The 2023 guide to video marketing

Ah, that good old customer attention. It’s fickle. It’s sparse. And it keeps a marketer awake at night, concocting strategies, hoping to catch and hold it long enough to convert the viewer into a lead. Video as the preferred online content format is most effective at grabbing attention and nurturing leads, on any device. In this complete guide, we’ll cover the ins and outs of video marketing along with tried and tested tips for beginners and professionals alike.

Jump to:

• What is video marketing?
• Why video marketing is so effective in business
• How does video marketing affect SEO?
• Most essential steps of video marketing creation
• Types of marketing videos
• How to find ideas for video marketing?
• Important KPI’s: is my video successful?
• Final thoughts: the future of video marketing

What is video marketing?

Video marketing is a set of strategies and methods that leverage video to promote your brand, products, and services. Video marketing is a powerful tool for creating connections with your audience, raising brand awareness, helping and educating your users, and driving sales.

Marketing copy and images are no longer sufficient to give your brand a voice on the web. Video represents 82% of all internet traffic, demonstrating the clear preference people have for the format. In its efforts to give the people what they want, the video marketing industry is growing to a considerable $45.6 billion projected by 2025. With a CAGR of 6.5%, video marketing is also the fastest-growing segment of digital marketing.

In fact, video is so effective that it increasingly permeates written marketing campaigns. Blog posts, social media posts, and ads are often accompanied by a video. Email marketing, the undisputed king of written marketing campaigns, also seems to benefit from video integration. An email marketing campaign nearly doubles its click-through rate when it contains a video.

Let’s explore the why in the next section.

Why video marketing is so effective in business

Adobe summarized the power of video marketing best, “Video marketing is an emotionally engaging and multi-sensory way for brands to connect with customers and catch their attention in a digitally overloaded world.”

Here are 8 reasons why video marketing is effective:

1. Video sticks

Viewers remember more about content seen in videos than about any written or audio-only content. That probably explains why 72% of customers prefer watching a video to learn more about a product or service.

2. Video increases your conversion rate

According to Hubspot, 86% of video marketers state that video is an effective lead-generation tool. Neil Patel says that up to 85% of viewers are more likely to make a purchase after watching a product video. 68% actually watch Youtube to help make a purchase decision.

3. Video works well on mobile

People like to consume video content on their mobiles. On the go, but even at home, 3 in 4 people indicated watching YouTube on their mobile devices. YouTube noticed a doubling in mobile video consumption, every year. They also state that mobile users pay twice more attention to what they’re watching than television viewers. Be advised, however, that 92% will consume your video content with the sound switched off. You might want to optimize your video for silent viewing.

4. Video is highly shareable

Every social media platform registers the highest organic engagement on video posts. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn get twice the engagement on video posts (versus non-video posts), whereas video tweets attract 10 times more engagement than tweets without video. It’s important to note that consumers want to see entertaining videos on social media.

5. Video builds trust and connection

Building trust is one of the main objectives for any marketer. Video as a format grants the customer a peek behind the curtains of your brand, a show-don’t-tell of the people and processes behind your business. Video can nurture a more personal experience, answer questions, solve friction, and build a strong connection with your brand.

6. Video is a very effective educational tool

94% of marketers find that video helps users understand their product or service. And the feeling is mutual, with 98% of users stating they watched a tutorial video to learn more about a product or service. Video not only has a higher entertainment value than any other content format, but it also boosts knowledge retention. Customers retain 65% of information from video after three days, compared to 10% from audio-only sources.

7. Video doesn’t have to be perfect

Video production can be a time and money-consuming endeavor. But we live in amazing times where it doesn’t have to be that way. Look at today’s social media influencers. Most of them put out handheld footage from a DSLR or point-and-shoot camera pouring out a cup of coffee while they share their opinions and views on random topics. They produce daily vlogs with consumer-grade gear. It’s all about the entertainment and the information. This means that today you can get amazing ROI from video marketing, without having to hire Hollywood-grade production crews.

8. Video also ranks higher in search

Google loves video. To be honest, with 82% of internet traffic being video-based, users aren’t leaving the search engines much choice. There’s a lot of evidence available in SEO circles that search engine algorithms favor results that feature video content. More on that in the next section.

How does video marketing affect SEO?

In the wonderful world of the Internet, only one entity overshadows the all-powerful Google, and that is the user. Google only exists because it generates the most relevant and high-quality content for the user. And if the user prefers video content, you can bet your bottom dollar that’s exactly what Google will display at the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Marketers know this, and that’s why 31% of them enrich their content with video, in a bid to optimize their ranking (alongside other benefits like increased conversion rate and lead generation). 64% of users who are at the bottom of the funnel of their purchasing process use a search engine to complete their decision-making. And you want your brand to show its white-teethed grin at the top of the first SERP when they do.

