Video Marketing Tips: How to Craft a Video Marketing Strategy

Video marketing is a type of marketing that uses video content to raise brand awareness, demonstrate the efficacy of new products, and otherwise entice new customers. This translates into posting video ads on social media platforms, using video hosting sites, and including video content on your company’s own homepage. Brands often pair video advertising with other forms of digital marketing to create a more holistic and multifaceted strategy.

Video marketing is an involved process. No matter your ultimate goal, you’ll inevitably pass through these four phases when planning a campaign of this nature:

• Preproduction: Set up a decent amount of time to script, storyboard, and plan your first video. Try to anticipate any pain points you might hit when you enter the production phase. At the same time, decide on your specific marketing strategy and how you’ll measure its success while you’re still in the preproduction stage.
• Production: Real-time video production can vary in terms of how long it takes. You could finish in a day, or it could take weeks, months, or even years. Production time all depends on how much footage you need to capture. On a similar note, animated video creation might be more or less cost-effective and strategically worthwhile given your specific goals.
• Postproduction: After you finish shooting your marketing material, use video editing software to pull it all together and optimize its appearance for distribution. The postproduction phase is for making the visuals flow seamlessly, adding any necessary voiceover content, and including any transitions or infographics you might need.
• Distribution: Once you’re done editing your content, it’s time to add it to a video platform. This might mean putting it on your company’s landing page, social media channels, or on a hosting platform. It all depends on your specific marketing plan. Make sure to choose an enticing thumbnail image.

A key benefit of video marketing is its adaptability. Learn more about five types of video content you can use to market your goods and services:

1. 1. Brand videos: For some marketing video campaigns, you might simply want to increase brand awareness. These brand videos function like traditional television ads but with the added benefit of social video sharing technology.
2. 2. Demo videos: E-commerce companies can record product videos demonstrating how their goods and services work. For example, a video might walk you through every aspect of a new smartphone’s features.
3. 3. Explainer videos: This kind of video explains the technical aspects of a good or service to both current and potential customers. When these tutorials are as entertaining as they are informative, they can draw in plenty of new interest in your brand.
4. 4. Live videos: You can use social platforms to create both planned and impromptu webinars. Livestreaming can help you achieve other marketing goals, too, such as facilitating live Q&As with potential customers. It all depends on your specific online video marketing strategy.
5. 5. Testimonial videos: Record actual customer testimonials to illustrate what the buyer’s journey looks like for your company. New customers will look at the personas you feature as case studies they can relate to personally. Testimonial videos operate akin to company-approved personal vlogs.

Video marketing is essential to advertising in the digital age. Use these five tips when forming your own video marketing strategy:

1. 1. Combine video with other marketing tools. Use video marketing alongside other advertising techniques to create a holistic content marketing strategy. Other tools include social and email marketing or search engine optimization (SEO). Additionally, make sure to include a call to action (CTA) in your videos and aim for a high conversion rate.
2. 2. Decide on a specific strategy. Tailor your video marketing efforts to a specific goal. Ask yourself what you want your videos to achieve. To help answer this, determine the video’s place in the marketing funnel. Maybe you want to attract entirely new customers or perhaps you want to advertise a new product to current ones.
3. 3. Know your audience. Your target audience’s attention span might be shorter or longer depending on what their goal is in watching your content. For someone just scrolling, this means something brief; for a very engaged customer, they might be willing to watch a podcast-length video. A short video strategy is probably in order if you’re doing social media marketing. Alternatively, people would be open to a longer watch time if they want to learn about your products in depth. Study demographics to tailor your video content to people’s needs and desires.
4. 4. Track metrics. Decide on how you’ll track your video marketing campaign’s success. If your goal is brand awareness, video views might be the best metric. In contrast, for a video ad, you might want to keep an eye on click-through rate. Look at relevant video marketing metrics to stay on target with your broader goals.
5. 5. Work with a production team. Behind the scenes, it helps to have an in-house crew of videographers and postproduction specialists to create high-quality video content. These trained professionals will know how to make videos that adhere to a marketing budget while still meeting the team’s goals.

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