The Importance of a Killer Video Strategy
In our digital age, the medium you choose to tell your brand's story can be just as important as the story itself. With the rise of technology and social media platforms, video content has surged to the forefront of effective marketing. If you haven’t harnessed the potential of video in your marketing strategy — yikes — it’s time to dive in.
Video marketing is not as simple as uploading a video to YouTube and hoping for the best. You need a clear and deliberate video marketing strategy that aligns with your goals, targets your audience, and delivers your message across different platforms and channels. A video marketing strategy is how a company creates targeted video content to promote its brand and increase conversions
Video Content and Strategy
Video content is immersive, engaging, and easily digestible. A well-crafted video can hook your audience, convey your brand message, and inspire viewer action in just a few seconds. Its combination of visual, auditory, and emotional components creates a powerful narrative tool to breathe life into your brand and solidify your online presence.
Video Boosts Conversions and Sales
Honestly, that’s not shocking. Vision is our dominant sense, and most information transmitted to our brain is visual. It’s how we make sense of the world and act accordingly. If pictures boost engagement, imagine what moving pictures can do for your business.
Increase Your Reach With Shareable Video
Because so many of us enjoy video content, it makes it more shareable with our friends, family, and colleagues. For businesses, this means more people are getting to see your brand and its offerings. Popular video-sharing platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have changed the content consumption landscape. Their algorithmic preferences for video content allow brands to reach a broader and more diverse audience.
Further, the shareable nature of videos offers a high chance of virality, pushing your brand into untapped markets and customer bases.
It’s also the most popular and engaging content type on social media. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all favor video content and offer various features and formats to create and share videos. Video can help you grow your social media following, reach new audiences, generate shares and comments, and build brand awareness.
Create a Personal Connection
Videos offer a unique opportunity to form a personal bond with your audience. They allow you to share your products and the faces and values behind them. From behind-the-scenes footage to CEO messages, videos can humanize your brand, helping to cultivate trust and loyalty among your customers.
Boost Your SEO
Businesses use video to improve their SEO efforts. You have to make sure your content is SEO optimized, but using video marketing helps place you higher on Google's search algorithm. YouTube video previews are a great example of how Google prioritizes video content for users. It's worth saying, however, that the content must be relevant to the user first. That’s the gist of Google’s query matching.
The world's largest search engine, Google, loves video content. Incorporating high-quality videos into your website can significantly improve your search engine rankings. Videos encourage visitors to stay on your site longer, reducing your bounce rate, which signals to search engines that your site provides valuable content. This, in turn, boosts your website's SEO and increases your visibility online.
Video Builds Trust and Credibility
Businesses can connect with customers more personally and professionally through video. From explainer videos and how-tos to product demos and virtual tours to 'meeting the teams' and onboarding, dozens of applications help build trust with a wider audience and establish your brand as a leader.
Video effectively educates your audience about your products or services, answers their questions, provides tips and tutorials, showcases customer testimonials, or shares industry insights. Video can help you establish yourself as an authority in your field, build trust and credibility with your audience, and position yourself as a solution provider.
Video Content Can Boost Conversion Rates and Leads
Videos have the potential to dramatically increase conversion rates. Whether it's a product demonstration, a how-to guide, or a heartfelt customer testimonial, videos can often convey the benefits of a product or service far more effectively than text. They create an instant, tangible connection with your audience, making it easier for potential customers to transition into actual buyers.
Eighty-six percent of marketers say that video marketing helps lead generation, and 81% say it has a positive impact on sales. The video format is highly engaging and it works wonders across multiple channels. Embedding video content into your website and service pages is a great way to drive engagement. Often you'll see clever companies using video in these areas to demo products and services.
Video Marketing is Highly Versatile
Video marketing is one of the newest additions to your promotion toolbox, and it's one of the most versatile and profitable digital marketing tools available. You can use video to educate your audience, showcase your products and services, build brand awareness, and more.
How to Create a Video Marketing Strategy
Determine Your Goals
Before creating video content, determine your goals:
What do you want to achieve with your video marketing campaign?
Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales?
How will you measure success?
Define your target audience persona and your SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely) goals before creating any videos.
Identify Your Target Audience
Once you've determined your goals, identify your target audience. All successful marketing campaigns must start with research.
Who are you targeting?
What are their pain points, needs, preferences, and behaviors?
Who are you trying to reach with your video?
Stay On Brand and Nail Down Your Message
Your videos should reflect your brand identity, voice, tone, values, and personality. They should also have a clear and consistent message that aligns with your goals and resonates with your audience. Whether you want to inform, entertain, inspire, or persuade your viewers, make sure you have a strong value proposition and a compelling call to action in every video.
Set a Budget that Makes Sense
Video production can be a complicated process. Different types of video content may require different expertise and equipment. Consider the costs of scripting, storyboarding, filming, editing, animating, and distributing your videos. You also need to decide whether you want to produce your videos in-house (😕) or outsource them to a professional video production company (👋😉).
Choose Your Video Type
You can create a whole host of videos to shout your message. Some examples include:
Brand videos
Explainer videos
Demo videos
How-to and explainer videos
Expert interviews and Q&A videos
Event videos
Case studies and testimonial videos
User-generated content
What content vibes best with your target audience? What will help you reach your desired objective? Be thoughtful about your audience journey, and you can pick your poison accordingly.
Create Your Video
As mentioned earlier, you can create your video in-house or work with a professional video production company. Either way, make sure your video is high-quality and engaging.
Optimize your videos for each channel to knock it out of the park. Different platforms and channels have varying requirements and best practices for video content. You need to optimize your videos for each channel to ensure they look good, load fast, and reach the right audience.
Consider the following when developing your video for different channels:
Video length
Video format
Video resolution
Video title
Video description
Video tags
Video thumbnail
Video captions
Video subtitles
Video keywords
It’s also smart to research your audience's preferences and behaviors on each channel to determine the best time and frequency to post your videos.
Promote Your Video
Once your video is complete, it's time to promote it. Share your video on social media, embed it on your website, and include it in your email marketing campaigns.
Test, Analyze, and Test Again
Video marketing is not a one-and-done deal. You need to monitor and measure your video performance and analyze the results. How did your video perform? Did it achieve your goals?
Use your results to refine your video marketing strategy and create even more effective video content in the future.
Consider tracking and evaluating the following metrics to start:
Views
Watch time
Engagement
Click-through rate
Conversion rate
Bounce rate
Return on investment
When all is said and done, collect feedback from your audience and learn from their comments, questions, and suggestions. Based on the data and insights you gather, you can test different variables and optimize your videos accordingly.
That’s a Wrap
Well, you made it to the end. What a journey, eh? Hopefully we’ve exhaustively convinced you of the importance video strategy in your marketing mix. It may seem like we’re overdoing it, but if you do things the right way the first time, you’ll be more successful and less stressed in the long run.
When you’re ready to work on your video production, we’re ready for you. Give us a shout.