Video is one of the most effective tools to help you appear on that coveted first page of Google. Here’s why:

• Because visitors will be watching your video, they will spend more time on your page, signaling to Google that your page is interesting.
• Video as a format generates the highest click-through rate, driving organic traffic from search engines and social media platforms.
• Video can land you a video snippet (meaning your video will feature directly on the SERP), increasing your visibility by displaying your page above text-only results.
• High-quality and relevant video content can help you get backlinks.
• Video is more readily shared on social media, generating more traffic through those channels as well.

Google measures variables like time-on-page, click-through rate, and bounce rate to calculate your page’s value in its algorithm and bump it up the rankings… or down.

But don’t merrily throw random videos onto your website and leave it at that. You will want to do a few things to maximize the SEO effectiveness of your video content:

• Think video content for all your main pages. If you rolled out a new product, make sure to feature a product video prominently on your homepage. Write a blog post for a video you recently created or have your video team create a video to go with your latest blog post. Do you have tutorial videos? See if you can use them to enrich knowledge center articles or FAQ pages.

• Create quality content to go with your video. Even if you have killer video content, your web page still needs copy. Make sure the copy on your page is on par with your video, both in terms of topic and quality. You could also edit the video transcript as a base for your on-page copy.

• Publish video content regularly and consistently. Posting video content on a regular basis sends all the right signals to search engines and users. Try to set up a process with your in-house video team that enables regular and fast video production. Video content production can be as simple as compiling stock footage from online marketplaces and adding voice-over or overlay text.

• Optimize your video for search. Free and paid video platforms alike offer video optimization tools to increase the visibility of your video assets in search. Create an eye-catching thumbnail containing a person and keywords. Create a compelling title, tags, and description, based on keyword research. Increase accessibility and reach with (multilingual) captions.

• Promote your video. Depending on the content, you could give your video a nice head start with a bit of promotion. You could feature it in guest posts, share it on your social media channels, and add it as an asset to your paid campaigns.

Paid video platforms vs free platforms – Where should you host your video assets?

First off, let’s start by agreeing that you should never host your video natively on your website. Video eats your bandwidth, takes up a lot of space, loads very slowly (negatively impacting your SEO and user experience), and creates many compatibility issues (mobile, operating system, device, …). Worst of all for marketers, you will lose out on visibility.

YouTube is a great video hosting platform. 122 million daily active users can’t be wrong. YouTube is an additional channel to drive traffic to your website, with optimal visibility. But it’s important to be aware of YouTube’s limitations and why most enterprises rather opt for a paid alternative like Kaltura Video Portal to run their video marketing campaigns.

YouTube doesn’t offer the level of security, viewing permissions, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) that you get with paid enterprise video platforms.

Paid options also offer vastly more options than YouTube, Facebook, or any other social media. Platforms like Kaltura Video Portal offer the full gamut of monetization options, far beyond mere ad-based revenue. You also get more engagement features, like in-video hotspots and interactive video paths. Not to mention tech support, which is crucial to enterprise use and non-existent on YouTube.

The last limitation I’ll mention is a big one. YouTube is YouTube. It’s not your branded interface. Don’t let your channel artwork fool you. It doesn’t fool your audience. You have little control over where and how your video will be listed. It most probably will be surrounded by competitor videos, ready to be clicked by your viewer. YouTube doesn’t care. They just want to keep the viewer on their platform. A paid enterprise video platform like Kaltura is white-label, meaning the interface is 100% your brand. Kaltura operates in the background. And it only lists your video content.

Our recommendation is to host your videos on Kaltura Video Portal and embed them on your website from there. Simultaneously, you should publish a selection of relevant videos on your enterprise YouTube channel and other social accounts for added visibility and sources of traffic.

Most essential steps in video marketing creation

• Set Goals for your campaign

Like with any campaign, your first step should be to set a clear marketing strategy and goals.

It’s important to define which section of the marketing funnel you are targeting. The answer to this question will influence the content, marketing strategy, and KPIs of your video campaign. Defining your goals from the get-go will help you track your progress throughout the campaign and quickly identify pain points.

Top of the Funnel: Brand awareness

If you want to introduce your brand to new potential customers and grow your audience,

a brand awareness video will be the way to go. Awareness videos create a connection with the brand and its values on a more emotional level. They’re about presenting your brand, not selling. This means that your goals will center around metrics like the number and duration of views.

