Video marketing is no longer optional. If you don’t include videos, or at the least visual content, in your marketing strategies then you’re passing up opportunities. Even the most basic mobile devices owned by the average consumer are now capable of streaming high-quality videos from anywhere.

According to Cisco, global internet traffic sourced from videos will comprise 80 percent of all internet traffic by 2019. Furthermore, four times as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about products or topics as opposed to reading about them.

Video not only offers a unique form of stimulation and engagement, you can also consume it a lot faster than other forms of media. This is important considering how active the average consumer’s lifestyle is. It’s why personalization and cross-platform experiences are such a huge deal.

Customers now have the power to choose when, where, how and how often they consume content. As a marketer, it’s your major responsibility to ensure available content for them, anytime.

Here are some ways you can ensure your video marketing strategies and content production are truly making an impact on your audience.

1. Always Optimize Your Video for Search

No matter where you share your video content — whether on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram — always ensure you update the proper information and tags to optimize search. This includes using a catchy or descriptive title, adding tags and related topics, uploading a closed captioning script where applicable and creating custom thumbnails.

YouTube, for instance, is one of the most popular video services that relies on proper search optimized data. Without the appropriate information, your video content will never show up in search outside of your shared channels. This is important because part of the reason for marketing in general is to reel in new audiences and potential customers. You want to expand your reach as much as possible.

2. Share Everywhere, and Encourage Sharing

You spent time and invested resources creating video content for your audience, don’t you want to maximize its view-ability? You should share your videos everywhere you have the option to. That includes Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, in email campaigns, on your blog and your official site. But don’t stop there. Encourage your audience to share with their friends, family and followers. The more viral klout your video has, the more traffic and potential reach you will achieve.

Take advantage of the embed video code offered by most social sharing and content sites and plaster that video everywhere you have the chance to do so.

3. Engage with Your Audience

Remember to reply and interact with your viewers and followers when they leave comments, ask questions or make suggestions. They are genuinely seeking some form of engagement, and so responding appropriately will help increase loyalty and retention. More importantly, the rest of your viewership will see how active you are, making them more likely to engage as well.

Don’t stop your content strategy at the point of creating and publishing a video. Keep it going, and continue to engage with your audience even on older videos and content.

Keep in mind there are many ways to engage with your audience. You can also deliver content in a video series that keeps people tuned in, provide seasonal branding materials or exclusive promotions. It’s not necessarily only about interacting through comments and replies. Engage your audience in new, innovative ways and try to think outside the box.

4. Review Analytics and Stats

Nearly every platform now offers some form of analytics or statistical data to see what’s happening with your audience and why. Pay attention to this information and audit it regularly. On platforms such as YouTube, you can see which videos garner the most views and engagements. This allows you to better plan future campaigns by delivering similar content that resonates with your audience.

If you spend enough time looking at your stats, you can identify trends and patterns within your videos that highlight your brand’s specialty — take advantage of this.

Pay attention to total views and engagements, the number of comments, shares and likes, and also which videos regularly see high viewer counts. You can study and use this information to influence future campaigns. For example, if you notice all your two minutes or less videos have the most views, you can quickly identify your audience’s ideal video length.

5. Keep It Brief

Long videos are great, especially when you have the time to sit down and really invest in some great visual content. Most people don’t have the time though, and even if they did, the average consumer has the attention span of a goldfish. Keep it brief and consumable in bite-sized chunks.

You can really see the impact of shorts videos on platforms such as Instagram or Snapchat. People love to create and consume video and visual content in brief, stinted environments and they love to consume it, as well. No matter where you’re publishing content, learn to be concise and get your message across quickly.

6. Give Back to Your Community

The general rule for content marketing is to create content — no matter what it is — that offers something of value to your audience. One of the best ways to do this is to produce content in the form of a tutorial, guide or advice piece. You’ll want to adopt the same approach for a majority of your videos. Not everything you produce needs to focus on giving back to the community, but to really make an impact you want to provide value to your audience.

Some of the best brand feeds offer helpful and informative video content for audiences, which garners shares, likes and views in the thousands.

7.  Sound Quality Matters

A majority of online and social platforms now allow you to shoot and record content with your mobile device and or smartphone. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should share professional-grade content that was shot with a mobile device.

One dead giveaway of an amateur in the video space relates to sound quality. When you can tell the audio for a video was shot using a terrible microphone, it quickly turns you off to the rest of the content. Even if you’re filming with a mobile device, make sure you have proper audio equipment available to record voices, sounds and even music. High-quality audio is as important as the visual fidelity of the content.

8. Stabilize the Video

Similar to poor audio, you can really tell the difference between an amateur and a pro channel based on the orientation and movement of the camera. For example, if you’re watching a video and notice jittery movement, or wobbly, unstable scenes, it’s a dead giveaway to the little planning and thought put into content creation.

Even if you’re traveling or shooting video out in public, try to use something like a stabilizer or tripod to ensure the video content produced is professional-looking.

9. Optimize Your Video Resolution and Quality

The platform where you publish your final content should be indicative of the quality and resolution. On YouTube, for instance, HD-quality video is preferred and available even on mobile devices. You’ll always want to ensure the video content you produce for said platform is of the highest quality available to you. Videos shot with a portrait-style view on a mobile device end up looking incredibly jarring when shared on YouTube.

On Facebook, however, video resolution and formats are quite different. Eighty-five percent of viewers on Facebook watch video content with the volume off, so you’ll want to create content conducive to captions and text-based narration.

In addition, platforms like Instagram accept mobile and portrait-oriented videos more readily because they know people record and share content with their mobile devices.

Retain awareness of the platform you’re participating on, and ensure the video is optimized in terms of quality, resolution and orientation.

So long as you follow the tips discussed here, your video content should be highly coveted amongst your audience. More importantly, you’ll garner the kind of attention and engagement that results in highly-shared and public content.