If you question any average marketer regarding their video marketing strategy and plans right now, you might probably face a shrug from the person. It is pretty evident that most marketers believe on a fundamental level that video making is pretty essential. They might even be posting videos regularly on their channel –it’s not always necessary to have more profound logic behind them. But without any doubt, video is essential. According to recent surveys, it’s how people today spend approximately one-third of their days: viewing online video content. And where there are more views, more website traffic, ad dollars subsequently follow.
According to a 2018 Business survey report, about 81% of businesses worldwide use videography as their marketing tool. Figures had risen up from 63% in 2017, and 81% of people have been convinced to purchase a product or avail of service by watching a brand’s video.
So how to work upon launching a video marketing strategy that helps us get more engagement and better results?
We start with the steps one by one:
1. Understand the demands of your audience and set campaign goals
All successful marketing campaigns must begin with solid ground research –You must ask essential questions like who are you targeting through your strategies? What type of content would sync with them perfectly, and what channels are they most likely to follow? There’s absolutely no point in making amazing video content and paying it to make it play on websites your audience won’t visit.
Also, most importantly, what goals are you trying to achieve with your video marketing campaign? Are you trying to encapsulate awareness, sales, traffic, all of the above under a single roof? To capitalize on your video’s ability to connect with your customer, make sure you use the right tone of voice and message while you communicate with them. It’s crucial to spend time working upon consumer insights before launching your video because these are the opinions that would inform you about the types of videos you must produce and how much money you can spend while making them.
2. Stay on brand, and pour down your message across videos
Videography seems to be a departure from other branches of marketing or a separate way to work out branding freshly. Still, it’s crucial that the viewers watching your videos –they might be surprised by the content you have to offer – and know who and what is trying to reach them.
According to recent studies, companies that function with a consistent branding of about 20% are more successful than those below them. For example, suppose your videos are on YouTube or any kind of a social media channel. In that case, they should establish a link to your site or a landing page, with a clear, on-branded creative and messaging feature that’s unified across all the channels. If the viewers of your videos see in your email that communications are different from what they see on Facebook, it doesn’t act as a proper reflection of your brand and could be of no great help.
3. Make sure of a sensible video budget
Many marketers make a rookie mistake of thinking that investing a massive amount of money into a video project would automatically power it to become a huge success. On the other hand, not spending enough money on a far-reaching and planned campaign could hurt your brand’s face value by not letting the messaging feature come across in a pretty low-quality way.
When it comes to creating video content, keep your campaign goals particularly in mind and make sure you’re efficiently spending your budget. Sometimes you might want to consider producing short videos for popular social channels like Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter or repurpose all user-generated content. If you have a larger budget down your pocket and want to keep your brand on top of mind, consider working upon a captivating story derived from the ideas of Hollywood (celebs optional).
But calling upon influencers in your videos doesn’t always mean all about recruiting big celebrities. To stay under your budget, consider featuring industry experts or even YouTube celebrities in your videos. That gives you a better insight and access to the audience you’re trying to cater to. However, it would be best if you made sure that the person is well-suited and qualified to represent your company. It would help if you properly researched their social media profiles and reputation and the topics they feature on their own channels and pages. Also, don’t ever undermine your brand or products’ values by anyways.
4. Optimize your videos and target each channel
Optimization primarily depends on the channels you choose to launch your campaigns, make sure your videos are optimized properly to garner as much engagement as possible. You can classify it as one of the most crucial video marketing tips. For your Facebook page, this means keeping your content short and uploading videos directly to the channel along with adding captions. However, in YouTube, this means waiting two long weeks after your video launches to make any tweaks and invite your target audience.
Also, optimizing videos for Twitter means finding a near-perfect balance between finely-tuned targeting –reaching out from interest to keywords and then to the device. In addition, not over-targeting to entirely make sure that you can easily track which campaign is performing and giving its best. Hence, this shows how essential optimization strategies are when it comes to video marketing tips.
5. Go on with your testing process
Like the display ad campaigns, continuous A/B testing should help you figure out what campaign elements are correctly working out and what isn’t. Maybe the faults in your video marketing tips are not from a creative point of view but your messaging feature, or perhaps it’s that time of the day where you’re deploying your campaign or the channels you are choosing. Either your videos are too long or too short in their length. Whatever may be the reason, make sure you test, and keep on with your difficulties, again and again, to figure out the content and timing for your campaigns.
Here are five definite ways to determine campaigning success:
a. Rate of Engagement
Engagement rate measures any amount of interaction someone has with your video content. Does it answer specific questions like how much time did a viewer spend on the video? Did they watch the entire thing or leave early, or did they merely skipping over the whole thing? These numbers give you a proper indication about the quality of your message, your creative issues, and says if your video is too long or of the appropriate length.
b. Play rate
Another vital part of the video marketing tip is to count the number of visitors who clicked and played to watch the video. This is quite crucial because it gives you a proper idea of how the video ad performs on certain specific websites or social media pages and feeds. Maybe its performance isn’t up to the mark in New York Times, instead, it gets a lot of plays and views on Slate. This tells you something proper and vital about your audience. You can also use Play Rate to influence the thumbnails that you provide, the copy, or even the length of your video.
c. Social Sharing
This parameter measures the number of times people on different social media channels have shared your video. People don’t bother to share content they don’t seem interested in; hence, if your videos are getting lots of shares by your audience, your content is resonating and creating a buzz.
6. Don’t forget Connected TV ads (CTV)
Nowadays, people are streaming TV content on their mobile devices in greater numbers than ever done before.CTV ads device a great way to track and reach them from where they’re spending a significant amount of their every day’s time. In fact, some recent IAB poll revealed that approximately 60% of US advertisers plan to shift their focus on a budget from linear TV to CTV or OTT in 2021.1 As you chalk out your video marketing plan, give a thought to whether building awareness with CTV ads are a viable option. Hence, this is another important link in your video marketing tips.