How to Plan Effective Video Marketing To Engage Customers
Video marketing is the most compelling way to promote your brand in an ever-evolving digital age. Effective Video Marketing helps you get in front of your audience, raise brand awareness, and it leads viewers to take action. The key to an effective video strategy is ensuring that your content aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey.
You see, your marketing will attract different prospects who are at different phases in your sales funnel. You may have a visitor who is ready to invest in your service yet another who simply wants information. It’s important to create content that suits these needs at each stage that moves them to the next stage in your funnel.
The ultimate goal is to convert prospects into buying customers. Video marketing is a top tool in inbound marketing to help you achieve this objective.
In this guide, we’ll outline the three stages to the buyer’s journey and how to use different types of video marketing in each phase for maximum success in your strategy.
Awareness Stage
In the awareness stage, the prospect is in the discovery process of your brand. They understand they have a problem and begin researching ways to resolve the issue. As a result, they land on your content as the solution. Your prospect is simply looking for educational content that will help them quickly overcome their pains and challenges.
Your goal in creating video content for the Awareness Stage is to do just that build awareness of your brand. Here, you’re positioning your company as a resource, expert, and solution in the industry. It’s where you let your audience know what you offer so buyers recognize what you do and how you can help them.
Therefore, you want to engage your visitor in a way that encourages them to indulge more in your content by focusing on their pain points, not your products or brand.
How to Use Video Marketing for Awareness Stage
Here are the typical content types that work best in the Awareness Stage using video:
1. Social Videos:
Social promotion is an excellent medium for building a following and community around your brand. It’s also a huge asset to getting your video content in front of an engaging audience.
There are three types of videos to consider when posting on social media:
- Sharing videos from your YouTube channel – As the second largest search engine, building your channel is smart towards growing brand awareness. Be sure to optimize your videos for better ranking
- Uploading organic videos directly to social media – you’ll obtain greater reach with your audience using organic videos (Source: Social Media Today)
- Live-streaming video – Facebook Live, Periscope, and Instagram Stories are generating massive engagement on social media. Excellent tactic to build exposure to your brand fast
2. Include Video in Blog Content
Your company blog is the perfect platform to create quality rich-content that educates your audience while increasing visibility to your brand. Add videos to these posts to enrich website-experience and keep people on your page longer (this also improves your SEO).
Consideration Stage
Good news! Your prospect has warmed up to your brand and you’re now viewed as a credible source. They’re also clear on their goals, are committed to addressing it, and now looking at options on how they can handle their issues. At this stage, they’re actively looking for content related to solutions.
Content in this phase needs to be incredibly informative and help the prospect gain clarity on how to solve the problem they are experiencing. In the Consideration Stage, you’re also focusing on capturing qualified leads by leveraging compelling lead magnets to get them in your sales funnel.
How to Use Video Marketing for Consideration Stage
The beauty of using video here is that they’re highly successful in moving viewers to action. This is especially important for growing your email list. Giving a clear call-to-action in your video that directs users to the next step will have a tremendous impact on your conversion rates.
Here’s how to put it to use:
1. Video on Landing Page
Landing pages that include video can increase conversions by a whopping 80% (Source: Hubspot)
2. Webinars
Webinars allow you to showcase your knowledge and expertise. You can dive deeper into topics and give people a chance to ask questions for further understanding. It also bolsters your lead generation as each participant must register before joining your broadcast
3. How-to’s and Instructional Videos
YouTube and live-streaming are ideal platforms for how-to and instructional videos.
4. Promote Your eBook
eBooks are ideal sources for product comparisons, how-to’s, or giving detailed instructions. Shoot a video that promotes your eBook and shares how viewers can opt-in to get their copy
5. Mini-Video Series
Consider repurposing your popular, evergreen, or long-form blog post into a mini video series that you can distribute on social media or use as a lead magnet. Repurposing content fills your content calendar, giving you ample content to share with your audience.
Decision Stage
Your prospect is now closer to making the financial decision to solving their problem. Through your email nurturing tactics, they’ve been cultivated by your content (whether blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.) and perhaps ready to make the purchase. In fact, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (Source: Emma). Your video marketing strategy is about to pay off big… but we’re not finished yet!
The content used to help close the deal will be different from the content leveraged in the previous stages. Your focus here is to make the sale, so it’s vital to create a smooth transition to the transaction.
