An Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing Strategies

You can use video marketing to promote your product or service, increase engagement on your digital and social media channels, educate your customers and consumers, and reach out to a wider audience. Marketing has become more popular with videos as the technology for creating them gets easier. But that’s not the only reason video has become so popular today. Audiences spend an average of 19 hours watching videos online every week. Brands can no longer ignore video marketing if they want to succeed. An Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing Strategies is provided in this article.

The Importance of Video Marketing

SEO and conversions are improved by video marketing

31% of marketers add a video to improve SEO. By adding video to a website, visitors spend more time on the page, and the quality of the page improves. At the same time, 83% of video marketers say that video helps them generate leads. More than 60% of marketers say that their customer acquisition cost has increased. The reason is that video has revolutionized not only business marketing and consumer shopping. It’s also revolutionized how salespeople connect with prospects and convert them and how service teams assist and delight customers. In short, video is incredibly useful throughout the entire flywheel — not just to boost brand awareness. Backend analytics can also help salespeople qualify and prioritize cold or non-responsive leads since video can be a useful tool throughout the entire customer buying journey.

Consumers Prefer Video Marketing on Their Mobile Devices

A Statista study found that 77% of those surveyed watched online videos on their mobile devices. And Facebook says more people watch videos on their phones than on their computers daily.

Building Trust and Educating with Video Marketing

91.9% of users are content watching any kind of video, while 31.3% are interested in how-to videos and 29.8% are interested in educational videos. For service teams, video can be used in a variety of ways – onboarding videos, knowledge-based videos, meet-the-team videos, support video calls, and customer stories are just a few examples. And users aren’t just learning from brands. Millennials and Gen Z users are different, but most of them want to learn from one another. According to HubSpot Research, consumers and customers prefer lower quality, “authentic” video to high-quality video that appears artificial and inauthentic. You can use video marketing to grow your business regardless of team size or budget. The data is clear. To succeed, you must have a solid video marketing strategy in place.

Video Marketing Strategy

Make a video marketing strategy before you start recording, editing, or setting anything up. Every decision you make during the video creation process will be related to the video’s purpose and what action you want your viewers to take.

1. Identify Where Your Target Audience Spends Their Time

In today’s video content and user-generated video content, it’s essential to target a specific audience with each video. Create strong buyer personas now if you don’t already have them. Update your buyer personas to reflect the latest video research if you already have them.

2. Identify and Align Stakeholders on Video Content Planning

When making a video, there are usually a lot of players. How can you make sure they’re all aligned? Using Google Forms or SurveyMonkey, create a questionnaire and send it to all stakeholders so they can all respond to the same questions. Identifying a clear set of goals is crucial. Are you using video marketing to increase brand awareness? Would you like to sell more event tickets? Are you launching a new product? After watching the video, what do you want your audience to do?

3. Plan your video’s timeline and budget

A video is like your favorite film but is shorter, faster, and less expensive. It takes fewer resources, but it can still be a time-consuming and costly process. Planning and project management will save you time and money. Make a timeline for every step of the process, and account for possible delays. Even small video productions require the skills of many people. So, if you are facing unexpected challenges, make sure you are still able to deliver your video on time.

4. Select an Appropriate Distribution Platform

Think about how people will interact with your video before you begin making it. YouTube SEO is becoming as important as website SEO. think about what people are looking for on that platform. You’ll also want to consider the following:

1- Average view time

2- Limitations on size and sound

3- Communities

4- Budget

5- Promotion

Although videos are often used for advertising, they do more than just promote themselves. Some platforms have built-in promotion tools, while others require you to work harder to see your video content. This list of video platforms can help you decide which platform is best for your video campaign.

5. Create Messaging and Choose Video Types that Match Your Personas

Communicating a message with your videos is important. Considering your budget, skills, and resources, consider the creative roadblocks that might arise. Do you need a designer to create lower-third graphics? Do you plan to create an animated video or a live-action video?

