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.