Marketing through video is a great idea these days as the demand for videos is high on every platform. Around 54% of consumers tend to watch video content from a business they support. This makes it the most effective channel to reach out to the target audience. However, you need a video marketing strategy that attracts more customers towards your products or services.
Are you unsure about creating an effective strategy for video marketing and are not able to draw enough traffic?
It can dip your sales but you needn’t worry as we have your back! We’re here with answers to every question you have about creating a video marketing strategy.
In this blog, you’ll learn about building your video marketing strategies with tips, best practices and examples. They will go a long way in helping you increase customer engagement and lead to sales.
But first let’s brush up the basics.
Table of Contents
What Is Video Marketing?
Video marketing refers to advertising products or services using videos. Like other marketing techniques, video marketing strategies also have a definite aim. The aim can be:
- Attracting your audience
- Growing engagement on your social networks
- Launching your product
- Endorsing and marketing your brand or service
- Growing client visits on your digital and social networks
- Educating your clients and customers
- Approaching your audience with a new medium
Do you know that an image can say a thousand words, then think how valuable the video is? This is the base of video marketing. With a forward-facing video marketing strategy, you can create attractive and appealing videos that convert.
Video marketing started in around 2005 when YouTube arrived. Google launched YouTube in October 2006, and there was an introduction of seven different ad formats by 2009.
As the technology to make excellent videos is getting easier, it has become more popular among marketers and business people. But this is not the only reason why videos are the in thing.
Video marketing is an expressively appealing way for products to connect with customers and have their attention in this digitally loaded world.
The video marketing strategy involves studying the product’s purpose and your customer’s position in the sales cycle. For better customer targeting, it’s important to know where you will place the videos and the way you present them.
Let’s discuss the importance of video marketing.
Why Are Videos So Important In Marketing?
Videos are the most widely-used content type on social media platforms for growing engagement. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook focus more on video content.
Trends clearly show how videos increase conversions and how a video marketing strategy can improve SEO. and their importance will only continue to grow (see: What is Google MUM? — the latest Google algorithm that is supposed to be able to read videos, among other types of content). As a result, marketers are focusing on videos to improve SEO.
On one hand, marketers believe that their customer acquisition cost has increased, but they also say that video helps them generate leads in a cost-effective manner.
And this is because video hasn’t only changed how customers shop; there is a change in the way salespeople connect with their audience. It also decides how service teams will support customers.
In a nutshell, videos are extremely handy throughout the buyer journey and not just to heighten product awareness.
Video can be a helpful tool for business people throughout the entire client purchasing journey, and it can do much more than growing engagement.
Backend analysis also helps marketers qualify and rank cold, unresponsive leads. Video marketing attracts more mobile users as most people who watch videos on mobile devices.
Facebook says that 65% of all video views come from mobile devices such as tabs and smartphones than from desktops. As a result, there are several benefits to content marketing, making it an outstanding alternative for interacting with the target audience.
Let’s now talk about the type of videos.
Types Of Marketing Videos
There are mainly 8 types of Marketing Videos that you must consider while making a video marketing strategy. These are:
1. Explainer Videos
They’re brief marketing videos used to describe a company’s product, service, or message. Product Explainers are simple, informational, impactful, and engaging. And they’re also amongst the most valuable resources for marketers
2. How-To Videos
These videos are helpful to the audience and easily shareable. With this type of marketing video, your content will reach your target audience’s particular objective. Though how-to videos also fall under the group of informative videos, sellers often categorize them separately. This is chiefly because of their format that makes them suitable for different audiences.
3. Educational Videos
Educational videos provide information to the audience, but they need to do it convincingly! Marketers take the help of certain resources to get the spectator’s attention. And this is instrumental in building brand trust
4. Testimonial Videos
With the help of an online review, customer testimonials elevate things to a whole new level. Here, people share their actual experiences with your brand. You cannot have anything more convincing for future clients than genuine testimonials
5. Company Story Videos
These types of videos that narrate the story of the company can improve the brand image. In this age of instant communication, audiences appreciate this type of social connection with the brands they support.
6. Video Ads
Video ads or advertisements are a key addition to your video marketing tool. These are all about your product and service. Ads aim at selling your product or service to the target audience and convincing them about its effectiveness.