6. Choose the Metrics You Want to Monitor and Ddetermine How You Will Measure Success

Defining your video goals and finding metrics to help you determine whether you’ve achieved them is crucial before you begin production. As a default, you can use the metrics included in the platform of your choice. However, this can make it hard to understand how your video strategy is achieving results over time. It can also make it difficult to identify working multichannel video strategies. Your video goals should be reflected in several key performance indicators. If you aren’t sure where to begin with, your video marketing tracking, the following list of metrics will help.

Defining Your Goals and Video Analytics

In your initial video marketing strategy, you probably set goals, but those goals can change during production, so it’s important to decide what your primary video goal is. Choose just one or two goals for each video. Any more than that, your video will seem unfocused, making it difficult to understand what viewers should do next. In one video, you can bring awareness to a new product and your brand, but you might not want to include your founder’s story in the same video. In the next section, let’s discuss metrics. Understanding video analytics will equip you with the tools to define and measure your success.

The view count of your video may be an important metric, but you may also want to consider other metrics. It is important to collect only what you can analyze. Choose the metrics that are most relevant to your video marketing goals. The following are some of the most common metrics you’ll see when publishing and tracking videos.

View Count

Reach is the number of times your video has been viewed. View count is the number of times a video has been viewed. To increase brand awareness, you should track this metric. However, it is important to remember that every video hosting platform measures views differently. According to most articles, a YouTube view lasts 30 seconds, while a Facebook view lasts only 3 seconds, but no one really knows. So read the fine print before reporting on your video views.

Play Rate

You can calculate the play rate by dividing the number of impressions your video received by the number of people who watched it. You can use this metric to determine how relevant or appealing your video is to your audience. If thousands of people see your video, but only a handful plays it, your content probably needs to be optimized.

Social Sharing and Comments

Your target audience’s social shares and comments are good indicators of your content’s relevance. If you’re on social media, you’re probably familiar with sharing and commenting. You can create great content if a viewer watches your video and shares it with their network. Social shares are also significant since the more times your viewers share your video, the more views you’ll get. Tracking social shares is a good way to reach a wide audience if your goal is to reach a large group of people.

Video Completions

Video completions measure how many times users watch your video in its entirety. This is a more reliable measure of video success than view counts.

Completion Rate

It is calculated by dividing the number of people who played your video by the number of people who completed it. How do your viewers react to your video based on completion rate and other engagement metrics? Do you have a low completion rate? Does everyone drop off at a certain point? Your video content might not resonate with your target audience if this happens.

Click-Through Rate

Depending on how many times your call-to-action (CTA) is viewed, you can calculate your click-through rate (CTR). If your CTR is low, consider revising your CTA design or copy. If your CTR is high, consider re-editing your video.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of visitors who completed your desired action by the number of clicks on your call to action. Try asking your viewers to sign up for a free trial to see if your conversion rate increases by adding a video to your landing page.

Bounce Rate and Time-On-Page

Are you considering adding a video to your website? Be sure to check your metrics after you place the video to see if your video changes the way people interact with the other content on your page. Consider the bounce rate and how long people stay on the page before adding the video. Measuring the effectiveness of your video marketing campaign. You can decide whether videos are the right content type for your audience by measuring their performance on each platform and channel. That you need to refresh your videos every few weeks or months to stay relevant to your audience. Measure your video’s lifespan across all platforms in addition to the metrics above. You may find that it has a longer lifespan. Track and compare video engagement to find out which topics encourage the most sharing and have the best lifetime value.

Conclusion

It can be overwhelming to start creating video content, but with a little practice and patience, you can produce high-quality videos unique to your business. Invest in a camera, start filming, and watch your engagement levels rise. It’s time to make video a core part of your marketing strategy. You never know how a new idea or strategy can help you achieve your goals. Take one step at a time and keep learning. The original version of this post was written in August 2018 and has been updated to make it more comprehensive.