7 Tips To Improve Your Video Marketing Strategy
Video marketing has seen a steady rise in popularity for the past couple of years, and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Whether it’s social media videos, webinars, or educational video material, many businesses have seamlessly integrated a digital video strategy into their overall marketing strategies. It doesn’t matter if you’re a pro looking for some extra inspiration or an absolute beginner trying to get into the game: we’ve gathered a team of experts who laid out all the facts, and you’ll find out everything you need to know about an online video marketing strategy in a less-than-10-minute read. Let’s dive right in!
What is a video marketing strategy?
A video marketing strategy is one of the main pillars in the grand scheme of digital marketing. It represents the blueprint and well-thought-of plan that is implemented to make efficient use of video content for promotional purposes. A properly researched and well-executed video marketing strategy will serve as your playbook that guides all marketing efforts on the video front, starting with conceptual drafts and wrapping up with key metrics and measurements.
Why is a video marketing strategy important?
A digital video strategy is more important than you’d think at first. Not only is it a key player when it comes to interacting with your audience, but it also contributes to actually creating a community and fostering loyalty amongst your viewers. Having an online video marketing strategy is like adding reliable bricks to your branding foundation, as it maintains brand identity through a consistent visual presence. Need we mention the brand awareness that is smoothly transitioning into brand recognition through a well-put-together video promotion strategy? Perhaps an even more important element we cannot overlook is the fact that video is the right channel to foster authentic connections with your audience. Images can seem overly curated and impersonal, whilst a video will always create a humane liaison and make the screen feel invisible when it’s fostered as an open dialogue. This is what you need to do more than just checking business objectives and truly become a relevant part of your customers’ lives.
How to create a video marketing strategy?
Establish your digital video strategy goals
Clarifying your online video marketing strategy through a goal-oriented approach is the way to go! If you’re still unsure of how you should define your objectives, we’ve got you covered with a couple of handy examples below:
- Create awareness by exposing your video content to as many people (that is, new people) as possible
- Inform your audience by creating educational content that would serve them directly, and use this opportunity to link it with your product or service
- Entertain your audience and build a trusting relationship with them through a personal connection (think of vlogs as a perfect example)
- Showcase your product by providing a tutorial on how it should be used and its benefits
- Drive traffic to your website by linking engaging videos with selected and dedicated landing pages
Research and deconstruct audience info
It’s no use knowing what your video’s goal is as long as you have no clue who it’s directed towards. This is why it’s vital to know your target audience and create a buyer persona - the ideal client that would interact with and/or purchase your product or service. Think of the buyer persona as an ultra-detailed character sketch that goes beyond demographics. Building it will help you understand their preferences, likes and dislikes, quirks, and even what makes them tick, so you can deliver relevant content that truly resonates and keeps them hooked.
Craft your message
Now that you’ve got the objectives and audience information out of the way, it’s time to get cracking on crafting the actual message you want to convey. Start by writing down your ideas with a video brief so you can have a clear overview of your entire plan, budgeting, and other details that can easily be overlooked. To provide even more clarity and structure, make sure you craft a video script to deliver your message just the right way. A pro tip is to remember to adhere to platform-specific requirements regarding video length, so time yourself while reading the script, then adjust accordingly.
Select platforms & distribution channels
Each platform has specific requirements when it comes to video length, aspect ratio, formatting, and even metadata. Yes, this means titles, descriptions, and a hashtag strategy. Keep in mind that there are unwritten rules for all social media platforms. A couple of notable ideas refer to LinkedIn being recognized as a more formal social space, meaning that the focus is on B2B interactions. Another example is that of TikTok, a platform whose very core is video content and on which authenticity thrives, as opposed to Instagram’s carefully curated, aesthetic, and occasionally heavily filtered content. As long as your social media video marketing strategy is mindful of these rules and the general feel of the audience, you should be good to go!
Schedule & post content
Your social media video marketing strategy should consider a posting frequency strategy based on your audience's needs and the type of content you are posting. This means that you need to take advantage of the very popular tactic of repurposed content and plan your calendar accordingly. Adapt the tone of each post and try to establish a set frequency and some content pillars you can stick to so your video marketing strategy has structure and offers reliable, relevant content for your viewers.
Explore metrics: analyze and understand
Being familiar with terms such as engagement, click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, and similar terms is crucial to anyone working in video marketing strategy. The best thing to do after you post a video is to monitor the metrics behind it. Try to understand where the audience is done with watching and hits the exit button, try to spot a pattern in videos that rack up the most comments, and don’t shy away from testing. Remember not to put too much pressure on yourself, as numbers aren’t always everything, and growth is sometimes slow and unsteady. You’ve got this!
7 Tips To Improve Your Video Marketing Strategy
1. Create engaging content
We know what you’re thinking: you obviously need to create engaging content as part of your digital video strategy! What you actually need to do is to understand your audience beyond the little stats and numbers you’ll see in analytics. Understand and deconstruct what makes them tick, where they hit the click button the most, and where they feel most encouraged to continue a conversation in the comments section. There’s one secret ingredient you need to add to the eclectic mix that your online video marketing strategy will become: authenticity. Remember that being yourself is not something you can quantify in a video advertising strategy, but rather the part of content creation that happens with your heart. That being said, we’re sure you’ll enjoy crafting an authenticity-focused video marketing strategy, and we’re leaving you with a couple of tips on creating engaging YouTube videos to serve as inspo.
