What is Video Marketing
Video marketing refers to the use of videos to promote your business or service.
Video marketing is a powerful tool for businesses because that is able to deliver messages to a wide audience and also allows them to connect with their audience in a more engaging and memorable way. By creating high-quality video content, businesses can build trust with their audience and increase their chances of converting viewers into customers.
Video marketing can be used for a variety of purposes, including building brand awareness, increasing website traffic, generating leads, and driving sales.
Video marketing continues to reign as the king of the digital marketing landscape. Videos average over 250 million hours watched daily on YouTube alone (Zippia). This statistic doesn’t even account for the watch hours on other platforms.
There is immeasurable value in how accessible such a large number of people are. Furthermore the audience is always available meaning your brand/product is always seen.
Knowing the value of the audience available is of great importance. However, greater is the importance of knowing how to create engaging material.
5 reasons why video marketing can help you grow your business
- Increases engagement: Video content is highly engaging and can capture the attention of viewers much more effectively than text or images. This increased engagement can lead to higher levels of brand awareness, increased website traffic, and ultimately, more sales.
2. Builds trust: By showcasing your brand or product in a video, you can build trust with your audience by providing them with a more personal and authentic experience. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and advocacy.
3. Boosts SEO: Video content can help boost your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) by increasing the time visitors spend on your site and reducing bounce rates. Additionally, videos often rank higher in search engine results than text-based content.
4. Reaches a wider audience: Video content can be shared and distributed across a variety of platforms, including social media, email, and websites. This means you can reach a wider audience and increase your brand’s visibility.
5. Provides measurable results: Video marketing allows you to track metrics such as views, engagement, and conversion rates, which can help you optimize your marketing efforts and achieve better results.
Types of Video Content
Video marketing can take many video formats, including product demos, customer testimonials, explainer videos, how-to guides, live videos, animations and promotional videos. It can be distributed on a variety of platforms, including social media, websites, and video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
The large majority of these video formats are compatible with being in short form. This is due to videos like product reviews having short viewer retention.
Testimonials for example are usually seen in ads as short 20-50 second clips of a user or customer. They provide insight into the product, service or environment and are short summaries. The short summaries cover key points that other viewers take interest in.
How to Create Effective Video Content
Here are some key steps to follow to create effective video content:
Define your objectives: Before creating your video content, it’s important to define your objectives and what you want to achieve. This will help you create content that is tailored to your audience and aligns with your overall marketing strategy.
Know your audience: Understanding your target audience is crucial to creating effective video content. Consider factors such as age, gender, interests, and preferences to ensure your content resonates with your audience.
Develop a clear message: Your video content should have a clear and concise message that is easy to understand. This will help ensure your audience takes away the key points you want to convey.
Choose the right format: There are many different types of video content, such as explainer videos, product demos, customer testimonials, and how-to guides. Choose the format that best aligns with your objectives and audience preferences.
Focus on quality: The quality of your video content is important, so invest in high-quality equipment and editing software to ensure your videos look and sound professional.
Keep it engaging: To keep your audience engaged, make sure your video content is visually appealing, interesting, and informative. Use visuals, animations, and music to make your videos more engaging.
Optimize for distribution: Once you’ve created your video content, optimize it for distribution by ensuring it is easy to share across multiple platforms such as social media, YouTube, and your website.
An element of a successful video marketing campaign is a clear target audience.
Target audiences are the viewers that you would like to reach and make an impression on. In the case of an insurance company, a video campaign would not be for adolescence. Rather they would make an advertisement for adults.
Knowing that the target audience is adults, the insurance company can now think accordingly. They can start by creating a compelling message that connects with the audience. This message should align with the overarching campaign and its desired goal.
For instance, an effective marketing campaign for sunscreen might be a fear campaign. Presenting skin cancer as the result of not wearing sunscreen as kids is valid here. This example has an audience, adults, and a driving factor. Out of love for their children, they would in turn opt in for using sunscreen to protect them from the harmful sun.
Measuring the Success of Video Marketing Campaigns
Measuring for success is a vital part of any marketing campaign. It is key to identify the efforts and the total return on all your investments. To measure the success you will need to track a variety of key metrics. Some of the key metrics used in video marketing are;
- Views
- Engagement
- Conversion Rate
- Retention rate
- Likes and shares
- Watch time
These metrics alone do not equate to a certain sum of money, but they can provide insight. This insight would allow you to improve other areas of your marketing campaign.
Views alone can be quite deceiving as a metric. This is due to how volatile social media algorithms can be in placing your video in front of viewers. This means your video may have many views despite them only watching a few seconds of a 15 minute video.
Metrics like engagement and shares indicate that viewers found value in your video. Engagement is a valuable mechanism, the comments feature especially demonstrates this. Comments are able to deliver the viewers exact thoughts on your videos. Customer driven marketing is the closest example to this thought. Where by positive engagement, customers can influence others to make a decision.
In regards to feedback, it can help identify exactly what needs to improve. Quality responses often include information about how you could improve on your video. Viewers may say to shorten a video or to improve mindfulness around certain topics. These constructive criticisms are valuable and should be part of your video marketing campaign.
Best Practices for Video Marketing
Being part of the norm is akin to staying out of enemy lines. Trying the wrong video formats meant for a different platform is often met with negativity. TikTok has one of the highest average watch time per user. Despite this they have a low viewer retention with a significant drop off after the 14th second.
Sources: Thenetworkec.com
Sources: The Quill, Cooper Funk
So by understanding that only short form videos see success on TikTok, the same format should be assumed when producing your own campaign.
User personalisation is a key factor in producing videos as mentioned before. This is because the more you personalise a video, the more likely you are to reach that target audience. You can also expand on the idea of personalisation by including accessibility. Accessibility in videos is very appreciated by certain viewers with impairments. Accessibility includes subtitles, colour blind overlays and clear dictation of key information.
A courtesy you could provide yourself is improving your video’s SEO. SEO includes making use of key words that are relevant in your description, caption and hashtags. Improving your SEO allows search engines to boost viewership on your videos.
Conclusion
Overall, video marketing is a powerful tool for businesses looking to grow and achieve their marketing objectives. By creating high-quality video content and distributing it effectively, businesses can increase engagement, build trust, boost SEO, reach a wider audience, and achieve measurable results.
So we recommend you make the most out of video marketing’s colossal audience size. We also see video marketing for its invaluable engagement and potential to create conversions.
As the famous saying goes, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million”. So why not make use of video marketing in your digital marketing campaign and grow your brand online?
