Video marketing has become one of the most important tactics for businesses today. Majority of B2Cs have already started producing videos for their brands. Data shows they see impressive returns on this investment.
In some cases, conversion rates increase 80 percent after adding videos to landing pages, an EyeView Digital study found.
Results aren’t guaranteed, however. You need to follow video marketing best practices and avoid common pitfalls if you want to be successful. One of the biggest mistakes brands make is by creating a video with no clear audience and, thus, no real purpose.
The first thing you need to do when you’re embarking on a video marketing campaign is to make sure you understand your audience.
Look at the Numbers
Use data to hone your audience targeting. Even if you already have a buyer persona, it’s a good idea to flesh out details with customer data you’ve collected. There are some places you can check, depending on the digital marketing channels you use, like Google Analytics, email marketing and automation tools, YouTube Analytics, and social media.
Here is some of the data you should be looking at:
1. Location
Where does your audience live? Are they spread across the United States, or do you have a concentration of customers in one region (Southwest, Northeast, West Coast) that you can hone your message to?
2. Gender
Do you have an even split of males and females? More males? More females? This will help guide your messaging and approach in the videos.
3. Age
What age group does your brand attract? If you have more Millennials, you may need to take a more casual or humorous approach to get their attention than you would with an audience of Gen Y, or Baby Boomers.
4. Device
Are your customers coming to your website on a desktop device, a smartphone, or a tablet? This might seem inconsequential at first, but it offers important insights on the environment people are in while watching your video and how long they will spend watching it.
5. First time or returning visitors
Is your audience mostly first-time visitors, who are discovering your brand for the first time? Or are you getting a majority of returning visitors? This breakdown has a huge impact on your approach to video marketing because these groups expect very different information.
Learn what they want
To get a sense of what your customers want from a video -the type, the tone -try to glean some insights from what you already know they like.
Identify the content that’s generated the most audience interest in the past. Conduct a content drill down in Google Analytics to see what pages and posts have:
- The most visitors
- The lowest bounce rates
- The lowest exit rates
- The best time-on-site metrics
Look for any common threads among these articles. Is there one topic that consistently performs well? Do you see a difference in results when content has a conversational or formal tone?
Then, evaluate which types of content attract the most visitors:
- Blog articles that tell them how to do something or explain a process
- ‘About us’ section to learn about the team
- Product pages to look at your inventory
These are clues about what your audience prefers and the information they are most interested in.
Conduct Competitive Analysis
Identify a competitor with a target audience similar to yours, who you think is creating compelling videos. Do some sleuthing to find out what is working for them, and if they have any ideas, you can borrow as you launch your video marketing strategy.
Here are two ways to do this:
1. Look at social metrics on the website
Some companies posts videos on their websites and the data on these pages can be useful. See if they have social media icons that show how many times the posts have been shared, and find the most widely-distributed video. This is a good indicator that viewers liked the content enough to pass along. Take note of the title, the type of video, the length, the tone, and the content as examples of what your audience enjoys.
2. Look at YouTube
If competitors post videos on YouTube, you can look at their Channel and see which videos are the most popular. Find the videos with the most plays, as well as Likes and comments.
Again, find any common denominators in their most-successful versus least-successful videos. Are they longer or shorter? Animated or live-action? Featuring one person or featuring multiple people?
This should paint a clearer picture of the likes and dislikes of your audience (or at least a demographic very similar to your customers).
Ask your audience
The most straightforward way to make sure you understand your audience is to ask them questions. Conduct customer interviews to learn about:
- What they like
- What they find useful
- What they want more or less of
- The information they still want from you
- The information they wish they had when making a purchase decision
Once you have gathered all of these insights, you should be armed with plenty of data to make videos tailored precisely to your target audience.
Do you want to learn more about creating videos that will help your brand stand out? Contact us to talk about a strategy that can help your business drive conversions online.