There’s no mystery behind the recent explosive growth in video marketing. Less expensive cameras and improved bandwidth have made it easier to deliver video, while search engines have begun prioritizing it in their results. More centrally, there is a high demand for video content among online users, making it an effective marketing tool for businesses. That’s not to say that incorporating video is easy. It requires an understanding of the audience, production, delivery channels, and more. Having a good video marketing strategy in place from the get-go simplifies the process and increases the chances for success.
Jump to:
- Why is it important to create a video marketing strategy for your business?
- How to build a video marketing strategy?
- Examples of successful video marketing strategies
- What goals can your business achieve with a video marketing strategy? [Use cases]
- The future of video marketing strategy and trends to watch for
- Final thoughts
Why is it important to create a video marketing strategy for your business?
A strategy is a step-by-step plan of action for attaining a set goal. When it comes to the complexities of using video content for marketing, a well-thought-out plan is needed to bring all the different elements together in a way that provides a benefit to both the viewers and the company, all while staying within budget.
Effective video marketing can no longer rely on just one, or even a handful of videos. Instead, quality campaigns require a constant stream of new content. Organizations need to decide in advance what kinds of videos they will release and at what time. A video marketing strategy breaks this process down, making it easier to navigate.
How to build a video marketing strategy
Research stage
Developing a video marketing strategy starts with in-depth research to fully understand the goals and how they can be achieved. Answering the following questions provides a solid foundation for implementing a successful strategy.
What are your video marketing goals?
When answering this question, it is helpful to keep in mind the SMART model (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based). Having clearly defined, measurable goals in place at the beginning of the process will inform the types of videos that need to be put out and later provide an objective way to assess whether they were successful.
Who is your target audience?
Your target audience is those who are most likely to be converted by your video content. Identifying the target audience allows you to create videos that appeal to that specific group of people. The main way marketers do this is through the use of personas, which are imagined representations of the ideal viewer.
Personas take into consideration personal traits like age, gender, location, and income along with interests, needs, habits, and even aspirations. There is usually more than one persona for each video/campaign, but the more specific each persona is, the better. Give the personas names and attach pictures of what they might look like. The clearer they are in your mind, the easier it will be to reach similar people online. User survey data and site analytics will help in constructing personas.
When will your videos be released?
A timeline should include an overall release schedule for all the planned videos as well as the pre-production, production, and post-production for each one. Depending on the scope of the campaign, it is highly possible that the creation of videos will overlap, for example, shooting one video while editing another, so having a detailed timeline is essential for keeping everything on track.
Where will videos be viewed?
Marketers have a lot of choices today regarding which channels they would like to share their videos on, but it is almost never a good strategy to try to use them all. When it comes to social media, each platform occupies a unique market niche, which determines what kinds of content the technology supports, and what users expect to see.
A twenty-minute tutorial wouldn’t be out of place on YouTube, yet clocks in at twice the current time limit on TikTok. While this precludes the ability to reuse the same video all over the web, it does simplify the process of reaching a target audience, since each platform has distinct demographics. Knowing your target audience helps in the selection of a platform, which in turn, clarifies the type of video that best suits that platform.
Companies also host videos on their own site or use a paid service like the Kaltura Video Portal, which can be branded and gives companies more control over their video content–plus added benefits like tech support and detailed analytics.
Production stage
No matter the scale of the video production, be it one or two people, or an entire team, marketers are responsible for ensuring that the video aligns with both their marketing strategy and their company’s brand.
Create written scripts
A good video starts with a good script. Even if it is meant to appear informal and off-the-cuff, there should still be something prepared in advance like an outline or list of interview questions.
During the writing process, remember that all videos must:
– Have a consistent tone and voice.
– Align with company values.
– Be attention-grabbing and tell a clear story.
– Include a call to action (CTA).
People tend to associate positive emotions they feel watching a video with that brand. They are also more likely to share a video if it elicits a strong emotion.
