Video marketers today face a massive challenge of creating compelling videos that could reach out to their target audience and make them ‘act.’ Videos are produced in thousands each day, but most of them fail to stand out. Many marketers are willing to experiment with the latest video tools simply because they have been asked to focus on videos. However, they are unable to create an impact due to the lack of a defined strategy. If you are a video marketer, remember that strong video marketing strategy combined with targeted videos will alone lead you to success.
What is Video Marketing and How it Works?
If you say that a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine what a targeted video is worth! Video marketing enables you to build rapport with customers and promote your brand.
Every brand tries to create videos that promote their company, create awareness about their product and services, and in some way, help increase their sales. However, like all marketing efforts, video marketing for business is driven by data. Hence, it’s essential to track buyers’ engagement and different metrics.
Statistics to Show Why Video Marketing is a Must for Businesses
If you are still wondering whether to use video marketing for business to achieve your company goals, here is evidence to prove why you mustn’t lose a minute to invest in video marketing:
- A one-minute video is worth 1.8 million written words
- Videos help retain 65 percent of information for three extra days
- A whopping 400 percent of buyers prefer to watch a product video in comparison to reading about the product.
- Video is likely to earn you 12 times more shares than pictures and written content
- Eighty-seven percent of companies use video marketing strategies as part of their marketing campaign to reach out to maximum people.
- Companies using videos in their marketing campaigns have talked about a considerable increase in their click-through rate (CTR), web conversion rate, and faster revenue growth.
Now, do we need to mention anything more to convince you to incorporate video marketing into your marketing efforts?
20 Proven Video Marketing Strategies
1. Identify Your Target Audience and Ascertain Your Market Goals
One of the first steps in creating a video strategy is to outline your video’s goals. Your video will be a flop if you do not know who your intended audience is. Those whom you want to target will not watch, and those who do watch it will not convert. Create a buyer’s persona if you haven’t done that already. The people who want to buy your product are the people who are likely to watch your video.
Your buyer’s persona will help you know exactly who your target audience is. To understand who your buyer’s persona is, ask yourself, “who is this product or service for”? The next step is to understand the objective of the video as that will decide where your target audience falls within the marketing funnel. In the end, you need to know where your target audience hangs out as this will help you figure out how to distribute the video.
Once you have figured all this out, you will know your target audience and how to reach them as well.
2. Plan Your Video Budget Well
Keep your goal in mind while creating video content. Investing a great deal of money in your videos cannot guarantee your success. How much you need to invest in a video depends on your target audience.
If you are millennial shoppers, you do not have to spend too much on video production. Instead, you could create short videos and post them on social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. However, if you want people to keep your brand on top of their minds, and you have a larger budget at your disposal, try using a celebrity. You can also seek help from YouTube celebrities with a large following.
3. Publish Your Videos
Choose an appropriate platform (YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo) to upload your videos. However, if it’s a live stream, you don’t need to do this as the video will play for your audience on your chosen platform. You also get to upload your live video for viewers to watch later.
- YouTube YouTube boasts of more than a billion users, with over 500 million hours of content watched each day. Uploading videos on YouTube have an SEO advantage as well since Google owns YouTube. Google, as is well known is the most popular search engine in the globe.
- Facebook Facebook is a great platform to upload your video content, especially if you have a good following.
- Vimeo Vimeo is a great option too since its paid subscription is affordableand enables you to upload and customize your video content that can be placed on your website, email campaigns, and landing pages. Vimeo’s paid subscription feature removes suggested videos and advertisements at the end of the video.
4. Figure Out Where and How to Promote Your Videos
It is not enough to create a video and upload it on YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo. Find innovative ways to promote your video. You can seek the help of other bloggers, businesses, or friends to help spread awareness of your new video content. If your video provides value to the viewers, they will be more than willing to watch, like, and share.
5. Devise a Video SEO Strategy
SEO is meant not only for website and blog posts but for video content as well. Considering that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, you have good enough reason to pay attention to your video SEO. Here are some ways you can do that:
- Pay Attention to Your Titles Keep your video titles short and informative. YouTube videos show only the first 55-60 characters. It is hence a good idea to use the SE Ranking keyword suggestion tool or the YouTube keyword tool for relevant keywords, similar to an article or blog.
- Add Keywords to Video Description Use your targeted keywords in your video descriptionand make sure you include a link to your website. It must not be more than 70 characters long.
- Use Appropriate Tags Think about all the phrases and sentences that people wanting to watch your video will type and accordingly insert the appropriate tags.
- Pay Attention to Link Building The number of links leading to your video plays an integral part in keyword rankings in search.
- Optimize for Mobile Viewing Since most people watch videos on mobile, it is necessary to optimize your video content for viewing on mobile.
- Create the Best Thumbnail Thumbnail is the first thing that catches a viewer’s attention, so make sure it is creative, eye-catching, and of high-quality.
- Create a Video Sitemap Creating a video sitemap will help give out all the details about your video to search engines.
6. Assess the Market and Your Competition
Do your research. Identifying the gaps in your content and the market will enable you to find new ideas and opportunities for untapped video content.
You must first review your video content and list down the topics you have covered and missed. Analyze if your present video format and content is working. Pick put the strength and weaknesses of your current videos and suggest areas of improvement.
Once you have done that, look around at your competitors and find out who you are pitted against. Ask yourself what kind of video content they are producing and whether it is working for them. Find out what kind of video content is there available online for your target audience already, and what new can you offer them? Once you have done that, you will be able to see the video gaps and understand what you can take advantage of.
7. Remain Consistent and Brand Your Videos
Your target audience must be able to recognize your videos, and hence you must be consistent with your digital branding. This will help people remember your brand when they watch your video, which in turn will also give your video content a professional look. Over time, it will help build trust as well.
