While most marketers know on a fundamental level that videos are important, if you ask the average marketer about his/her video marketing strategy you’re probably going to get a shrug.
Videos have become so important that you can find it on every platform and channel. It is useful for more than just entertainment. Videos on your website, landing pages, or social handles are capable of increasing your engagement rate by over 80% if not more. It is central to your outreach and campaign efforts, and so if your marketing team is still producing videos the same old way, it will be difficult to create video content that’ll truly make a difference.
Whether you’re a small business or startup, you need to consider a solid video marketing strategy to get more engagement and more results. To build a video marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Understand your target audience and set campaign goals
Any successful marketing campaign starts with research. You should understand who you’re targeting, what type of content make them share, like or buy and what channels you can most likely find them. There’s no point creating great video content and paying to have it play on websites your audience doesn’t visit.
In addition, to build an effective video marketing strategy you need to be clear about what you want. What goals are you trying to reach with your video campaign? Are you trying to drive awareness, increase sales or engagement? Your videos should speak to your target audience. The content needs to answer his or her questions, resolve pain points, and provide the right calls to action.
2. Determine what topics and formats resonate with your audience
Once you understand your target audience, you’ll be able to determine what format and topic they can best relate to. Should your videos be tutorials (how-to’s), testimonials or narratives? The goal should be to provide something that your viewers will appreciate and want to share.
For your video campaigns to connect with your audience, ensure you’re using the right tone of voice and message to reach them. Will you be fun and entertaining, or does your ideal customer prefer a serious, more professional approach?
Basically, there’s no fixed way to go about it, research and experiment to determine the most effective style and topics for your brand, that way you’ll be able to adapt the right tone and message in your video marketing strategy.
3. Analyze your Video Budget
Spending a huge sum on a video project won’t automatically make it a huge success. When it comes to developing the video content, keep your campaign goals in mind and make sure you’re spending your budget well. For instance, if you decide to use influencers in your videos, you don’t have to recruit big celebrities. To minimize your budget, consider featuring industry experts or even YouTube celebrities that have access to the audience you’re trying to reach, also make sure the person is suitable to represent your company. Find out more about them, their reputation, and ensure the topics they feature on their own channels and platforms don’t compromise your brand or products’ values.
4. Optimize your videos for each channel
Depending on what channels you choose to run your campaigns, it important your videos are optimized to get as much engagement as possible. For instance, a Facebook video should be short, uploaded directly to the channel, and should include captions.
While optimizing videos for Twitter means targeting the right keywords and interest and not over targeting to make sure you can easily track which campaign is performing best.
5. Test consistently
Display ad campaign testing will help you understand what parts of a campaign are effectively successful and which parts aren’t. Possibly your content, creatives, target audience, length of video or day you choose to display the campaign might be the issue. Whatever the problem might be, make sure to test consistently so as to obtain optimal content and timing of your campaign.
The goal of your video marketing strategy should be to educate, entertain, and inspire your audience – A content like that will definitely increase engagement and be remembered.
