the Highball Advisors website we have a few examples. I love if you don’t have a thumbnail that has an actual play button to include the word video in the title for a higher click-through-rate and people will know then that it is a video, but you can see here different topics that the advisor has just created a quick video about. So if we were to click on that post it will take us to the blog and then if you scroll down you can actually go in and play and watch the video. So that’s one way to do it.

Another example here from Retirement Matters Illinois. He has both a blog that is written editorial-style blog posts as well as a blog that is more video-style posts. And so he has different toggles you can go through so you can just look at his written blogs or you can look at all of his video blogs, and here again, there’s a preview of what that video will look like.

So when you’re thinking about adding video to your own website there’s a few things I want you to keep in mind:

Number one: you absolutely don’t want to host your own videos. Instead, you want to upload them to a platform like YouTube or Vimeo where the speed will be much faster and it also gives you a better chance for exposure. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, so it’s a great place to host your videos, and people might be there searching for something like “can capital gains push me into a higher tax bracket?” and end up landing on your video, even though they’ve never heard of you before. So that’s one tip.

The second tip is I want you to make sure you optimize your video for SEO purposes so you’ll notice with all of these videos that I’m showing you the advisor also has a transcript of what it is they talked about. That’s because search engines cannot crawl a video on your site, so by including the transcript below you’re going to get all that good SEO juice that you hope to get from any other kind of content. If you’re first uploading your videos to somewhere like YouTube you can actually transcribe the video there, and they’ll give you the transcript that you can copy and paste into your blog post. This is also great for compliance because it’s a lot easier oftentimes for compliance teams to read the text and approve it that way or give you feedback on what we need to change, so when you’re getting the transcript you can also go ahead and submit that transcript to your compliance officer for approval before you publish.

And the last tip is to create a great thumbnail. So you can see here these beautiful thumbnails that Dave Grant from Retirement Matters Illinois has created. If we head over to Twenty Over Ten’s YouTube channel you’ll see we have all different kinds of little thumbnail images here. These are going to entice someone to want to click on your video more when it has the title of the video, a great graphic, something to compel them to want to choose your video overall all the others. If you’re not sure how to make a thumbnail you can go to Canva, and they have a free resource template where you can create video thumbnails for your video.

Okay, so once you’ve optimized your video, you’ve uploaded it to one of these other services, how do you actually go about adding it to your website? Now, depending on what site provider you have, it’s going to be a little bit different. So let’s go ahead and just choose a video. So if we have this video, we can see once it loads it’s going to give us this URL right here at the top, right? So all I need to do is actually copy that link, and then I’m going to go ahead and paste it into the page that I want to add it to. So I copied the link of the video I wanted to include, and let’s go ahead and add it to a blog post. So let’s say this is the blog post I want to add it to. You’re going to choose where on the page you want to add it, and in the Twenty Over Ten editor this is what the blogs look like. You’re going to go ahead and click insert, then you just paste! You paste the URL right here, and when I click insert, watch this. How beautiful! It just goes in and pops that video right in here for me.

Now, if you’re not using Twenty Over Ten for your videos, there are other ways you might want to add them to your website. Each platform is a little bit different in the practices that they have, but once you go ahead and click on the video, whether you’re on Vimeo or you’re on YouTube, if your platform doesn’t allow you to just copy and paste the link, there should be below the video a little button here that says share, and you’ll go ahead and just click that. Then it will tell you how to embed the video. So this little embed code right here, if you’re on a platform different than Twenty Over Ten, you can copy that embed code and then go back into your website, find where in the code you want to insert, and then you’ll just click this little code view and then paste.

Now, if you’re not tech-savvy, you might need to get your web developer involved in order to do this, but again, if you’re on a platform like Twenty Over Ten where we make it easy just to copy and paste the URL, it should be very simple for you to do. [Learn more about embedding videos on your advisor website.]

So those are my tips for you today on why it’s so important for you to add video to your advisor website. I hope you found this helpful, and if you’re looking for even more marketing tips you can connect with us over at the Twenty Over Ten blog: blog.twentyoverten.com Thanks and have a great day!