I am sure all of you have planned your marketing strategies with attention to the minutest details.
Of course, it has been a month, the second quarter of 2019 began and all your strategies would be ready to hit the market.
Before we go any further, let me ask a question.
How many of you have included video marketing in your strategy?
If you have, it’s good you are keeping up with the trend and if not, you need to cope up.
Video marketing is already trending in the market and if we look at the stats, it is not going anywhere in the near future.
According to the numbers,
- Out of 6 channels that worldwide consumers use to watch videos, 4 are social media channels.
- As per the prediction of Facebook’s EMEA Vice President Nicola Mendelsohn, all of their content will probably be videos by 2021.
- By 2021, 82% of the web traffic will be generated by the videos.
In short, it is time that you include video marketing into your business strategy.
It is actually not as difficult as it sounds. By the end of this article, you will have a complete guide to a perfect video marketing strategy.
In this article, we will explore the power of video marketing and the types of video you can use to grow your business.
Let us begin with….
What is Video Marketing?
Although video marketing may seem dark, complicated and expensive, it is not! It can be as simple as recording videos on your mobile phone and editing them in a single video with music and your company logo. Video marketing is really about incorporating video into your marketing strategy to increase brand awareness.
Have you noticed the sponsored videos that appear on your social networks? It’s video marketing! Have you received newsletters with videos? It is also video marketing! What about the videos embedded in home pages or blog posts? Yes, it is also video marketing!
Most likely, knowingly or unknowingly you are already immersed in the world of video marketing and simply have just not noticed. But you don’t just want to be a spectator in this game. If you want to develop your brand and increase your impressions, your views and your conversion rates, you must get to the task and get to work it for yourself, when it comes to video marketing.
Now that you know what video marketing is, let me note down some more facts to convince you why video marketing is important.
- One minute is worth approximately 1.8 million words.
- 65% of the information retained by visual aids tends to stay in the memory for more than 3 days, as compared to other mediums.
- 400% of consumers prefer to watch a video than reading about a product.
- Organic participation in Facebook is more when messages include videos.
- The video earns 12 times more actions than the combined text and images.
- 87% of online marketers already incorporate video marketing in their strategies.
- Companies that use videos in their marketing report have seen:
- 27% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR).
- Web conversion rate up to 34%
- Profit growth is 49% faster every year.
I guess this might be convincing enough to understand the power of video marketing.
Now let us take a look at…..
What is Video Marketing Strategy?
Despite popular misconceptions about video marketing strategy, it’s not just about posting videos until you find one that is viral, or as simple as publishing all your content on social media platforms.
This is the creation of a comprehensive video strategy that effectively achieves the desired business objectives – mainly to attract traffic and enhance brand awareness.
Video content marketing can be used to explain and promote products, services and events, as well as to develop brand awareness, customer relationship and in general, draw attention to your business.
Depending on your situation, the videos can be entertaining, emotional, logical, fun or anything you want to directly attract to a specific audience. And, according to your needs, they can be published and measured on your website and on multiple platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook., Instagram, etc.
It is essential to have a comprehensive video marketing strategy, in which each video is a small part of everything. Guide the development of content and help cement the identity of the brand in the minds of viewers.
In the long run, this also reduces costs and improves the value of creating multiple unique videos due to its strategic focus, greater impact and condensed production process.
Now let us have a look at the
Complete guide to a perfect video marketing strategy
In this section, I will detail every aspect of the video marketing strategy in a step-by-step and easy-to-digest guide.
- Define the mission of your video marketing campaign
What general objective do you want your video marketing campaign to achieve? This is an essential first step because if you do not define the aspect of a successful campaign, you will not have a clear direction in the future.
- Understand (audit) your current situation
One of the most common mistakes is to start formulating a solution based on preconceived ideas. For example, you may think that it is obvious that some content will give more subscribers to the website, but in reality, it is almost never so simple.
Therefore, Step 2 is to step back to better understand your audience and funnels. To do this, you must collect objective measurements and conduct in-depth analysis, as well as further exploratory research on your audience and your interaction with your funnels.
- Obtaining and analyzing objective metrics
First, to get a complete description of your funnels, you must gather enough information to map them in an organization chart.
The flowchart should start where traffic sources meet your business for the first time, such as a Google or Facebook search, and describe the route you must take to reach the desired goal (an application or a sale, for example) .
The trip in the middle can include a blog article, a service page, your contact page, etc.
- Fewer metrics
But how is this data collected?
The best method is Google Analytics. With this extremely useful tool, you can connect your various social media accounts and video channels and track the origin and destination of your website traffic.
For example, you could reveal that much of your traffic lands on the blog page of your website through Facebook, recognizing the importance of these publications for your business in general.
The objective of each step of your map should be to encourage traffic closer to your desired objectives. For this reason, you must apply the same method to study click rates and reveal the amount of traffic lost in each.
For example, you may discover that once a person has reached a particular service page, 70% of them leave the website.