Work on video production
When it comes to physically shooting your videos, the goal should be to attain the highest possible production values while staying within the budget. Viewers are used to seeing professional-looking videos, and anything that fails to meet that bar may lead them to equate that brand with lower quality.
Luckily, it only takes a few basic elements to elevate the quality of any video, even if it is shot with a smartphone. The primary ones are lighting, sound, and titles. All three can easily be adjusted with simple, inexpensive pieces of equipment or software. A ring light coupled with an external microphone or body mic and a good, well-lit background will instantly elevate any video. Free or low-cost editing software can be used to add titles, music, and other simple effects.
Still, organizations need to be realistic about what they can produce in-house. If high quality is key to the message, it may be worthwhile to outsource the production to a professional team with high-end equipment and editing expertise.
Launch and promote the videos
It pays to be consistent and put out new content on a regular basis. For each video, consider the elements that will cause a viewer to click on the video like the thumbnail, title, and description. The title should elicit an emotional response, such as curiosity, and contain popular keywords that are likely to appear in online searches. (This goes for tags and meta descriptions as well.)
There are many ways to promote videos online and they all fall into the following four categories: Owned, shared, paid, and earned.
Owned media is published on channels a company controls, like its website, blog, and social media accounts.
Shared media is also social media, but not necessarily accounts that a company controls.
Paid media is when a company is charged a fee, like in the case of online ads or when paying to promote a video. It also includes influencer partnerships and native advertising.
Earned media is when the content is promoted by another party for free, like social media shares and news coverage. This is the most sought-after form of distribution, but also the hardest to achieve.
Note that there are areas of overlap between the categories, for example, social media posts that go viral, or paid media that attracts attention from journalists.
Conduct A/B testing
A/B testing is the process of presenting two slightly different versions of the same media to different groups of people and measuring which one is more likely to achieve the desired results (per CTA). It is a way to gauge the effectiveness of video content and identify areas for improvement.
Some variables that can be altered for purposes of A/B testing include title, thumbnail, description, length, and CTA–but only one variable can be changed at a time. If more than one variable is changed, there is no way to know which specific element caused the video to perform better.
Tracking Stage
Every video released online offers an opportunity to improve the marketing strategy. Evaluating the performance of the video, including close analysis of certain metrics, can provide valuable insights into what is working well and what needs to be corrected.
Measure the performance
The primary measure of whether a video is performing well is the percentage of people who complete the desired action after viewing it, in other words, the conversion rate. This ties back to the goals that were set earlier on and the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the progress toward those goals. KPIs could be measuring revenue, number of downloads, increased brand recall, and so on. Tracking KPIs is a way for marketers to know how well their video strategy is working.
Analyze metrics
Metrics are electronically collected data about each video. This data can reveal which videos your target audience found engaging, and those that did not perform as well. The information can be exceptionally detailed, highlighting parts of the video viewers typically skipped over, or moments where audience members tended to stop watching altogether. Useful metrics to pay attention to include:
– Impressions – Number of times the video thumbnail was shown to viewers.
– Click-through rate – Number of times the video was played.
– Percentage of video viewed – measured in quartiles (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%)
– Skips and pauses.
Analyzing this information allows marketers to improve their video content and better understand their target audience’s interests and needs.
What goals can your business achieve with a video marketing strategy? [Use cases]
A video marketing strategy can achieve practically any business goal, as long as it exposes viewers to the right types of videos at the right time depending on where those viewers are in the marketing funnel:
Awareness – If the target audience is unfamiliar with the brand or product, the video should memorably introduce it in a positive way. This can be done through interviews with the founders or employees, or perhaps a video centered around something that makes the company unique. CTA: “Learn more”
Consideration – Viewers who are familiar with the company and considering becoming customers might like to see testimonial videos from existing customers or tutorials showing the product and its benefits. CTA: “Request a demo”, “Start a free trial”
Conversion – New customers want to feel like they’ve made the right choice. A thank you video is a way to welcome them and instill trust in the brand. It could be personalized with specific information about the product or service they chose. CTA: “Write a review”
Retention – Videos are a way to stay engaged with customers and build loyalty. Tutorials can teach customers about new features, share tips, and generally update them about the company. CTA: “Take a survey”, “Like/Comment”
Advocacy – Customer advocacy, AKA word-of-mouth, is the most powerful tool marketers have for driving sales and expanding brand awareness. Any video can become an advocacy video if it resonates with the viewer. These types of social content videos might be humorous, heartwarming, or educational. CTA: “Comment/Share”
Always have in mind where the typical viewer is in the marketing funnel and make sure both the message and the CTA are in accord with that.
