THE ULTIMATE VIDEO CONTENT MARKETING GUIDE

MARCH 15, 2021 / CREATIVE HUMANS

Video marketing is a critical aspect of any online marketing strategy. Videos offer an accessible and entertaining way to engage with your audience and are incredibly versatile. They can help you introduce new products, explain new services, build a community, and more. 

By developing and implementing an effective video content marketing strategy, businesses can boost marketing ROI, increase social media engagements, improve search engine rankings, and enhance other aspects of their digital strategies.

If your business isn’t currently prioritizing video marketing, now is a great time to get started. Whether you’re looking to launch your first video marketing campaign or are interested in ways to improve your current efforts, here’s everything you need to know about video content marketing.

Creative Humans makes it easy to find and hire top video production studios and freelancers. Browse the Directory, or Post a Job to get started.

Benefits of Video Marketing

Before launching a new marketing initiative, it’s important to answer the question: is it worth the time, effort, and financial investment?

When it comes to video content marketing, the answer is a resounding yes. Video marketing offers businesses a number of valuable benefits:

• 57% of consumers aged 18 to 24 prefer video content from brands over other types of content marketing.
• Social videos generate 12,000% as many shares as text and image content.
• Nearly 90% of marketers claim that video marketing has boosted their marketing ROI.
• Videos on landing pages can significantly increase conversion rates.

These statistics indicate that video is one of the most powerful marketing tools businesses can use to elevate their online performance. If you’re ready to take advantage of these benefits, here’s how to plan your video content marketing strategy.

Planning a Video Content Marketing Strategy

Video marketing involves several important steps. From finding your target audience and writing a script to distributing your video, it’s important to carefully plan your project to ensure it achieves the desired results. Here are the essential steps required to plan an effective video content marketing project:

Establish Your Goals

First, to create an effective video, it’s important to establish your goals. Video marketing can be used at any stage of the marketing funnel—i.e., to build awareness, generate leads, and drive conversions.

For example, if your intent is to raise awareness for your brand, your video should succinctly introduce your company and explain how your brand solves a problem that your target audience faces. If your intent is to drive conversions, you should focus on explaining the advantages of your product or service and how you stand above your competition.

Types of Marketing Videos

Depending on your goals, there are different types of marketing videos that may suit your purposes better than others. Common types of marketing videos include:

• Social Videos: Social videos are short clips or ads designed specifically for quick consumption on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
• Explainer Videos: Explainer videos are great for brands that need to introduce a new product, service, or concept to their audience.
• Commercials: Commercials or promotional videos are brief advertisements designed to grab viewers’ attention and highlight your company’s best features.
• Testimonials: Testimonial videos help brands highlight stories from satisfied customers in the hopes of convincing viewers to take action.
• Docu-Style Storytelling Series: Creative a compelling narrative with a documentary-style story.
• Integrated Brand Marketing: With a decline in ROI on TV ad spend, it’s more important than ever to create integrated video campaigns that use both TV and digital ads together. Bumper ads, live streams, soundless social videos and more can be great to add to your integrated mix.

Before beginning production on your video, be sure to consider which type of video is most likely to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Find Your Target Audience

Who is your video for, what is your video’s purpose, and where does your target audience spend most of their time? Answering these questions will help you determine what type of video you should make and where to distribute your video. If your target audience spends a lot of time on Twitter, for instance, your content should be curated for that platform.

Platform Distribution

There are several paid and organic ways to distribute marketing videos. For organic interactions, you should publish your videos on your brand’s owned channels. This includes your company website, social media channels, blogs, and email newsletters.

Videos can also be distributed through paid channels as well, including paid search engine and social media ads, influencer marketing, and sponsored content. Paid media is a great option for videos intended to raise brand awareness.

Track Video Performance

The key to developing and improving your marketing strategy is to continually track performance over time. For video content, there are several KPIs you should be sure to keep an eye on, including:

• Impressions
• Unique views
• Watch time
• View-through rate
• Clicks on links attached to videos
• Calls
• Conversions

These KPIs will help you determine whether or not your video is effective in raising brand awareness, encouraging interaction, and generating sales.

Set a Realistic Budget

Without setting and maintaining a realistic budget, it’s going to be difficult to maximize your ROI and achieve your intended results. Determine what you’ll be able to shoot in-house using your own equipment and what you will need to outsource. Producing a marketing video includes:

• Writing a script
• Storyboarding
• Hiring actors or voiceover talent
• Sound editing
• Post-production effects
• Renting equipment
• Paid media placement
• And more

Be sure to shop around to determine what you should be paying for each of these, and create a realistic budget based on your quoted rates. While it’s important to stick to your budget, be careful not to cut corners, which may result in a low-quality, ineffective final product.

Hire Professional Video Production Talent

Creating and implementing a comprehensive video marketing strategy is a great way to raise brand awareness, increase sales, and retain your existing audience. However, planning your strategy is only the first step.

With an effective content strategy in place, it’s important to hire the right talent to execute your ideas effectively. By working with proven video production professionals, you can create high quality video content that appeals to your target audience.

Creative Humans makes it easy to find and hire top video production studios and freelancers. Create a Free Account or Post a Job to get started.

* This article was originally published here