As with any marketing endeavor, video marketing requires understanding your goals and the distribution method(s). This may include your website, social media channels or paid promotion channels.
Start by exploring your buyer, customer or user personas to determine what kinds of video content they typically consume and engage with – this will enable you to establish stronger bonds between yourself and them.
Know Your Audience
An effective video marketing strategy requires an in-depth knowledge of your audience. Select videos which resonate with them and answer any inquiries or provide answers about products or services, this may lead to email subscriptions, phone inquiries, website visits and product purchases.
One way of identifying your audience is through analysis of existing data. You could, for example, look at YouTube auto complete information to discover the most-searched for topics. Social media analytics tools also allow you to track who is viewing and sharing your videos among their friends and followers.
Take it one step further and ask your customers or prospects about what type of videos they would like to see from you! A survey platform that allows open ended answers may provide more insightful responses that help create an accurate portrait of your target audience.
Social media platforms also allow you to utilize targeting capabilities to ensure that you reach as many viewers as possible while keeping costs to a minimum. But learning which video campaigns are the best should still be one of the necessary steps.
Uningenious audience understanding will make developing an impactful video marketing strategy much simpler. By knowing their priorities and producing videos with strong calls-to-action, this will lead to a higher return on investment for your video marketing efforts.
Know Your Goals
Becoming engaged in video marketing without setting goals is like throwing darts blindfolded: while you may hit some sort of target, you won’t know exactly how or where. Running a business makes it easy to forget the significance of creating an objective-based video content strategy plan.
Outline what your goals for each video are so that you can select an appropriate type of video and track its success.
If your goal is to boost sales, producing a product demo video or explainer video that highlights the benefits of your products or services can help build brand recognition and educate customers about your offerings. This strategy also creates brand awareness.
If your goal is to increase social media engagement, a humorous video showcasing your company’s personality could help to do just that. People love seeing what’s behind their favorite products or services and hearing why it was created; this helps build trust while creating pride within your audience.
Acknowledging your goals will also assist with identifying the appropriate approach to distribution. For example, if your aim is to engage your target audience on social media channels like YouTube, consider including influencers in videos. Just make sure they fit with your brand by researching their reputations and social media profiles to make sure they’re suitable. Doing this could save a great deal of time and headache down the line!
Know Your Budget
Video marketing can be an extremely effective way to expand the reach and audience growth of your brand, but it can be expensive if done poorly. Therefore, it is vitally important that before beginning production you create a budget in order to ensure sufficient resources to create high-quality videos while meeting all other marketing goals.
To develop your video budget, first determine what type of video you wish to make. This will enable you to allocate funds accordingly – for production costs, editing costs and any additional expenses like music licensing. Furthermore, consider its length; shorter videos tend to garner greater engagement while longer ones may take more resources and time to produce.
Video marketing used to be an expensive venture, with TV ads costing tens of thousands of dollars to produce. But with social media and smartphone cameras becoming mainstream, creating high-quality videos on a tight budget has never been simpler – Wistia recently conducted an experiment that demonstrated it was possible to make an engaging video for less than $1,000!
When working with a limited budget, it’s essential to think creatively when devising your approach. Consider tapping any internal employees with talent in certain areas that could be put to use: for instance a graphic designer could design graphics for your video; similarly if an employee who can act would provide voiceover for it.
As another way of cutting costs, one way to limit costs when creating video productions is limiting the number of people involved in your video productions. For instance, hiring one actor over several cast and crew members will drastically lower production costs compared to having to hire all these extra hands at once.
Know Your Tools
Video marketing strategies can be an invaluable asset for businesses seeking to bring their products and services directly into consumers’ hands. According to one study, consumers spend 33% of their online time watching videos; thus making video content an efficient marketing tactic which can support many goals such as raising brand awareness, aiding customers through decision stages of buyer journeys and turning customers into repeat purchasers.
Before creating your video marketing strategy, it is crucial that you clearly establish your goals. If one of your objectives is converting new subscribers to your website, for instance, then videos should focus on call-to-actions that encourage viewers to sign up for your email newsletter.
Your audiences must also enjoy watching your videos. A high level of social media engagement but low conversion rate could indicate that they don’t connect emotionally, and therefore may need a new strategy when it comes to video marketing.
Entertaining videos like adorable puppies or hilarious pranks are great tools for increasing brand recognition, but don’t overlook the importance of humanizing your business as part of social media’s evolution. A video introduction of your CEO or founder can create an authentic connection with viewers and increase brand loyalty.
Video XML sitemaps can also help optimize videos for search engines like Google. By using All In One SEO, you can create an easily read sitemap which provides Google with an easily digestible list of all of your videos on the website and improves their rankings in search results.
Know Your Schedule
Video marketing goes beyond simply producing and posting videos to social media; it requires making video production part of your regular routine and building it into your schedule. Once you have established buyer personas and refined messaging, it’s crucial that you plan for when and how often videos will be created and uploaded so they become an integral part of your brand’s rhythm.
If you want to introduce a new product, use a short promotional video that highlights its key features and benefits to drive sales on your ecommerce store or inspire people to sign up for your email marketing contact list or visit your physical store.
Dependent upon your goals, educational videos can also help expand your audience and brand recognition. From short how-to clips to full online courses, educational videos provide a fantastic way to expand both reach and build trust with audiences – especially if partnering with an influencer to promote it! For storytelling video marketing purposes storytelling videos offer yet another effective means of building rapport between brand values and audience trust.
Once your videos are up and running, it’s important to evaluate your metrics. If they aren’t meeting expectations, experimenting with new formats or platforms might help – for instance if your videos don’t perform as you hoped on Instagram perhaps prioritising YouTube and TikTok may help as well as hiring professional videographers or editing software as means for furthering them – ultimately creating an impactful video marketing strategy becomes much simpler.
