Video Marketing: A Primer

How many videos do you interact with daily online? One, ten, a hundred? Think of your shopping patterns and interactions with product reviews, entertainment videos, skippable and unskippable video ads, and content from your favorite influencers on social media.

Video marketing is here, it’s thriving, and if you’re not yet in, you’re missing out. Businesses worldwide use video marketing to market products and services, improve customer engagement, and educate consumers. International brands such as GoPro, Patagonia, Pepsi, and Moz have cracked the video-ad code and are using their content to engage millions of consumers.

What’s more, video production is now more affordable than ever. You can create 4K video with your phone! There are also plenty of inexpensive cameras, lighting equipment rigs, and editing applications.

At a time when online content is flooded with short videos, live-streaming, and 360-degree interactive videos, you can’t rely on written content and images alone.

However, if you’ve never shot and edited a video for your business, getting started can be tough. We created this guide to help you launch your video marketing strategy.

We’ll cover everything from choosing the type of video you need to producing engaging video content for your brand.

Why Should You Invest in Video Marketing?

Videos are compelling, engrossing, and stimulating. They package and deliver information faster than text and images, while entertaining viewers and invoking their emotions. In short, videos are engaging, hence their dominance in marketing.

Brands use videos to produce content in a conversational, practical, and measurable way. You can use video content to entertain your audience, promote content to increase click-through rates, and personalize marketing to encourage conversions. Video content is helpful throughout the customer journey to boost brand awareness, nurture customers, increase conversions, and provide a positive customer experience.

However, the popularity and effectiveness of video content is not a call to purchase costly equipment, over-edit content or invest in professional film production. In fact, many consumers prefer lower-quality videos because they feel more authentic than high-quality, over-edited videos.

How Do I Create a Video Marketing Strategy?

If you are getting started with video advertising, it’s good to begin by defining your video marketing strategy.

Your video content marketing strategy guides your storytelling, budget, timelines, production process, conversion metrics, creative processes, etc. Here’s how to build a video marketing strategy.

• Define your video marketing goals
• Find your target audience
• Incorporate storytelling into video marketing
• Define your creative elements
• Have a realistic budget
• Create your timelines
• Distribute your video content
• Track video content performance

Define your video marketing goals

Before shooting video content, you need to know why. What is the purpose of the video content, and what action would you like your audience to take after viewing it? Why are you launching a video campaign, and what metrics will you use to measure success?

If you have multiple players in video creation, you can prepare a questionnaire and use it to create your briefs and scripts.

Ideally, the purpose of your business videos will fall into any of the four categories of a video marketing funnel:

Awareness

In this stage, a customer experiences the symptoms of a problem and researches to frame their issue better. Your video marketing goal is to help potential customers communicate their problems and become aware of your business as a solution provider.

Social media videos and SEO videos are great for increasing brand awareness. In addition, if you make awareness videos, your measurable metrics should be related to brand discovery — for example, the number of views and viewing duration.

Consideration

In the consideration stage, potential customers are considering solutions for their problems. They’re looking for recommendations, product reviews, and cost-effective solutions. To ensure that you develop a relationship with a potential customer, you need to show that you’re an expert in your field.

Important metrics include click-through rates to show how many people were captivated enough to click on your content, and view length to show the engagement level of your video content.

Conversion

In the conversion stage, you need to nurture your prospects to make a decision and choose your business. Your videos should prove why a customer should choose you over your competition.

Delight

In the delight stage, a customer has made a purchase and you need to engage them to stay in business with you. In this stage, videos are helpful for product training, especially if your products evolve or are applicable to different scenarios. You can also consider live-streaming events.

Find your target audience

Knowing who you are marketing to is critical for any video advertising campaign. A practical way to approach this is to use your ideal customer persona. Which customer is the best fit for your business and will derive the most value from your products or services?

Sift through your data to define your ideal customer age, business, interests, preferred video content, and patterns. The more refined data you can gather, the more accurate your aim becomes. Try to answer these three questions:

• Who is your product or service for? This is the buyer persona
• What is the purpose of your video? This is the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion, and delight)
• Where is your target audience? This is where you’ll distribute your video content.

You may need more than one buyer persona for different platforms. In addition, you need to revisit your personas as your video marketing progresses and align them with the viewers.

Incorporate storytelling into video marketing

You need to choose what story you want to tell in each video before preparing a script. Storytelling in video marketing uses an engaging conversational format for advertising your business. Stories should have four main elements.

• Characters: A person that plays a significant role in the story. The protagonist should align with your target audience.
• Conflict: The customer’s pain point(s).
• Quest: Introduction to your products or services.
• Resolution: How your product triumphs and solves the protagonist’s problem.

As you create your story, ask yourself the following.