Middle of the Funnel: Consideration

In the consideration phase of the customer’s journey, the viewer is researching brands and products through reviews and recommendations. This part of the funnel is especially important in competitive markets. In this type of video content, you want to showcase your expertise and value in your field. This is where you want to engage your audience. So, viewing duration will still be a valid metric in this stage of the marketing funnel, but click-through rate will be your main KPI.

Bottom of the Funnel: Conversion

The bottom of the funnel is the decision-making phase of the customer journey. He or she is about to buy. So, you will want to reel them in with social proof (customer satisfaction) and the bottom line of why your product is better than the competitor’s. By the time your customer is at the bottom of the funnel, you probably nurtured them through brand awareness and consideration at earlier touch points. But if the bottom of the funnel is your first connection with a particular prospect, then discounts and USPs can help win them over. The KPI here is of course conversion of prospects into buying customers, alongside the click-through rate.

• Define Your Target Audience

Another variable that will influence the video content and marketing strategy of your campaign is your target audience. Defining your target audience should be your second step.

Of course, your customer personas might already be defined by your niche, product, or previous campaigns. These personas will help you understand how to address your audience and appeal to them.

Your marketing persona can be identified by location, gender, age, profession, interests, preferences, etc. You can use your social media dashboards, Google Analytics, customer surveys, and specialized platforms like SEMRush or Similarweb to collect the right data to help you build your customer personas.

Knowing your target audience will also help you home in on their preferred online platforms and communities so you’ll know when, where, and how to publish and promote your video campaign.

• Create a video script

Now that you know your goals and your audience, you can start working on your content. Start by thinking about what kind of emotion you would like to elicit in your audience, then build your story around that. You can tell a classic story of a character facing an issue and going on a quest to resolve that issue. But really, in creativity and viral ads, pretty much anything is fair game. So, gather a team of creatives and get the ideation going.

This would also be the right time to get budgets and timelines approved with higher management. Based on the budget and timelines, you can also start looking for talent and external service providers.

• Develop your marketing strategy

Start planning how you will publish and promote your video. You want to start doing this now to avoid any should haves and could haves. If you want to get more out of the can with a behind-the-scenes video or you want to post teasers on social to pique your audience’s curiosity, then you need to factor that in before you start shooting.

Set up a social media calendar that aligns with your campaign timeline. Prepare organic posts and paid campaigns. Create posts for teasers, BTS video footage and stills, on-topic polls or surveys, customized branded designs, banner ads, YouTube pre-roll campaigns, etc. Get your copywriter and your design team to work to deliver assets in time, according to your calendar.

Outline the rest of your campaign and create an inventory of the assets you will need: blog posts, guest posts, email copy, banner ads for your website, a landing page, … add these to your timeline and delegate the tasks to the relevant team members.

• Lead the video production

If it fits your budget, it’s usually best to leave the production in the experienced hands of a video production team, whether it’s an in-house team or an external service provider. But it neither’s available to you, you can still create magic with available gear. Remember that pro-grade video production gear is not a priority in these times of social media influencers. If you have access to a recent model smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S21, iPhone 13, …), read up on basic lighting and sound best practices, and know your way around editing software, you might be surprised by what you can do on a shoestring.

Don’t forget to tie in a clear call-to-action based on your KPIs (Subscribe, Like, Comment, Share, Learn More, Sign In, Buy Now, Get Discount, …)

• Run your video marketing campaign

Upload your video asset to your video hosting platform (we recommend Kaltura Video Portal for its customization and branding options, content security and digital rights management, full monetization options, and the fact that it contains only your brand and content) and follow your social media calendar and general video marketing strategy. Have your social media manager monitor and answer audience queries and comments.

• Evaluate your video marketing campaign performance

Follow up on your campaign analytics from start to finish. Compile a report on the number of views, duration, engagement (likes, comments, shares), click-through rate, conversion rate, etc. Measure the results against your KPIs. Identify successes and weaknesses and suggest improvements for future campaigns. Share the report with your team and executives. We hope it was a success!

7 Types of marketing videos

There are many types of marketing videos, and your choice will largely depend on which section of the marketing funnel you are targeting and on your specific goals. For the sake of brevity, we won’t be discussing live-streamed events or stylistic and tech-based choices like 360°, VR, AR, or animated video. Though it’s important to know you have those options, as well. This leaves us with the following list of 7 types of marketing videos:

• Video Ads (commercials)

Let’s start with the most common type of marketing video, the traditional “tv-style” commercial. Video ads are very “top of the funnel”, and thus mainly geared towards brand awareness and attracting new customers. The main focus of video ads is to keep your brand and products at the top of the viewer’s mind, so they will remember your brand when they move further down the funnel. But that doesn’t mean you can’t include a strong CTA like “Buy Now”, “Start Your Free Trial”, or “Request a Demo”.