2. Make your videos community-centric
Another way to engage with your community effectively is to make them the show's stars. People love seeing themselves in videos and being noticed by brands.
Encourage your fans to make videos using your products and services, and then share those videos on social media and your website. Welcome to the beauty of user-generated content (UGC) as a strong pillar of your video advertising strategy. You can even pair this tactic with a branded hashtag strategy to increase your posts' reach and get your brand noticed.
Even more so, fans are more likely to share videos with friends and family if they recognize themselves in them, so making relatable content is vital in a video promotion strategy. Every time one of your videos is shared, your brand will appear in the feeds of a larger number of viewers, increasing your exposure and brand awareness. Now this is something you don’t want to miss out on when drafting your online video marketing strategy!
3. Optimize your video content
Just like a website's pages, Google and Bing also index YouTube videos. And that’s only one platform, without considering how the algorithm works for the others! Let’s stick to the YouTube example for now to take an in-depth look at a social media video marketing strategy.
In other words, when someone searches for your brand using a specific phrase, you may appear in the search results. That is, only if your video is SEO-optimized for that keyword phrase! You can use keywords in your video headlines and descriptions to help optimize your videos. You can also use YouTube's tagging function, which helps define the context of your videos and groups them based on similarity. Then, when a viewer watches a similar video, your video will be more likely to appear as a related video. Sounds pretty straightforward, right?
Make sure to incorporate SEO optimization into your digital video strategy, so you can properly leverage the power of search engines.
4. Use Calls-To-Action (CTAs) wisely
In your videos, always include a clear and concise call to action (the video promotion strategy darling, the CTA), letting people know you want them to visit your website, follow you on social media, or perform a specific action.
If a narrator talks in the video, they can tell viewers to perform this action. But you should also include text or subtitles in the video to direct visitors to complete your call to action, which is especially useful for short videos that they might watch with the volume turned off.
A viewer might enjoy your content, but you may be wasting time and money creating videos if they don't know what to do afterward.
Including a call to action is easy and results in better conversions since it creates a clear path for the viewer to follow and understand what they need to do next, so make sure you incorporate at least one in your social media video marketing strategy.
5. Reuse and repurpose your videos
Engagement is the name, and repurposing content is the game! A crucial factor in growing engagement as part of your video promotion strategy is consistency and having a clear-cut plan. Of course, creating fresh content isn’t always a piece of cake, as a digital video strategy not only takes up time but requires resources that might not always be available. This is where reusing content and repurposing for another medium comes to the rescue.
As part of your social media video marketing strategy, try to establish one piece of content as the starting point, then rework the same material around different social media platforms. We know we’re stating the obvious, but your video promotion strategy should include at least two different social media media, depending on your audience’s preferences and needs.
If you’re still unsure as to how this tactic can be worked into your video advertising strategy, check out this resource on how to repurpose your best-performing content into highly converting videos.
6. Schedule your videos
Viewers expect regular content updates from the brands they interact with, meaning you need to invest time and thought into a good social media video marketing strategy. This is why instead of uploading videos at random whenever you've got time, it's best to create a video content schedule and stick to it. Consider what ideas, topics, and stories you want to share with your audience and split them into short segments, posting a new update at the right time. We’ve compiled a list of the best times to post on social media that can serve as a handy guide to help you optimize your video posting schedule. It’s important to know that each social media platform not only has specific requirements for video lengths, aspect ratios, or sizes, but the algorithm also considers timing. If you’d like to go into further detail by exploring a hands-on example for your online video marketing strategy, here are our experts’ findings on the best times to post on Instagram.
Now, back to our topic at hand, setting and sticking to a regular posting schedule allows your audience to know when they can expect new content from you and encourages them to return for more videos at given intervals. You can also use your videos to build anticipation, leading to a significant product launch or an exciting announcement by spacing them out over time.
In the end, if you regularly post reliable, helpful video content by following a clear social media video marketing strategy, this will help establish your company as a thought leader in your industry.
7. Evaluate your online video marketing strategy success
You’ve created a carefully curated series of videos and posted them online. Great, now what?
It’s vital to recognize and assess your video promotion strategy from an efficiency point of view to help you improve and optimize your digital video strategy over time.
Fortunately, many video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo offer video analytics, which can help you determine how well your videos perform. You can use these analytics to examine metrics: the number of views, the percentage of visitors who pressed the play button, how much time they spent watching your video, and many others. This will allow you to make better decisions about your online video marketing strategy in the future.
If you need some help in decrypting and understanding analytics, we’ve got you! Check out our article on the most important YouTube analytics and step up your video promotion strategy!
Make The Most Of Your Video Marketing Strategy
TLDR, having a video marketing strategy is more important than ever before. Not only are videos practical, but your followers now simply prefer to consume information by watching a video rather than reading a blog post. Therefore, you must include a clear-cut online video marketing strategy as part of your overall digital marketing strategy!
We can’t wait to see you put good advice into practice, so please share your story of successfully implementing an online video marketing strategy on socials, and we promise we’re going to have a look!