• What impact do you want your story to have?
• What emotion do you want your customers to feel after watching your video?
• Are your characters lovable or relatable?
• How can you boost the video’s impact through soundtracks camera angles, fonts, graphics, brand visuals, or other edits?
• Are you telling instead of showing? Always show, don’t tell.

Define your creative elements

As you define your video, remember all creatives that offer input into video production and determine how to manage creative feedback. Not all feedback is beneficial for your videos. For instance, some business owners may insist on having a company logo at the bottom of video content. The decision may reduce the impact of good content. Agree on details about the script, brand images, graphics, and product placement to avoid throwing your video production off.

Have a realistic budget

Money rules, even in creative planning and production. You need a realistic video production budget to help you achieve what you want. Without a proper budget, it’s hard to plan and know your spending limits. A budget helps you identify your basics and extras and where you’d like to be in terms of production quality.

If it’s your first time, shop around and ask industry experts, agencies, and freelancers how much they charge for video production services such as story creation, scriptwriting, editing, and social media distribution.

Create your timelines

Map out your entire schedule, from planning to production and distribution. Timelines are crucial, because they account for time spent and remind your team about pending tasks. In addition, other departments in your organization may have different timelines, so it’s best to share your plans and align schedules accordingly.

Distribute your video content

Once you’ve created your video content, it’s time to distribute it to your audience. You can publish your video content on your website and other popular video hosting platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Vidyard. You can also share your videos on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

If you embed the videos on social media and your website, remember to do so with relevant content. Furthermore, boost your video through search engine optimization (SEO). Use keywords, actionable titles, links, descriptions, transcripts tags, and annotations that make your content easy to crawl and rank organically.

Track video content performance

After producing and distributing your video content, remember to track the performance to check if your content meets your marketing goals. Then, you can adjust your video marketing strategy to fulfill your goals with the correct data and insights. For example, you can use metrics such as:

• Watch time: The total amount of time viewers spend on your videos.
• Average video duration: This measures the total time your viewers spend on your video. Divide the total watch time by the total number of viewers.
• Completion rate: The percentage of the video your audience watches. This metric shows your video’s ability to hold customers’ attention.
• Audience retention: This metric shows the percentage of your audience that watches your video from beginning to end. You should analyze the data to find when viewers drop off from the video.
• Re-watches: The number of times your viewers rewatch your video. If people rewatch specific videos or a specific part of your video, it probably has meaningful and engaging content.

How Can I Use Videos To Market My Business? Types of Marketing Video

Once you have a video marketing strategy, you need to decide what kind of video you’ll create. Every type of video has its application and marketing goal. Let’s break down some of the most common types of business videos.

Brand Videos

Brand videos explain a business’s mission, vision, and values. These videos are essential for increasing brand awareness by intriguing and attracting the target audience. Brand videos aim for positive association and building good reputations, rather than promoting products and services.

Demo Videos

Demo videos show how your product works. They include practical applications of your software at work, unboxing, and testing physical products. Demo videos are helpful in influencing buyer decisions.

Event Videos

Event videos capture essential parts of a conference, interview, presentation, fundraiser, round-table discussion, or any other type of event. You can use event videos to highlight segments of the event for marketing.

Expert Interview Videos

Video interviews with industry experts can set your brand apart as a thought leader. You can use these videos to grow authority and trust. Your content should dive deep into topics and offer viewers unconventional knowledge and practical advice.

Instructional or How-To Videos

How-to videos provide foundational knowledge customers need to understand your products and services. For example, explainer videos show how and why your products can solve a customer’s problem, while instructional/training videos walk customers through all steps required to use your product or service.

In most cases, explainer videos focus on a fictional customer journey with a specific problem that can be solved by your business, while training videos focus on practical steps.

Animated Videos

Animated videos have versatile applications, including explainer videos, demo videos, and sales pitch videos. In addition, these videos are easier and cheaper to produce in some cases, instead of shooting with live actors.

Customer Testimonials

One of the best ways to prove that your products and services work is to create customer testimonial videos. Your customers become advocates for your business and go on camera, describing their business problems and how you solved them.

Live Videos

Live videos are great for live chats and discussions, interviews and presentations, and behind-the-scenes at your business. They’re a great way to boost viewer engagement and encourage viewers to respond in the comments.

360° Videos

These videos help viewers experience a location or event through watching. They’re great for live videos, exhibitions, and events.

AR Videos

Augmented reality videos use devices to create a virtual 3-D environment that viewers can interact with. These videos provide a near-reality experience where customers can interact with a location and products virtually.

Launch Video Marketing For Your Business Today

Are you tired of missing out on the action? Discover how Big Sea Marketing can help you create video marketing that engages and converts.