Examples of successful video marketing strategies
Blendtec
The owner of this blender company, Tom Dickson, created a Will It Blend YouTube channel in 2006 featuring entertaining videos of himself using the product with items that are unintended–and ill-advised–to be placed inside blenders. The videos are parodies, shot in the style of an outdated game show. The popularity of the series expanded Blendtec’s brand reach and directly improved sales, demonstrating the link between humor and recall. Also, note the clever use of video titles based on items that were likely to appear in searches at the time of posting such as new iPhone models and Pokémon, as well as partnerships with other popular marketing campaigns like Old Spice.
Dove
Dove Real Beauty Sketches is a three-minute video released in 2013 in which women describe themselves to an FBI-trained forensic artist who can’t see their faces. The same women are then described to the same artist by somebody else, and in all cases, the second sketch is objectively more appealing. The women who were sketched have strong, genuine reactions to seeing the two sketches side by side, realizing that they are their own worst critics, something most viewers found relatable. At the time, the ad was considered the record holder for the most viewed ad of all time and third place for most shared. It shows how powerful marketing can be when it understands its target audience and manages to elicit positive emotions.
Dollar Shave Club
No discussion of video marketing is complete without mentioning Dollar Shave Club. In 2012, the then-one-year-old consumer goods start-up released an online ad with a conspicuously profane title. It featured the company’s CEO clearly explaining the company’s value proposition and presenting a CTA in a creative, irreverent, and undeniably hilarious way. The video instantly went viral with millions of social media shares and massive media coverage, leading to 12,000 conversions (orders) in the first 48 hours it was up. Just four years later, the company was sold to Unilever for $1 billion!
The future of video marketing strategy and trends to watch for
Video marketing is a rapidly evolving field influenced by innovations in technology and culture. There is currently a drive in viewership towards short-form content (TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight), primarily among young audiences. Marketing strategies aimed at reaching those demographics are creating short videos that suit those platforms. Some organizations are also collaborating with influencers that have an existing audience in these online spaces to create branded content.
Even if the content is intended for a company’s website or other owned space, it should still conform with the type of content the target audience is gravitating towards. Along the same lines, viewers are consuming more and more content on their phones and often in public, so it has become common to view videos with the audio off. This is why a large percentage of marketing videos now feature captioning and visuals that don’t rely on sound.
What does the future of video marketing hold? Technology can again provide good clues. One technological advance that will doubtlessly influence video marketing in the near future is artificial intelligence. Marketers are already experimenting with OpenAI’s infamous ChatGPT bot launched in the fall of 2022 to convincingly write scripts, but that is just the beginning. Advances will soon make it possible to not only write scripts using AI, but also generate video, which will open up a whole world of possibilities for content creators–as well as a host of ethical and legal ramifications to consider. Other interesting technologies that are just starting to get integrated into marketing strategies are personalized videos and virtual reality/augmented reality.
Final Thoughts
Developing a good video marketing strategy is not easy. It requires meticulous research and up-to-date knowledge of the digital landscape. Meanwhile, evolving technologies, shifting business priorities, and changes in viewer habits mean that strategies need to constantly be reevaluated and revised. Despite the challenges, implementing a comprehensive strategy early on remains the best way to maximize return on marketing investment (ROMI) while utilizing the power of video to achieve company goals.