Make your mind as to what branding elements you plan to include in your video content. It can be your brand logo or a unique dress that you would wear for all your videos.
8. Use Social Evidence
Social evidence plays a very crucial role in influencing people to make a purchasing decision. People look up to others before deciding who to do business with. That is why testimonials, reviews, endorsements, and case studies are so crucial for businesses.
Social evidence helps when a buyer is unsure of your product and wants to see how many people have bought your product or services, and what they have to say about it. Votes, views, or comments on your videos are also part of social proof. You can choose to bring a celebrity or an industry expert in your video if you can afford.
9. Measure Your Campaign’s Success
You can measure the success of your campaign through view count, engagement rate, social sharing, play rate, comments, and feedback.
- Engagement rate The engagement rate refers to the interaction that viewers had with your video. Several factors, such as the time spent on the video and watching half or full video, will decide the engagement rate.
- View count View count depends on how many times you have watched a video and is measured differently across platforms. A view is measured as 30 seconds on YouTube and only three seconds on Facebook. It is hence, essential to understand how views are measured on different channels as it will help you to plan future campaigns.
- Social Sharing It is not easy, but not unachievable either. If you create videos that your target audience wants, more people will share it on their social media platforms.
- Play rate Play rate is the number of viewers who clicked to watch the video and. The size and thumbnail of your video, to a great extent, influence the play rate.
- Feedback and Comments Pay attention to the feedback and comments that your viewers make after watching your video. See them as potential customers, and so whatever feedback they give is crucial. Consider both positive and negative comments and act accordingly.
10.Utilize YouTube Extras
Take advantage of the extra features that YouTube offers, especially the Cards and End Screen Elements. While Cards are the grey titles that slide out on the top right corner during videos, End Screen Elements are the thumbnails and links that you can spot at the end of your video. These features help in attracting viewers to your previous and new videos. It also enables people to subscribe to your channel and also prolong competitor’s videos from coming up at the end of the video.
11. Establish Relationships
Building a relationship is essential if you want tons of loyal customers. Relationships are built over time, and this is made possible by how-to videos. It is an excellent idea to do weekly video blogs that will provide value and benefit to your target audience. By building their trust, the customer begins to see you as an authority on a topic. So, when you provide value to your viewers without expecting them to buy from you, they are more likely to buy from you when they decide to purchase since they trust you or your brand.
12. Combining Email Marketing and Video
Video content, in contrast to written content, helps increase the open rate in email campaigns and increase the click-through rate of an email. By using videos in email campaigns, you will have fewer users who will unsubscribe your emails. Use video thumbnail within your email to help increase the engagement.
13. Include a Strong Call-to-Action (CTA)
Use a strong CTA to make your video marketing strategy powerful. A strong call-to-action can direct the users to your website’s landing page or your next video. A CTA should be attractive enough for viewers to want to engage further with your brand.
14. Add Transcript
A transcript will bring in more engagement from non-English speakers. All you need to do is to create a word document and write the same spoken words in your video. Make sure you don’t use compound words and use appropriate keywords to improve your SEO.
15. Try the Sales Funnel Flywheel Pattern
HubSpot, not too long ago, unveiled Flywheel, a new approach to the sales funnel. The flywheel approach gives new and old customers a chance to be attracted, engaged, and delighted by your company.
The flywheel approach has four elements:
- Attract Educate viewers with content and get rid of any barriers that come in the way of their ability to collect the required information.
- Engage This is all about engaging the consumers and building relationships.
- Delight Connecting the company’s success with that of the customers.
- Customers Customers are the center of business decisions. Businesses will try to remove any discomfort that the customers might experience, thereby paving the way to their growth and that of their buyers.
16. Measure the Performance of Your Video Content
Measuring the data of your video performance is much easier than you think since you can quickly get the data from a video marketing platform. You can get accurate information on who is watching the videos and for how much duration.
17. Try Giveaways and Gifts
As part of your video marketing strategy, you can take it one step ahead by offering occasional gifts to your viewers. Here is an example to prove to you that it works wonders!
Unbox Therapy had 12,583 subscribers before they announced that they were gifting 106 OnePlus 6 smartphones on Jun 27, 2018. However, the channel saw an increase of a shocking 52,173 subscribers between June 27th and June 30th, 2018. That video has more than 14 million views as of today.
18. Create a Mission Statement for Your Video
A mission statement is beneficial as it gives your team an easy to remember purpose for creating a video. Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute suggests this. Your mission statement must answer questions such as ‘what type of video content do you plan to make,’ ‘who is your target audience’? and ‘what do you want your audience to take from the video’?
19. Try Video Retargeting
Video retargeting helps in connecting video ads to shoppers wherever they are watching. It helps in delivering video ads targeted at people based on their purchasing behavior and shopping intent.
Retargeting, if you are wondering is a form of PPC advertising that uses a tracking pixel to gather contacts who have visited your website in the past, watched a video, or engaged with your online content in some way. Video retargeting provides video ads to those lists of contacts.
20. Leave Your Viewers Asking for More
If you remember the Old Spice Guy advertisement, you might remember how people waited for the next episode after the commercial that presented “the man your man could smell like.” People wanted to know the next funny way the Old Spice would advertise the guy in the commercial! While this is not always possible on ads, you can most certainly create videos that leave viewers asking for more. They will most certainly like, share, and subscribe to see what video is going to come next, and this is when you know if your video marketing strategy has succeeded or not.
In Conclusion
Big and small business video marketing is gaining prominence with each passing year. It is hence, extremely essential to plan your video marketing strategy accurately. If you cannot do it yourself, try hiring a video marketing agency to help you in your effort to reach out to your buyers.
-Videocaddy
Video Caddy
