Did you know that by 2020, 80% of online traffic will involve videos?
Video offers all marketers an opportunity to engage and captivate consumers.
Plus, it's easy and cost-effective to implement. Some business owners even shoot compelling marketing videos using standard iPhones!
If you are ready to harness video's great advertising potential, you need a strategy first. Without a coherent strategy, those YouTube clips may have a minimal return on investment (ROI).
In this post, we discuss tips and tricks for crafting an effective video marketing strategy. Keep reading for more!
1. Know Your Target Audience
This is the most essential component of your video marketing strategy. If you don't know who you're targeting with your videos, you won't see the results you crave!
Take the time to pinpoint who you wish to reach with your campaigns. Be as specific as possible. Identify age groups, genders, geographic locations, and other demographics.
Think carefully about your target audience's needs and desires. Identifying a perceived need (or lack) is a great place to begin: you can focus on filling this need or lack in your marketing efforts.
You will likely have to do a fair bit of research to understand your target audience. One way you can do this is to visit public online forums like Quora to see what questions consumers are asking about your industry, product, or niche.
Social media can also give you insight into user activity, behavior, and preferences. If you have business profiles on Instagram or Facebook, for example, you likely already have some data on trending content, popular hashtags, and keywords.
If you already have an established customer base, send out customer experience surveys. To ensure responses, offer incentives in the form of discounts and freebies (like e-books and membership access).
By this time, you'll have enough data to assemble a buyer persona. This is your ideal customer with a specific set of needs and qualities. Keep this buyer persona at the fore as you are honing all of your marketing strategies.
2. Pinpoint Specific Campaign Goals
Now that you know your target audience, what are your campaign goals? If you don't have concrete video marketing goals, you won't be able to measure your campaign's success.
Be specific when creating your goals, just as you were in identifying a buyer persona.
What do you want to accomplish with your campaign? Do you want more brand awareness? Greater site traffic? Higher conversions? More subscribers?
Try to put numbers to these campaign goals, if possible. A great video campaign goal, for example, might be to obtain 10% more newsletter subscribers each month for four months.
Naturally, you may have multiple goals within one comprehensive marketing goal. That's okay: video marketing content makes use of multiple channels. It also takes many different forms.
3. Understand Your Brand and Your Message
This may sound like a given, but it's more important than most business owners realize. In fact, businesses with powerful brand images have 20% more success, in general, than those without.
What is your brand all about? What message do you want to convey to the world with your product or service?
If you've been following the steps in this post, you've already partially answered these questions.
Figuring out a target audience can help business owners establish a brand identity. Campaign goals often come from a business's “why”–what they are all about and what they wish to accomplish.
Brand identity can also emerge from a company's “personality” and emotional appeal. If you had to specify your brand's personality, what adjectives would you use? What emotional connection have you established or do you want to establish with your core audience?
Once you can answer these questions concretely, you're on your way to a solid video marketing strategy. Your goal should be to communicate your brand identity and message in every single video clip.
4. Create a Reasonable Budget
Video marketing can get expensive, and it can get expensive fast. While most small businesses allocate $400 per month to marketing, professional videos can have price tags of $4,000 and upwards.
That being said, video marketing has the potential for a significant return on investment (ROI). A potential customer may view your Facebook video ad, for example, and convert after thirty seconds.
If that conversion is worth $1,000, and if it happens with lots of different customers, those video costs are suddenly quite minimal!
Keep this in mind as you incorporate finances into your video marketing strategy. Pinpoint a budget ahead of time and make it reasonable.
Think about quality here. Fronting thousands of dollars for a video campaign doesn't equate to getting stellar results. On the flip side, shelling out $100 for a low-quality ad can hurt your brand image in the long run.
Your ultimate aim should be quality, but within parameters that make sense of your business. If you know your target audience, figuring out a budget should be even easier.
For example, let's say you want to cater to millennials. To do so, you may only need to invest in short, snappy social media video ads. You may even be able to repurpose social media content.
If you wish to cater to retirees, you may want to create longer, more informative videos showcasing industry experts.
Marketing budgets can be fickle things, and they often adjust as you follow your strategy and adapt results. Over time, however, those numbers will feel more precise.
5. Choose Your Distribution Channel(s) and Strategy
Marketers can distribute video content across a wide range of channels, including websites, blogs, social media, and email.
Videos can also take different forms. You may launch a social video ad campaign on Facebook, for example. Or you may embed an informative video into a pillar page on your website.
The channels and content forms you choose will depend upon your campaign goals and buyer persona!
If you're unsure of your distribution channels, start with where you currently have the most traction.
This is often a social media page. If you have several hundred followers on Instagram, for example, begin here. Launch targeted video ads and release regular Instagram stories that align with your buyer persona, campaign goals, and message.
Set up a timeline for distribution, too. This is paramount. Timelines give you an additional parameter for tracking results.
What's a good timeline for a video marketing campaign? This depends upon your goals. However, most video marketers work in months-long timelines.
6. Figure Out Production
How are you going to create your videos? Will you be hiring professional video services? DIY-ing it? Working with a freelance designer?
Identify the mechanics of video marketing production in your strategy. These will also be tied to your campaign goals, buyer persona, and–most especially–your budget.
It's also possible to work with a marketing agency to produce video content. These partnerships typically support businesses interested in a comprehensive internet marketing campaign.
7. Create a Plan for Optimization
Once you have a video product, your work's not done yet. It's important to optimize your video content for distribution.
Optimizing videos involves refining them to ensure maximum engagement and reach.
Marketers targeting social media channels should upload mobile-friendly video content. 77% of American adults have a smartphone. Many of these smartphone users access social media from their mobile devices.
You'll also want to optimize your videos to suit specific social media channels.
Shorter videos, for example, are more suitable for Facebook browsers. What's more, make sure you start your video with the most important information.
This will ensure that viewers get a snapshot of your message and brand immediately–regardless of how long they watch for!
You'll also want to use the appropriate captions, hashtags, and keywords once uploading video content to social media. If you have a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign in place, be sure to tag your content with SEO keywords.
If you are embedding video content on your website, make sure you compress it first. This will ensure quick loading time.
8. Analytics, Analytics, Analytics
Establish a system for obtaining and analyzing your video marketing campaign's results. This is essential!
If you can't analyze how your campaign is doing, you won't be getting the insights you need to adapt accordingly. Make use of social media insights, for example. These are readily available to any social media business profile or ad campaign.
To track website traffic, spend some time with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google Analytics can be especially valuable, as it shows you where traffic is coming from. It also shows the devices used for access.
As you measure results, keep coming back to your campaign goals and target audience. Tweaking these can help you achieve that ROI you want!
Final Thoughts: Your Video Marketing Strategy
Now you have all the tools you need to develop an effective video marketing strategy.
Remember that every marketing campaign takes time and effort. It also requires a solid amount of advertising savvy!
Are you ready to take your marketing strategies to the next level? You can do so without hiring an ad campaign company–and from the comfort of your home.