How to Use Video Marketing for Decision Stage
Videos will help get the job done. Hubspot also shares that after watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to buy that product online. You’re using the right tool to convert leads into customers.
The following ways show how:
1. Gather Customer Testimonials
User-generated content and sharing testimonials are extremely effective in boosting sales revenue. It builds trust with your audience and shows that what you have, works! Compile your customer’s social videos into one, compelling marketing video to share with your list
2. Live Demo
Show prospects how your products work live and in living color by hosting a webinar or live-streaming video on social media. Outline the benefits, features, and how people use it as their solution. Allow an opportunity for participants to ask questions for immediate response
3. Share Your Story
Storytelling is a powerful strategy to pulling your audience in and connecting them with the vision of your brand.
4. Product Videos
Create an extensive video for each of your products and services. This can be evergreen content that you can use forever that highlights the details, advantages, and how viewers can purchase.
Final Insights For Effective Video Marketing
Video marketing is a powerful tool in the inbound marketing box! By honing on your video strategy, you can significantly boost brand awareness, get more eyeballs on your content, grow your leads, and increase revenue. The key is ensuring that you’re leveraging the different types of videos appropriately to effectively move your audience.
Use this blueprint as a guide to creating your video marketing strategy. Be consistent and patient with your results. Regularly test your outcomes to discover what’s working best with your audience and what needs to be modified. In due time, you will experience the desired growth in your business with video.
Are you ready to ramp up your video marketing in 2017? We are equipped to help you get in front of your audience and achieve results in your inbound marketing. Reach out to us here and let’s chat!
How to Create a Strong Video Marketing Strategy
Implementing a video marketing strategy is a must if you desire to reach today’s consumer. The popularity of video is undeniable as more consumers are using it to discover, engage and stay connected with brands.
Video marketing can enrich every aspect of your digital inbound strategy. From growing brand awareness, improving lead generation, boosting engagement and driving revenue. Videos can be the secret sauce you need to amplify your inbound efforts. The key is creating a video strategy that aligns with your ultimate business goals and the needs of your customer.
Are you ready to add video marketing to your inbound marketing mix or looking to improve your current one? If so, here are five steps to creating a robust strategy that gets in front of your customers and generates results.
1. Be Clear on Your Audience and Goals
Knowing who your target audience is and the results you desire from your video marketing campaign are essential to your strategy. It sets a solid foundation and serves as a guide to ensure that the content you publish aligns with your goals and speaks to its intended audience.
Create Buyer Personas
Perhaps you’re already clear on your target audience from your inbound marketing plan. If not, the best way to gaining this clarity is by creating buyer personas. This process allows you to paint a clear picture of your ideal customer which positions you to produce content that appeals to their needs.
You’ll glean data such as their job description and responsibilities, the problems and pain points they have, what their role is in the buying process, keyword phrases they’re likely to use when searching online, their unique goals, and more. It helps you create the content that your audience wants to see. Therefore, making your strategy highly effective.
Know Your Goals
What exactly do you want to achieve from your video marketing strategy? Are you seeking to build brand awareness? Capture leads? Increase your sales?
Whatever the goals, it’s important to know upfront to keep your campaign centered on achieving them. When your business understands why you’re creating video stories, the content becomes intentional and purposeful.
2. Brainstorm and Decide On Your Video Content
There are a plethora of video content ideas. From how-to’s and product videos to customer testimonials and video email marketing, the options are many when considering the video topics you want to publish for your audience.
In addition to key videos, every business should have that highlights their brand and purpose; it is important that you create content that supports different points in the buyer’s journey to hit all targets in your audience.
You see, some may be familiar with your brand through social media or as an email subscriber. Others are more in the discovery phase. Having videos tailored to each prospect maximizes your reach and impact. Viewers are likely to move in your favor (opt-in or purchase your product) when your content relates to their specific journey.
