When you ask how important it is for businesses to have a robust video marketing strategy, the one-word answer is always going to be “very”.
We are currently in the new era of marketing. And in this era, visually oriented content trumps everything else because of its ability to create hooks easily.
In the past few years, the average video consumption time of individuals has increased drastically. A statistic by Invideo claims that 96% of the consumers increased their online video consumption in the year 2020. Invideo also says 9 out of every 10 customers showed the desire to see more video content from businesses and brands, as compared to other formats.
With such an increase in the consumption of videos, it is not one part of the marketing strategy anymore. It is the center of outreach efforts, especially on social media.
Marketing this format of content, however, is completely different. You have to stick to trends and the expectations that your audience have from you. Getting started with video marketing can be really challenging in its initial phase. But that’s where persistence and we come in.
In this video marketing guide, you’ll learn all about video marketing, from its definition to how you can create a strategy that generates massive ROI. We’ll make things a little easier for you by providing seven tips for a good video marketing strategy too.
What Is Video Marketing?
There’s a popular saying in the digital marketing industry that an image is worth a thousand words. To put things in perspective, a good quality video has at least 30 frames per second. You can replace tens of thousands of words with a really short video. That’s how impactful a video is. The impact that a video can potentially create is the base for video marketing.
Using video to promote your business, tell your audience about your products, and engage with them is called video marketing. It not only increases engagement but also educates your audience present on the channel via different mediums. It can also serve as a medium to build customer rapport, promote valuable customer testimonials, stream live events, and post entertaining content.
What Is a Video Marketing Strategy?
You might be using videos for ages to promote your brand or might have just stepped in, but all of it is the same if you don’t know where you’re heading with your videos. You need a proper outline of the road map to take the right actions, proper metrics to measure the success of your video marketing campaigns, this is what having a video marketing strategy is.
Video content marketing strategy is as essential as execution. A robust road map ensures that you are aware of the return on investment (ROI) your video content is generating for you. It also helps in determining which videos are working for you and which are not. A video marketing strategy organizes tasks for you to reach your goals seamlessly and also aligns your video content with the real brand objective.
Why Do You Need Videos in a Marketing Strategy?
There’s no content medium that is more powerful for storytelling than a video. It is one of the best ways to build a deeper relationship with your target audience. To prove the fact that video has to be an irreplaceable part of your content marketing strategy, we have a list of statistics to share. Take a look:
- According to Cisco, in 2022, more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic will be generated via online videos, and this number is 15 times higher than what it was in 2017. In fact, around 85% of the internet users (as of January 2018) in the United States watched a mobile video on any of their devices.
- The online video stats show that consumers love video marketing. An OptinMonster statistic suggests that 72% of the customers find it convenient to learn about a product or service with a video. The same survey stated that 84% of these customers are convinced to buy a product/service after watching the video posted by the company/brand.
- As far as social media sites are concerned, the stats show that the users are responding in the affirmative. Facebook gets more than 8 billion video views daily. In its first year, the newcomer TikTok got an average of 1 million video views per day. Twitter claims that a video is retweeted six times more than a photo or a no-media tweet. On YouTube, users upload 500 hours of video content every minute, and the average per day video consumption on this platform is around 1 billion hours per day. In short, social media craves video.
- When viewers read a text, they are only able to retain 10% of the complete information. In comparison to this, video viewers retain 95% of the message shared in the video. (Insivia)
- Wyzowl published the State of Video Marketing report in 2020, in which it was mentioned that 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. The number is 63% higher than the past couple of years.
- 40% of the shoppers across the world said that they had made many purchases after discovering the product in Youtube videos. (Think with Google, 2018)
- According to Wyzowl, the percentage of marketers who consider video to be an irreplaceable part of their marketing strategy has increased consistently in the past few years. It 82% in 2017, 85% in 2018, 91% in 2019, and 91% in 2020.
Source: Wyzowl
In other words, this is the right time for you to create a video marketing strategy on social media that can bring leads and improve the conversion rate. In the next section, we’ll share a seven-step video marketing strategy template to help you create one that works the best for you.
How To Get Started With a Video Marketing Strategy?
Are you starting your video marketing journey from scratch? No worries, you can still make it intentional from day one. With its help, you can bring rope in more qualified leads in your sales funnel. It is essential that your videos serve a purpose. And instead of just building excitement, it should produce measurable outcomes.
Here’s our 7-step guide that deals with all the fundamental elements of video marketing strategy:
1. Set Clear Goals
The first step, not just for video marketing but for any other form of marketing, is to set goals. Establish what you want to accomplish with your videos in the initial stages. In the beginning, you should set a fewer number of goals (easily achievable) so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
While setting up the goals, you’ll want to target all the stages of the marketing funnel. However, it is essential to target the most important stage when you’re starting out. You can’t expect people to purchase your product when they don’t even know your brand. So, in this case, the first step would be to create brand awareness.