This identifies a significant problem with this page and provides valuable information for the campaign, that is, where the video content should be embedded in its distribution funnels to increase the click-through rate of certain pages.
- Other important factors include in your video marketing strategy are:
Bounce rate when people land on your website. What percentage of them leave without moving from the first landing pages?
Spend time at each step of your sales funnel card. How much time do people spend on each step on average? This will reveal what content is interesting to your audience.
These are key color reports about visitor activity and how they interact with your website. Warmer colors generally mean a lot of activity and colder ones have little or no activity.
For example, if your landing page contains several videos, a red patch in one and not the other means that it attracts more attention.
- Design your content strategy
Driven by the results of the research and metrics, by now you are ready to develop an overview of the content strategy of his video marketing campaign, which includes objectives for each type of video. The main thing to consider here is how the content of your video will be integrated into your sales funnel to maximize its power.
- Sales funnel
The sales funnel is the trip that a person must take to become a customer, which is the traffic source map developed in step 2.
However, in terms of marketing, it is often shown to contain 4 different steps. To maximize the impact of your video marketing campaign, you must determine how the videos will take advantage of each step to encourage as many people as possible to get to the bottom of things.
- A very effective and practical model to follow to achieve this is the Google framework “Hero, Hub, Hygiene”.
- Hero, hub, hygiene
Hero (attraction): high-impact videos that present their brand to a new audience.
An ideal hero video is a low-budget brand ad created around a high-level event or product launch and that creates a strong emotional connection with the viewer.
They are at the top of the funnel because the attraction stage is to make your business known to as many new customers as possible.
- Hub (Capture and Nurture): regular and consistent videos that generate brand awareness and trust through engaging content.
To do this, they usually tell an interesting story about their brand or explore topics of interest to their audience.
They are perfect for the capture phase because it is important to present yourself as an informed leader in your niche.
Once visitors have reached their level of complete knowledge, it is important to calm the last doubts they may have to increase the sales opportunities. For this reason, customer testimonials and product demonstrations are perfect.
- Hygiene (attraction): videos that cover the content your target audience is looking for, ensuring its presence when searching related terms online
If you have a flower delivery business, for example, and the most frequently asked question online is: “How can I decorate roses in a vase?”, Then create a video that explains how. When people continue to look for this question, they will now be attracted to your business.
- Choice of promotional platforms for your content.
The planning of the publication of your videos will, of course, depend on the demographics and behaviour of your audience. For example, they can have a strong presence on a particular social network or video platform, of which you should take full advantage.
Each platform has its own best practices to rank high. Therefore, before planning this content, be sure to familiarize yourself with it.
- Schedule the duration of the video
With regard to the duration of your videos, the ultimate goal is to make them as long as necessary to better serve the messages and information you want them to convey. To find these ideal lengths, of course, you will try several options to determine which one works best.
This is especially important for videos on the landing pages of your website since each video and social media platform has its own best practices for the duration of the video, which I will refer to in the next step.
Always review best practices for the duration of the video on each platform you are targeting before making the videos. You will find that the algorithm of each platform favours different factors compared to others.
- Take 3 of the most popular platforms, for example:
Duration of the video on Facebook
The latest Facebook algorithms favour more than any other long video content, such as textual or link-based content. Naturally, they want people to stay on the site for as long as possible, which rewards “Facebook viewing time.”
This means that long videos are your best option for drawing attention to the platform. 5 to 10 minutes is the ideal point between the Facebook viewing time and the retention of the viewer.
Duration of the video on YouTube
Like Facebook, YouTube’s “viewing time” is one of the most important factors in its algorithm. Again, your YouTube videos should be long.
If viewers watch 50% of their 8-minute video, for example, it will have 4 minutes of playback time.
Alternatively, if you watch 75% of your 2-minute video, you will be rewarded with 1.5 minutes of reading time.
Therefore, even if they have seen a higher percentage of these, their algorithm will favour the former.
Duration of the video on LinkedIn
The length of the LinkedIn video is not as important as in other platforms. For optimal performance, LinkedIn recommends that branded videos are maintained in less than 30 seconds and more complex videos can vary from 30 seconds to five minutes as needed.
- Set your deadlines
Now that you have planned your content, you are ready to create a detailed calendar for your video marketing campaign.
Naturally, once the results are tested and analyzed, you will have to make changes, but it is still important to set deadlines beforehand.
To give you an idea of the attention to the required details, your schedule should allow time for:
- Test and investigation
- Analysis of data
- Strategic planning (concepts, artistic styles, marketing, promotion)
- 2 drafts of the storyboard for each ad
- 2 drafts for each ad
- Critical production (filming, animation, editing, sound design)
- Review and comments
Like stated earlier, by the end of this article, am sure you are now well versed with the ultimate guide to the best video marketing strategy for your business.
Put all the above-mentioned points into practice and follow the guide to plant the perfect video marketing strategy for your business. You can also contact the best digital marketing company – Drive Digital to help you carry on with your video and marketing strategies.
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