Commercials are a great format for paid advertising campaigns, but you can promote their official launch on social as well, and they can be a great addition to your homepage.

• Product Videos

A product video showcases your product or service in the form of an on-camera demonstration, an unboxing video, or a tour of the main features and capabilities. Contrary to what you might expect, a product video is a top-of-the-funnel tool and can help you attract new customers.

In other words, your audience will still be in the research stage, so you’ll want to demonstrate your product’s value and how it stacks up against the competition.

• Event-based Videos

If you organize live events like webinars, summits, workshops, expert interviews, and panel discussions, you can repurpose this content into marketing videos. You can create a video summary of your event or extract video footage of interesting discussions or keynotes and release them on social media to get a conversation going. Having experts share their knowledge in a video under your brand will help you build trust and authority, even if those experts are external.

Event-based videos are also aimed at the top of the funnel, making them suitable for raising brand awareness and growing your audience, rather than converting.

• Educational Videos (tutorials / how to’s / explainer / infographics)

Educational or instructional videos are specifically aimed at solving a specific issue for your audience. Of course, the solution to that issue is found in your brand, product, or service. So make sure your educational videos contain a clear call to action. Instructional videos can attract both existing users who want to get the most out of their purchase and prospecting customers who are looking for information in their consideration phase (middle of the funnel).

Hubspot puts it best, saying explainer videos in particular focus on your customer persona’s fictional journey as they solve their problem using your product or service.

• Testimonial Videos

Social proof sends a very strong signal about the quality, trustworthiness, and popularity of your brand, products, or services. They are personal accounts of existing customers expressing their positive experience with your product or service. The best part is that testimonials are user-generated content (UGC), so they are cost-effective, and viewers don’t expect high quality and production value (on the contrary!). You can publish user testimonials “as-is” or you can compile and edit several testimonials into a single video. The B2B equivalent of the user testimonial is the “case study” and can include several members of the same enterprise customer sharing feedback about your product or service.

Testimonial videos are “bottom of the funnel” content, giving prospecting customers an extra push towards purchasing your product or service.

• Social Content Videos

Social content videos are short-form video clips that mainly aim to elicit social engagement (liking, commenting, or even better, sharing). The content can be funny, educational, or a conversation starter of sorts –something that makes the viewer share it with their community, going “have you seen this?”

It’s recommended to keep social content videos shorter than 30 seconds. Also keep in mind how video is viewed on social media (square format is preferred, oftentimes the content is viewed in muted autoplay, looped, etc.). Make sure to react to comments and keep the conversation going. Social content videos are a great addition to your top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy.

• Editorial Videos

Editorial videos are best suited to serve customers in the consideration phase. They are a great format to deliver nuggets of information concerning a wider topic within your industry. Kind of like a short video version of a blog post. Editorial videos often tease full-version pieces of content on that topic (the cta of the video might read “Get the full story here” or “Learn more”, or “read our blog post”). Types of editorial videos include infographics, listicles, polls, and Q&As.

How to find ideas for video marketing?

Publishing a marketing video always feels a bit like a gamble. You put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it, but that doesn’t mean your idea or storyline will catch on, let alone become viral. But there are a few marketing methods you can invoke to increase your chances of dishing up something your target audience will like, engage with, and remember.

• Ask Your Marketing Persona

Marketing personas are built from demographics, preferences, habits, pain points, goals, tools and devices they use, etc. In other words, they can offer you a wealth of vantage points from which to develop your topic and storyline. If your demographic is teenage boys, then your video characters must reflect that. If their pain point is fitting in socially and their goal is having fun, then that could be your storyline –how your product can help them achieve that. If you have data about their issues and what they wish to learn, then you can create educational videos around those topics. Create a list of as many angles and ideas as you can extract from your marketing persona. Then get together with your team and choose an idea you are most excited about that is within budget.

• Draw inspiration from SEO Keyword Research

Users research answers to their questions on search engines. With SEO tools, you can reverse-engineer this and find out what questions people are asking and how many people are interested in specific topics. Paid options like Ahrefs and SEMRush offer you a sneak peek into your competitors’ strongest keywords and other valuable information.