With that said, here are different types of video content every brand should have in the vault and ones that relate to each stage in the buyer’s journey:
Videos Every Brand Needs
- Explainer Video – videos that explain your product or service or offers an in-depth explanation of a specific facet of your product empowers future clients to make educated buying decisions
- Product Videos – each of your products and/or services should be featured in its own exclusive video. Highlight the benefits and the results your customers have achieved through your business
- How-to Videos – showing your customers how your product works is extremely beneficial for customer success
- Customer Testimonials – did you know 88% of people trust reviews as personal recommendations? Posing your testimonials using video can be a power-packed strategy to building trust and converting leads into customers
Videos for the Buyer’s Journey
- Awareness Stage - Prospects are simply looking for educational content that will quickly solve a problem. You want to position your brand as an expert. The best videos here include social videos, YouTube (for search), and ones shared in your blog articles
- Consideration Stage - Prospects are looking at options on how they can handle their issues. They view you as a trusted, credible source and looking to stay connected. Optimal videos in this stage include webinars, instructional, mini-video series, and adding a video to your landing page to boost conversions
- Decision Stage - Your lead is closer to making the buying decision. Make it easy by sharing demonstration, product, and customer testimonial videos
3. Decide How You Will Create Your Videos
With clarity about your audience and content topics ready, it’s time to create and publish remarkable videos that capture attention and WOWs your audience. You have to decide whether you’re going to make your videos in-house or leverage a video production team that can bring your ideas and vision to life.
Using both approaches to creating your videos is highly suggested as you can designate professional ones for evergreen and promotional content and others such as live videos and webinars can be performed by your team.
For videos produced on your own, use these tips to help you in the creation process:
- Get to the point quickly, keeping it short and concise
- Showcase your personality to stand out. Allow viewers to relate to your brand through your style and message
- Make great eye contact. Refrain from looking at yourself in the screen but rather gaze into the lens, so it appears you're looking directly at your viewer
- Give a call to action. Tell your audience what to do next to improve engagement. Whether it's to opt into your list, give a comment, or share with their friends, make it clear, so people follow your instructions
4. Create Your Video Promotion Plan
Getting your video in front of as many targeted eyeballs as possible is crucial for brand awareness and meeting your goals. Traffic, lead generation, and sales opportunities are dependent on how successful you promote your video content. In fact, you should spend 54 minutes promoting your content for every hour you spend creating it (Source: CoSchedule).
Although there are tons of ways to spread the word about your video, be sure to include the following tactics in your promotion plan:
- Social Media Promotion - Each network has a different tolerance of how often you should post and the way you tailor the headline for that specific network. It’s okay to share your video more than once to increase exposure. Just be sure to switch up your headline, so it appropriately speaks to the audience when you’re promoting your video
- Video Email Marketing – Your subscribers should be the first to know about your video as your fans. Keep them connected by including your videos in your email strategy. Create your campaigns if your videos are designed for the buyer’s journey
- YouTube – Although a no-brainer, simply uploading your video on YouTube is not enough to drive engagement. Optimize your video and its title, description, and tags for SEO to improve ranking in Google and YouTube search. The title should include the full keyword you’re aiming to rank for. Also, consider uploading a transcript for further optimization
- Influencer Marketing – Leveraging influencers can play a big role in getting your video in front of new people. They already have a large active following that supports their content. Build relationships with influencers in your niche to create winning partnerships where they promote your video in exchange for something (whether intangible or tangible)
5. Decide How You Will Measure Results
The final step to creating a strong video marketing strategy is measuring your results to test effectiveness. There’s too much invested in “hopes” that your video generates desired engagement to meet your business goals. You must know what’s working and what isn’t so you can continuously make improvements to your strategy to yield favorable results.
The good news is, deciding on how you’ll measure your efforts isn’t complicated. You can create a simple system of questions that analyzes and gauges your outcomes. Here are a few to consider to test your video marketing strategy:
- What keywords are people using to locate my video in search (on Google and YouTube)?
- Which content topic generates the most shares (i.e. explainer, tutorials, social videos, etc.)?
- How long are viewers watching my video? Are they staying for most of the video or leaving after the first few seconds?
- How many views did my video receive?
- Which content topic produced the most social engagement (combination of likes, shares, and comments)
- How many leads did my video generate?
A Strong Video Marketing Strategy Engages Your Customers
Video is a game-changing tactic to capture attention and increase engagement with your target audience. Engaging video helps your brand become more visible in search results. Best of all, it converts prospects throughout the funnel. It’s one of the best tools you can leverage in your inbound marketing.
Use this blueprint as a guide to building a strong video marketing strategy in 2017. You will appeal to today’s consumer and find your company quickly meeting milestone goals for your business.
Much success.
Are you ready to publish compelling videos that sell your product, educate and delight your customers? Reach out to us here to discover how we can help get you to your next level through video.