Source: Lemonlight
You can create a video for the awareness stage if you want to attract a new set of customers to your brand. The video you create for this stage of the funnel should show your viewers the problem they are facing and how you can solve it for them.
In the next stage of the funnel, the consideration stage, viewers consider that their problem needs a solution and hence are looking for ways to solve it. The more you engage with them, the more likely they are to move forward with you. For the consideration stage, create videos to engage with the customers so that you stay on top of their minds.
Similarly, you can set goals for the other stages of the funnel as well. When you create funnel-specific videos, you’ll be able to put in a better and more relatable CTA. Moreover, setting goals for your video marketing strategy will ensure that you are on the right path.
2. Decide on Platforms
Videos come in different dimensions and run time on different platforms. While there are some older platforms like Facebook and Instagram that offer several types of videos, the newer ones, TikTok and Snapchat, are strictly sticking to one format only. This multifaceted nature of video-sharing platforms has made it essential to determine which one will align the best with your marketing goals.
Your video quality should be top-notch. That is the primary reason why it is advised to start with the most compatible platform. When you post on the most compatible platform, you’ll see your content getting detached from others, leading to incredible output.
The secret behind every successful video marketing campaign is that all the videos are posted on the platform where the majority of the target audience is present. Being partial towards a platform or selecting the one that you like will lead to an ineffective campaign.
3. Social Listening
Knowing what users are saying about your brand on different social media platforms can help you create more engaging and relevant content with a higher chance of going viral. This is where social listening comes into the picture.
You should listen to your audience present on social media, monitor their conversations, and engage with them to understand what type of content they want from you. If people do not like some videos, you should avoid posting such content. Instead, look at the posts where your audience has posted positive comments and take inspiration from them. It helps you avoid the ongoing trends that your audience doesn’t like and allows you to jump on the trends your audience might like.
Moreover, social listening can also help you determine which stage of your buyers’ journey needs the most attention. For example, if someone is in the consideration stage, you can look at their conversation and analyze what their views are about your videos that introduce your products or services to new customers.
Simply said, social listening gives you access to lots of valuable insights and data, which can come in handy for improving your video marketing game. There are tools like Radarr that helps you listen to your target audience on various video marketing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The best part is that you can see all the insights, from every platform, on a single dashboard.
Additional reads:
- Complete guide to social listening
- Complete guide to social listening on TikTok
- Complete guide to Facebook listening
- How to use social listening for Instagram
- Complete guide to using social listening on Twitter
- How to use social listening for LinkedIn marketing
4. Select Video Types
There are various types of videos that you can post on different social media platforms, and all of them serve a different purpose. Irrespective of the type of video you post, the video should align well with your overall content marketing strategy.
Identifying what type of video you should post for your marketing strategy is a crucial step. Because it’s the type of video that determines the set of audience that’ll engage with it. You don’t have to make videos of the same type throughout your video marketing campaign, but it should always bring value to the audience.
Here are some types of videos can you can consider making:
- Educational: These videos educate your audience about your products and the problems they can solve. Aiming to establish the brand as an expert, the tone of these videos are not casual; it is more on the polished side.
- Behind-the-scenes: These videos give an inside look into how the company operates and how the employee works. Looking at the workplace environment, the audience finds it easier to connect with the brand. These videos are mainly to entertain the audience and build a connection.
- Interviews: Interview videos are a great way to not only introduce your company to the users but also introduce new guests. These guests can be someone from your industry or even your employees. Your brand appears more authentic when you post such videos.
- Testimonials: These videos are for people who like your product but just need a little proof that it actually does what you’re saying. Video testimonials are the best form of social proof you can post for your company, culture, products, or services. In most cases, if the story shared in the testimonial is good, the customers are persuaded to make the purchase.
It is, however, essential to not jump to every type of video at once. For sure, all of them are important for your video marketing strategy, but selecting the video types based on the resources available is an ideal way to go forward.
5. Plan Production
You just can’t get up and post videos for your marketing strategy. There has to be a pre and post-production plan in place. You can get rid of all these production tasks if you just hire an agency or video production company to take care of your video filming and editing tasks. You’ll give the instructions, and the company will handle the rest.
But if you are planning to do all the production work on your own, you’ll need to plan every step for perfect execution. Here are the steps you need to take care of:
- Buying all the required pieces of equipment and props
- Writing and editing the script
- Storyboarding the video
- Planning the schedule for the shoot so that the people in the video don’t have additional work at the time of the shoot
- Gathering the right set of people to get featured
- Selecting the place for the shoot to happen
- Taking care of the lighting
- Need people to approve each step. For example, you can’t just write a script and shoot it. There have to be people to check if the tone of the script is right. If it conveys the right message, then it can be approved!