7. Social Videos
In today’s world, you cannot afford to overlook the influence of social media on your content marketing strategy. Creating videos for various social media platforms has to be a priority on your list to increase your brand’s social presence.
8. Product Videos
Product videos are all about presenting your product to your target audience in the best possible way. These videos aim to present your brand so that the audience can visualize themselves using the product and making the most of its benefits.
How To Create A Video Marketing Strategy?
Below are the points that one should keep in mind while creating a video marketing strategy :
1. Define your objective
You should be clear about what content you have to deliver and how you want to offer it! Try to pre-define your objectives and goals to avoid confusion later on. It would help decide what goals you want to achieve with the video marketing strategy.
2. Know your audience
A successful video marketing strategy must start with finding out who you are targeting? What type of video inclines them towards you, and what platform do they like the most? Are they most likely to be on? It’s imperative to devote time to gathering buyer insights before launching the video because they will help you decide the content type will work and how much money you will spend on making them.
3. Define your style
Depending on the platforms you choose to launch your video campaign, you should customize your video accordingly. Don’t try to copy from elsewhere because that leaves a bad impression on the audience’s mind.
4. Set your tonality
A brand’s tone is more important than you think. Maintaining a reliable tone throughout your product videos can help viewers engage better with your brand and make you look credible.
In video marketing, a script does much more than delivering information. Expert writers have a grip on the brand’s voice tone and use it to maintain consistency across all videos in the campaign and create a connection with the audience.
5. Calculate your budget
You cannot make your campaign a success just by Investing a lot of money into it. On the other hand, spending way too less will also not work. When it is about making video content, you have to keep your goals in mind and use your resources wisely.
6. Split Test Or A/B Test
A/B testing should help you find out what is working and what isn’t with your video campaigns. Maybe it’s not the presentation of the videos but your content, or maybe it’s the platforms you’re choosing. The other reason could be your videos being too long or short. Make sure you examine and test them again to get the best outcome.
Tips For Creating An Effective Video Marketing Strategy
Here are some video marketing tactics that can help you create a powerful and effective strategy:
1. Create a posting schedule
Audiences want regular content updates, so it’s important to plan your posting schedule in the place of posting them haphazardly. Think of stories that you can convey, break them into multiple parts, and post a new update each week. Doing so will engage viewers better. Read our Video Marketing Statistics guide.
2. Include tutorials and demos
Demos help customers feel more confident about purchasing a specific product or service. Detailed demo videos will help change more of your website visitors into happy clients.
3. Showcase your personality
Your videos can be a great platform to showcase your company culture. Audiences like to watch videos that are gripping and full of character. Think about what sets your business and product apart and shed light on it in your videos. In addition to that, don’t waste time making videos that don’t represent your brand’s personality and tone.
4. Tell stories
Including stories in your video marketing is great to increase viewer engagement. Instead of simply presenting your company, your job, and your products, look at how you can tell stories with your videos. How does your firm influence your clients? Are you creating a change in society? Build your story, and take the help of videos to share it with your viewers.
5. Evaluate Success
If you want to organize successful video marketing campaigns, you need to know the effectiveness of your video marketing strategy. Many interactive video platforms provide analytics, and you can get an idea of how your videos perform.
Video Marketing Best Practices To Follow
Creating videos can feel like an impossible task. But the return on your investment will be worth it if you have the right video marketing strategy. Here are some of the best practices for video marketing to keep you on the right path.
1. Start with a goal
Get the idea of your goal, and summarize it in one or two sentences to keep it simple. Let everybody know about it and share it with your own team or a marketing agency so that everyone is on the same page.
2. Define your audience
Ask a set of questions to know who your target audience is. They should provide you with the following details:
- The age bracket of your target audience
- The geographical location of the target viewers
- Their job role
- Their pain points
- Ways to address the pain points
If you are unable to answer the above questions, it indicates that you are not ready with your strategy yet. You should be clear about whom you want to reach out to first if you really want to succeed.
3. Don’t forget video SEO
As your videos will remain on the internet, you should consider performing SEO just as you would do for your blog pages or landing page. This will help it rank on search engines. Make sure you have a YouTube keyword research strategy and name your videos accordingly to make them searchable.
4. Drive them to take action
As a video marketer, your end goal is to draw the viewer towards your brand and ultimately make a purchase. It is always logical to have a CTA in your video so that the viewer knows what to do next. If you are creating interactive videos, you can make the viewer choose what he wants to do next, for example, the options could be taking the viewer to your website, asking them to book a demo, or providing them a meeting link.