But you can also use free tools like your own website’s Google Analytics account and Google Search Console to find out what pages and keywords drive traffic to your website. Answerthepublic.com is a great free online tool that generates a list of most asked questions based on a topic, brand, or product you enter in the search bar. You can further home in on your results by geographic location and language.

The resulting keywords and questions will give you a great starting point from which to develop your main idea and storyline for your next video marketing campaign.

• Analyze Competitors

No need to reinvent the wheel, you can see what’s worked for your competitors. Of course, you don’t want to blatantly copy what they’re doing, but it might give you an idea of how they perceive their marketing personas, what pain points they’re trying to solve, and the language and selling points they use. Based on what you see on their websites and social feeds, you can extract ideas and create your take on them, or maybe even approach those ideas from the exact opposite angle.

Important KPIs: is my video successful?

It’s great to get a ton of views on your video. Your view count is a direct indicator of the reach of your video and its success in terms of brand awareness. But you should analyze other metrics as well to paint a broader picture of how well your video marketing campaign performed. Of course, not all metrics are relevant to your particular KPIs. The following list of metrics should give you a clear idea of what will help you define success for your particular case.

Play rate

Your video play rate is the ratio of people who viewed your video, divided by the number of impressions (number of times your video is displayed on your audience’s screens). It shows you how many people stopped scrolling to click and play your video. A low play rate means you should either optimize your content or verify if you are targeting the right audience. Play rate will help you evaluate your success in terms of brand awareness (top of the funnel).

Video completion

Video completion indicates how many viewers have watched your entire video. The completion rate indicates what percentage of your viewership watched the video all the way through. Watch time is similar to video completion, but it shows you at what specific point in your video you are losing viewers, rather than merely counting how many viewers stayed until the end. This will help you pinpoint what part of your content made viewers lose interest and take note of that for future campaigns. Video completion and watch time will help you evaluate how interesting and engaging your content is, from the beginning until the end.

Social engagement

Another way to assess engagement is through likes, comments, and shares. If a viewer shares your video with their network, it’s a clear indicator that they stand behind and identify with your content. Of course, sharing puts your content in front of more eyeballs, leading to higher view counts. That makes social engagement an important metric for brand awareness.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the number of times visitors clicked on your CTA. It is an important metric in the consideration stage of the customer journey (middle of the funnel) when the prospecting customer is researching solutions and brands. As opposed to the awareness stage, you want your audience to click beyond the video to your website or landing page. The video is merely a teaser to entice the viewer to complete the desired action.

Conversion Rate (CR)

The conversion rate is the average number of conversions per interaction versus the total number of visitors who clicked on your CTA. Conversion here means completing the action you set out as a goal for your video marketing campaign. This can be a purchase, a sign-up, starting a free trial, or requesting a demo.

Time-on-page

If you publish your video on a webpage, rather than on social or through paid advertising, you might want to add time-on-page as a metric. Adding a video to a webpage is a tried and tested SEO technique to keep the visitor longer on the page, thus sending Google a signal that your page is interesting. Keep a tab on your Google Analytics to see how adding the video to your page affects the time-on-page metric.

Evaluate success through A/B Testing

A/B testing is a marketing technique that presents two different versions of a campaign, page, CTA, or video to similar audiences, to understand which version performs better. This is a method you can apply in video marketing, as well. You can create two videos with alternative endings or different tag lines. You can also experiment with different CTAs for the video. Once you have a winner, you can run that campaign to your wider audience. It is important to A/B test only one variable. If you combine variables (your A version and your B version sport both a different ending AND a different CTA), you won’t know which variable positively impacted the performance.

Final Thoughts: The future of video marketing

As a general prediction for the future, we can already say that video marketing will continue to grow in importance. Video will be and already is an inevitable part of any effective marketing strategy. We’ll leave you with a few more predictions to help you take your video marketing in the right direction:

A new way to target audiences

Since this year, advertising is moving from a cookie-based operation to direct partnerships with platforms to harness their data collections and target audiences. Data will also increasingly become the main driver behind video content and optimization.

Dynamic video

We also notice some very welcome major developments in online video tech. Video text overlays might soon become personalized to the individual viewer, based on user data. But also the actual video content could be personalized with alternative content for different customer personas.

Soundless Influencer videos

Social media feeds are visual-first platforms, where video auto-plays directly in the user’s feed without sound. Many users don’t bother to turn up the sound, so creating videos that work just as well on mute is the new trend. The trick is to grab the attention quickly, for instance by partnering with a recognizable influencer to host your video marketing campaigns. According to Forbes, today’s customers prefer influencer content over brand content, even when your product is the topic. So collaborations with influencers are and will be the way to go.