Using video to raise awareness, generate audience engagement and ultimately drive sales continues to be a trending strategy in the digital marketing realm. Not only is video marketing effective, but it’s a versatile approach that can be employed to achieve goals like promoting a brand, educating an audience and building customer rapport. Is it any wonder why video dominates digital communications?
Hoping to help your brand rise to success by integrating video into your larger marketing strategy? Read on to fully understand why video marketing is important and how to establish a video marketing strategy.
Rise of video marketing
The origins of video marketing can be traced to the first television commercial in 1941, but it’s only been in the past couple of decades that the strategy’s true potential as a viral marketing tactic has been realized. When Google bought YouTube in 2006, Nike had only recently become the first brand to score more than a million video views. It wasn’t long before other major brands started engaging with massive audiences via video production.
Once online videos regularly started going viral, brands everywhere wanted to make their names in the video marketing game. Today, 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, according to Wyzowl’s 2022 marketing statistics report. In the survey of 582 respondents, Wyzowl also found that 92% of marketers value video as an important part of their marketing strategies. They have good reason to prefer video marketing, as Cisco forecasts that 82% of all consumer internet traffic in 2022 will be video content.
Video marketing may be nothing new, but the way it's distributed continues to evolve. Hubspot’s 2017 research found that four of the top six channels used by global consumers to watch video were, in fact, social channels. That majority only could have grown in recent years with the meteoric rise of video-centric social media platforms like Tiktok. Considering that Animoto’s 2018 survey found 73% of consumers admit to being influenced by a brand’s social media presence, video marketing through social media channels is not a strategy any serious digital marketer wants to avoid.
Reasons to implement a video marketing strategy
Considering implementing a video marketing strategy, but not yet convinced? No matter what format of video you choose, there are a variety of benefits to video marketing. Audiences are more often motivated to share video than other types of content, possibly because most people find video more engaging and captivating than text or images.
Video also keeps users on web pages longer as they consume the content, which in turn gives brands’ SEO efforts an always-welcome boost. Plus, video simply offers prospective customers a clearer understanding of a product or service, which helps them trust a brand. Combined, all of these factors mean that video ultimately converts better compared to other marketing strategies. In fact, adding video to product pages can increase conversions by at least 80%, according to a study from EyeView.
Types of video marketing
Before you successfully can build a video marketing strategy, it’s important to understand the various types of videos that can help a brand grow, including:
- Brand videos – Usually part of a larger advertising campaign, brand videos are often used as social media advertisements to boost brand awareness and drive website traffic.
- Event videos – A business might document the experiences at or highlights of an event it sponsored or one at which it participated.
- Explainer videos – Just as their name implies, explainer videos describe how a product works or how an audience can benefit from it.
- Live videos – By broadcasting live to a social media audience, a brand can use live videos to drive customer engagement.
- Educational videos – Teaching a target audience something it will appreciate knowing through an educational or how-to video helps potential customers understand how they can get the most out of a product.
- Disappearing videos – By employing disappearing videos through platforms like Snapchat, Facebook Stories or Instagram Stories, a brand can promote a sense of urgency among its audience while capturing greater attention.
- Expert spotlight videos – A video featuring a brand interviewing experts and influencers is an effective strategy to offer an audience real value while establishing the brand as an authority in its niche.
- Personalized videos – Innovative brands now use video to address customer concerns, inquiries and requests with personalized messages that boost trust and loyalty among social media audiences.
- Demonstration videos – By showcasing its product and highlighting the benefits, a brand can encourage target audience members to make a purchase with a demonstration video.
- Case study videos – Case studies and customer testimonial videos help brands showcase their products and build trust, which increases social proof while influencing their target markets, driving potential customers further down the sales funnel.
- AR videos – By adding a digital layer to their video content, brands can employ an augmented reality video that allows customers to explore products and experience services.
- Animated videos – With animation, video marketers are afforded greater creative freedom, which helps them better explain abstract or difficult concepts. The format is also an eye-catching and entertaining way to attract audiences.
- VR videos – Not yet mainstream in the marketing sphere, virtual reality videos promise to someday become an integral part of interactive video marketing.
How to integrate video into a marketing strategy
Once you’ve made the decision to implement a video marketing campaign and familiarize yourself with the different formats available to you, it’s important to follow the proper procedures in order to integrate video into your overall marketing strategy. Hastily creating a video and haphazardly sharing it through a randomly selected channel can only be a pathway to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Instead, take the following steps and successfully use video to increase engagement and boost conversions:
- Identify audience and goals
Before you can create an effective video for marketing purposes, it’s vital that you determine your target audience and set realistic goals for your video campaign. By identifying a target market, video marketers can choose the format most likely to engage with potential customers and the messaging most likely to connect with the audience. Setting specific goals and objectives also helps marketers plan for effective video production since a brand awareness campaign won’t utilize the same message as one designed to more directly drive sales, for example.
- Choose video type and distribution channel
Based on your video marketing objectives and target audience, what type of video format is most likely to achieve your goals.? Will a brand video be the best type of video marketing to utilize, or will a demonstration or educational video work better for your purpose? It’s also essential to choose what distribution channels are most likely to attract your target audience and meet your goals. Perhaps you want to focus on a Tiktok campaign, post a video to Instagram Stories, share the content on YouTube or use a combination of online platforms.
- Develop a video message
What will be the message of your video marketing campaign? What do you want to communicate with your target audience? Before you create a budget proposal and request funding – let alone write a script, you’ll need to determine not only what message you intend to convey to potential customers but how your video will communicate that information to viewers.
- Obtain budget approval
Marketers need funding to produce video campaigns, and capital resources often require obtaining an approved budget. You’ll want to create a professional budget proposal that provides stakeholders with information on your video marketing campaign goals, as well as details on how you plan to achieve those objectives. You can save time while designing a top-quality presentation with Beautiful.ai’s budget proposal presentation template, curated with all the right slides and infographics to promote your campaign’s assets.
- Assemble a team
With an approved budget, you can set about assembling the team that will create and distribute your video for marketing purposes. You’ll need help writing a script, producing the video, directing any action, filming the content and editing the video. You’ll also want to designate team members to distribute the video to the proper channels and measure your success.
- Get everyone on board
Just assembling a team to help with your video marketing campaign isn’t enough. How do you get everyone on the same page as your planned strategy? Creating an engaging visual presentation is a highly effective way of briefing teams and communicating details to a group. Beautiful.ai features various presentation templates that can be useful to communicate a video marketing strategy, including options like a marketing plan template, a marketing campaign plan template and a project plan template.
- Create and distribute your video
Once you’re ready to create your video, you’ll want to create a professional script and plan for elements such as location, set, props and actors. In fact, entire volumes could be written on the specific steps for actually producing the marketing video. Even with a completed raw video, it’s vital to invest adequate time and effort into editing the content for the most professional and effective results. Once your video is ready for consumer consumption, it’s time to distribute it through whatever channels you’ve selected. Don’t forget to optimize your content with SEO best practices, including metadata, keywords and hashtags.
- Measure video performance
Now that your video marketing campaign has launched, it’s time to measure its performance. After all, what better way is there to improve the success of future video content? Social media makes it easier to measure these results, Marketers might choose to utilize A/B testing that determines which of two videos, titles or thumbnails works best at reaching an audience. Or, they might prefer to simply analyze a social media audience’s engagement with a video through likes, shares and click-through rates. Such video analytics consistently rank as one of brands’ top online video platform features.
Some video marketers might find more success by taking the above steps in a custom order. Regardless of their order, the same elements are necessary to achieve desired video marketing results.
