Your Essential Guide to Video Marketing
Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing Survey is an annual report that provides data on the evolving video marketing landscape. In 2021, they found that people surveyed spend roughly 19 hours a week watching videos online, and roughly 88% say that watching videos influenced their purchase decisions. These are two reasons why 87% of marketers say video provides a general good ROI. Read this blog to learn the fundamentals of video marketing so that you can create effective videos for your business.
What Is Video Marketing?
Video marketing, also known as video content marketing, involves using videos to promote your brand, product, or service. Nonetheless, video marketing isn't limited to driving sales. You can also use videos to increase social media engagement, provide customer support, educate customers, and more.
The Four Benefits of Video Marketing
Nearly 86% of businesses surveyed reported using video as a marketing tool. But why do many businesses consider video essential to their marketing efforts? If you're wondering why video is a go-to medium for many businesses, here are four benefits of video marketing.
Video Boosts Sales
Fifty-five percent of customers watch videos before making purchase decisions. What’s more, 81% of marketers say video has directly boosted sales. If you have a product or service with low sales, creating videos about it may help conversion.
2. Videos Improve Search Ranking
If your content doesn't perform well on search engine results pages (SERPs), videos can improve your ranking. Google boosts pages with video over pages without so incorporating them into your digital marketing strategy can make your content more discoverable online.
3. Videos Boost Social Shares
Increasing engagement is one of the top priorities for marketers. Videos can increase social shares if customers don’t engage with your content. Social media videos get 12 times more shares than images and text, making them a great way to grow your online community.
4. Videos Offer Lasting Impact
Videos are more memorable than other types of content. According to a study, viewers recall 95% of the content when conveyed via video compared to only 10% when reading it in text.
How to Develop a Video Marketing Strategy in 6 Steps
Besides shooting videos and uploading them online, creating effective videos involves much more. Before you start shooting videos, you must create a video marketing strategy. Why? A video marketing strategy will help you keep your project on track and provide you with a clear roadmap of how to tackle every step of the project. Plus, a video marketing strategy will save precious time and prevent you from making costly mistakes.
Here are steps you can follow when crafting your strategy.
Determine Your Key Objectives
First, identify what you want to accomplish using videos. Common goals include building awareness, generating leads, building trust, or increasing sales.
Once you establish your key goals, prioritize one and set out to achieve it. For instance, if you want to introduce a new product to the market, you'll need to create videos that build awareness about the new product.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Next, define your target audience. By identifying your target audience, you'll avoid the pitfall of creating content that doesn’t connect.
To identify your target audience, create one or multiple buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional descriptions of your ideal customers. Generally, buyer personas should highlight information about your target customers like age, gender, location, interests, and profession. They should also list your target customers' most significant challenges and how they make purchase decisions. Once you develop one or more buyer personas, you'll know who to target with your videos and how to create messages that resonate with them.
3. Set a Budget and Timeline for the Video
While a substantial budget won't guarantee success, a cheap, low-quality video could hurt your brand image. Therefore, remain realistic when setting a budget.
To create a realistic budget, identify all the resources you already have available and the ones you may need to get externally. When listing resources, don't limit them to only equipment. Consider personnel as well. For instance, if you don't have a video production team, you may need to hire a marketing partner like Radically Distinct with video marketing capability.
Once you create a budget, set a timeline for each project. Even short video projects can take considerable time, so ensure you select a timeline to keep the project on track.
4. Choose a Video Type
Before you start filming, you'll need to pick a video type. Ideally, the video type you pick should be relevant to your goals. For instance, if you aim to demonstrate how your product or service solves a particular problem, an explainer video will be perfect for your project.
Besides explainer videos, other popular types of marketing videos you may want to consider for your project include:
• Testimonial videos
• How-to-videos
• Webinars
• Demo videos
• Live videos
5. Select Distribution Channels
After creating your video, you must share it with your target audience. Some great places to share your video include your website, blog, and email list. In addition, social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok are great options depending on your target audience.
Finally, consider using paid social media ads if your advertising budget allows it. Paid social media ads can allow you to reach a wider audience with better targeting.
6. Measure Performance
The video marketing process continues once you share your video online. To refine your video marketing strategy, you'll need to measure the effectiveness of your video. Tracking the performance of your video will allow you to identify what's working and what isn't so that you can change your strategy if required.
Some key video metrics you can track to measure video performance include:
• View count
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Video completions
• Completion rate
• Social shares
While these are some video metrics you can track, the key metrics you should track will largely depend on your main goal. For example, if your main goal is to accelerate sales, you'll want to track the video ability to set appointments.
Video Marketing Agency in Seattle, WA
Videos can take your business to the next level. But before you create them, take time to make a video marketing strategy if you want your videos to be compelling. And if you need help with your video marketing, contact Radically Distinct. We are a strategic branding and marketing agency based in Seattle, WA that helps business owners develop and optimize marketing programs to drive growth.