Why Video Marketing Matters and How You Can Do It

07 Feb Why Video Marketing Matters and How You Can Do It

Video marketing is when you or someone on your marketing team takes and posts videos with the intention of moving toward accomplishing the business’ marketing and sales goals. Video has quickly become the most attention-getting and impactful type of content online. It is also becoming the most successful way to grab the attention of prospective customers, build brand personality and trustworthiness and make an impact and impression on prospective customers. With the increasing popularity and success of videos, search engines like Google is also factoring video meta content into its SERPs rankings, meaning video marketing boosts your company’s website’s chances of being found online.

Why Video Marketing?

• Greatly improves email open rate by nearly 100%
• Has the highest click through rate of any digital medium
• Increases social sharing
• More than 90% of consumers watch explainer videos before purchasing a product or learn how a product works
• Mobile video has grown 100%
• Video improves your website ranking on SERPs by 50%
• More than 50% of consumers watch a company video before purchasing a product as video builds trust and authenticity
• Conversions can improve by as much as 80%
• The majority of businesses that do video marketing say it’s worth the investment and has improved ROI
• Video increases brand awareness and attracts more qualified leads

Video Content Marketing Strategy

It may seem like a no-brainer to do video marketing. However, a successful video content marketing strategy requires planning and thought. After all, videos done poorly will likely have the opposite effect of what your brand is trying to accomplish. Whether you’re nervous about doing your first video or you’re excited and can’t wait, there are some things to consider and plan out first before plowing headlong into video production.

1. Have a Purpose for the Video Content and What Your Video Will Accomplish

The purpose of the video and its role in the company’s overall marketing or sales strategy will determine the type of video to be made, its length, its content and where the video will be shared. Consider your company’s values and unique personality as well as the values and problems of your customers. Have specific goals and answer the hard questions such as why anyone should care to watch your video.

2. Know Your Audience

After figuring out what’s important to your business and who your business is, it’s time to pinpoint who your audience is. It’s a good idea to make buyer personas of your ideal customer groups, learning who they are, what sites they regularly visit online, what they’re interested in, what worries or problems they are looking to solve and find issues to, their education level, etc. Knowing your audiences will help shape the type of video and the content of the video. Knowledge of your audience will also help you find them online and post your video on those sites.

3. Make Your Video Special and Unique

With all the videos already posted online and the many more that are posted each day, it is important that each video you produce is unique and special, featuring a unique value proposition, or UVP. In creating an UVP, consider your brand’s style and tone, the topic covered in the video and where the video will be posted.

4. Have a Plan

Like any other element of a marketing strategy, a plan is needed for success. When coming up with a video content marketing plan, you’ll want to consider your business’ marketing and sales funnels. To do this you’ll need to know which type of content will be best for each stage of the buyer’s journey as well as having an answer to questions such as how the content appeals or gets the attention of each target audience, how the content fills in any messaging gaps, where and how the content fits onto the buyer’s journey and where and how the content will be used, posted and re-used.

Video Content Marketing Tips

Whether you’ve never done a video before or you’ve dabbled with some in the past and didn’t get the results you were looking for, here are some tips on how to start producing successful marketing videos:

Make the Video Interesting

For starters, your story has to be compelling. Most people want to feel something. If you’re just taking the same content that you already have in other places on your website and adding some video clips you’re probably not going to be getting the results you want.

Videos, particularly brand videos, give you more freedom than most other marketing formats to show off your values to your customers and potential customers.

Get to the Point Quickly

Regardless of how long your video is, the first 5-10 seconds of the video will be how long someone will watch your video and decide whether or not to watch the rest of it. This is because web users have a short attention span and they want to make sure that watching your video in its entirety is worth their precious time. The longer your video is watched, the more likely people will convert, share the post or interact with your brand.

Tell Viewers What to Do Next

It’s important to interact with viewers of your video while they are engaged with it. Most marketers do this via inserting a call to action (CTA) at the end of their video. This CTA should clearly tell the viewer what to do next. Sometimes video content marketers will also insert a CTA in the middle of the video as well. However, one has be careful that this CTA doesn’t interrupt the flow of the video and that it naturally fits in with the content. If the mid-video CTA doesn’t fit, it can distract or annoy the viewer and derail your video content messaging.

Make Sure Your Video Content is Optimized

YouTube is the second largest search engine, and because it’s run by Google, many of the same SEO SERP ranking factors are applied. While the Google robots can’t read video, they can read text which is why optimizing your video description is important. Concisely describe what the video is about, naturally sprinkling in keywords and important links back to your website.

Share Your Videos Where Your Audiences Are

You can have an amazing video, but if it is shared and posted in front of the audience, it will not be as effective.

Using the above user personas and research about your ideal customers, you should have an idea of what websites they frequent and engage on. Post your videos there.

Now that you have tips and suggestions, you may be wondering what kind of videos your company can do and what do these videos look like in practice. There are two main types of video: pre-recorded and live video. There are numerous ideas for novice and seasoned company video producers for each. Here are some tangible ideas on what type of videos you can begin doing based on your level of comfort and experience:

Pre-Recorded Video Ideas

Beginner

• Do short “thank you” videos from your team
• Film a product screencast demonstration
• Create an animated GIF to demonstrate how to use your product or service
• Short customer testimonials
• Utilize user-generated content by asking the online community for photos, videos and social media content shares via contests and giveaways.

Intermediate

• Film longer testimonials and case studies.
• Film longer customer success stories.
• Do longer product demos using whiteboard-style instructional animation.
• Do a video introduction of your company and its vision and mission.

Advanced

• Create a long, full product demo.
• Create vlog, or video blog entries highlighting summaries of the company, conventions and how-to videos of products.
• Conduct long interviews with the company CEO, president, marketing director and other key employees.
• Shoot live presentations by company employees.

Live Video Ideas

Beginner

• Use Facebook Live or Twitter to broadcast from interesting industry events someone in your company is attending.
• Thank customers on special occasions using Google Hangouts or Skype.

Intermediate

• Do live Q&A sessions with company employees or visitors.
• Live stream a conversation with a relevant thought leader or influencer.
• Live stream relevant in-office events that highlight company culture.

Advanced

• Show a live product or service demonstration with a salesperson that includes a Q&A.
• Film a live presentation Q&A.
• Stream a “day at the office” behind-the-scenes video with a company executive or regular employee.

Video content marketing is a powerful tool in your marketing tool belt which will only become more common in the coming years. If you haven’t tried video marketing or haven’t had much success, there are numerous tips and suggestions on how to make your videos stand out. There is almost no limit as to what video one can produce or use video.

Video is highly successful in sales as well, garnering not only more leads and click-throughs in general, but high-quality leads that will more likely convert. At Aktify, we can help your company with getting qualified leads, and even written-off “dead” leads through your company’s sales funnel. To learn how our services can help your video marketing strategy more successful, contact us today.