5. Keep it simple
You shouldn’t overwhelm your viewers with a lot of information in your video. Conveying too many irrelevant messages in one video can be quite taxing for the viewer and they may not relate with you. It would be better to have a simple idea that is easy to remember and resonates well with the target audience.
Examples Of Video Marketing
We all have seen videos of animals making human sounds to soldiers meeting their families after a long time. We all like heart-warming and hilarious stories. Marketing specialists are aware of the power of viral videos and use the same technique to sell their products. Here are some of examples-
1. Squatty Potty
The Squatty Potty video handles a taboo subject in the most non-embarrassing manner. It presents the product, which is a stool to correct your toilet posture in a way that is easy to understand and gripping at the same time. The focus is on how Squatty Potty can improve your health by correcting your posture when you use the restroom with the use of creative graphics and animation.
2. Dollar Shave Club
Many factors pushed its drive from nobody to a player to a unicorn. Reasons like hard work, the gap in the marketplace, and an unbeatable product, to name just a few. But one thing that is most accountable for pushing it so far and so fast is its viral video. It tells the audience that shaving can be both costly and bothersome and how their product is the just the thing they need. Having a unique brand voice has made them stand out in the crowd and sell more.
3. Slice Credit Card Ad
Slice’s ad films are true to their brand’s extraordinary inspired approach, which made them attract the millennials and GenZ. The focus is on the speed of the Slice super card, hinting that the credit card is for those who love to move swiftly in life. The tagline is – ‘For the fast ones’, which is the need of the hour.
4. Vodafone Zoo Zoo Ads
Vodafone Essar wanted to create special characters that would be unique and act as a mutual thread for more commercials. The end result? Immensely popular ads that are crisp and to the point with complete clarity. All the ads have focused on presenting one feature at a time to grip the audience.
5. Apple Super Bowl Ad
This 1984 video has an innovative concept. All this while, brands have tried to come closer to it but have failed. It is indeed a milestone in marketing. The main idea was to launch Macintosh as the future of technology that would take the computing world by the storm. The marketing strategy is a hit and has made Mac one of the top sellers.
Challenges of Video Marketing
After covering the benefits, tips, and best practices of Video Marketing, let’s discuss the challenges.
1. Limitation of budget
While we saw that video creation is not too expensive, it depends on what kinds of videos you require. Video marketing requires you to set aside a certain amount of money, especially when you are thinking of animated videos. Outsourcing the task to agencies can cost you a bomb, and so can hiring a full-time employee for it.
2. Absence of a strategy
The lack of a strategy can severely affect the success of a video campaign. You can’t even gauge its performance that way. That is why you must set your goals before you start out and know your target audience, just like how we discussed earlier in this post.
3. Not adding value
Many small business holders jump right into forcing the buyer to buy their product or service without conveying the message they want to or attempting to build trust. Try to add value to people’s lives through your video.
4. Choosing the right distribution channels
An effective video distribution channel is your way to success. But choosing the perfect channel that matches the goal is way too tricky. However, you have to choose the best one for your brand so that you don’t waste money by making the wrong choices.
5. Difficulty in Calculating ROI
Measuring marketing return on investment (ROI) is difficult for many reasons. Some campaigns don’t directly bring revenue. Therefore, there is no consistent method for defining what is a part of the advertising cost. Additionally, not having enough video metrics to measure can make measuring the campaign’s performance difficult.
Create Your Video Marketing Strategy For Maximum Conversions!
Starting out with video marketing and creating a video marketing strategy is a no-brainer if your approach is right. If you are just starting out, you can build an effective strategy and improve your video marketing with the proven tips and best practices you just read above.
We hope the blog helps you, and you’re able to apply these guidelines to witness the exponential growth of your company’s revenue.
FAQs
A video marketing strategy refers to the strategy marketers devise to use videos for marketing their brand to the intended audience. There is a need for a lot of brainstorming to build it.
Videos help meet marketing goals by doing much more than growing engagement and building brand awareness throughout the entire client purchasing journey.
Though ideally, it is better to keep marketing videos less than 2 minutes long, the length of the video depends on the platform on which you are sharing it & your objective.