Keep in mind, these are only some of the many things you’ll need to take care of. And it only includes the pre-production part. Once all the steps of pre-production are managed, you’ll have post-production to deal with. The point is, the video you post should be completely polished and optimized for audio, visuals, and words.
6. Schedule and Promote Videos
Moving on, after getting done with your video creation process, you should put all your focus on scheduling and promoting it on your decided platforms. As far as scheduling is concerned, you have to plan it in a way that your content keeps appearing even after weeks of your first post.
For example, you can retweet the same content many times on Twitter. On Instagram, you can share the video post again and again in your story. And as for live streams, to ensure that the maximum audience joins the chat, you’ll have to promote it quite often.
Your one shooting can generate a lot of content. You can repurpose it, or slice and chop to form new content out of it. You just have to be creative while promoting video content.
7. Understand Their Performance
Your job is not finished after posting the videos; you also have to keep analyzing how the video is performing on different social media channels. The statistics associated with the video, like the number of views, watch time, the number of likes and shares, types of comments, etc., will tell you all about the performance.
Every social media platform has its native analytics dashboard that tells you how your video is performing. You should analyze if the performance of the video aligns with your goals or not. You should even keep tabs on the older videos. If you have used the right keyword in the video and have picked the right topic, it can stay relevant to the audience even after a couple of years.
Pro tip: Don’t just look at the number of likes and views on your videos; also do a thorough sentiment analysis to see how the audience feels about the video content you’re publishing. Learn more about how sentiment analysis works here.
7 Tips for a Good Video Marketing Strategy
The above template is just one of the video marketing strategy examples. Your format and way of organizing things can be a little different based on your industry, but the foundation is still the same. That said, here are seven valuable tips that can increase the effectiveness of your video marketing strategy:
1. Start With the Right Channel
As we have mentioned already, it is best to start with the channel that has the majority of your target audience. According to Statista, the audience on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat spend around half of their time watching videos on the platform. You can choose any of the three, depending on the age category you’re targeting. And since all the platforms have different sets of guidelines for content size, time, and format– it’s best to pick the channel that’s most compatible with your business.
2. Use Storytelling
Social media users will watch your videos only if it creates some value for them. If your video is all about you and your company, the audience is more likely to ignore it. The video content that works the best has a story that viewers can connect with. The more relatable content you put on social media, the more keen audience will be to know and connect with you.
Additional reads:
- Why storytelling and marketing are a match made in heaven
- How to make a fairytale convert: The art of storytelling in marketing
3. Leverage Trends
New trends bring an opportunity to attract more audiences with your videos. However, there can be some totally unrelated trends, and if you become a part of it, your audience might not like it. Instead of force-fitting yourself, pick the trends that go well with your business.
To identify and predict trends in a timely manner, start using social listening.
4. Sentiment Analysis Is Mandatory
Amalgamate your content with emotions that people have for your brand. But how can you use those emotions if you have no idea what people feel about your brand? This is where sentiment analysis comes into the picture.
Radarr, the social listening tool, also offers the feature of sentiment analysis which helps you find out the intent and sentiment behind the content posted online. You can use this feature on the conversations generated by your videos and find out how the audience is feeling about it.
5. Adopt and Ditch Platforms When Needed
There are enough analytics tools available in the market that can easily tell you which platform works for you and which is the one you should leave instantly. If some platform is not generating enough ROI, it’s a waste of your time and effort. Don’t drag your feet into something that is not good for your business. Instead, you can put extra effort into a platform that generates good ROI.
6. Shorter the Better
What would you like more– appearing in front of people for a significant amount of time on one day or keep popping up in front of their eyes every other day? Most of you, and wisely so, will choose to appear in front of your audience every day. So instead of packing one video with everything you have to share, split it into parts and share ten videos in place of one. Moreover, the shorter your videos are, the more your audience will engage with them.
7. Put CTA at the Right Place
Yes, it is a different format of content, but your audience still needs to know what they have to do next. So, having a clear CTA is mandatory. But just having it is not enough. You must ensure that you position it carefully. A study by Wistia found out that CTAs in the middle of the video are most effective and have the highest rate of conversion.
8. Engage With Your Audience
The rules of the best-performing content don’t change for videos too. If you want your videos to create a ripple effect, you should focus on monitoring the response on videos. This means keeping a tab on conversations around the videos and the comments it receives, and responding to them in a timely manner. This is where having a social media response strategy comes in.
Conclusion
Video marketing is not a choice anymore, it’s a must-do practice to stay relevant in the market.
And your decision to use video for marketing has already increased your chances to have a genuine and emotional connection with your target audience. This connection on its own is enough to increase your sales.
But getting started with video marketing requires following a strategic approach. That’s why your first step to video marketing, needs to be social listening.
Here is the complete guide of the Social Media Marketing Calendar.
Book a demo of Radarr today to use social listening for video marketing.
