Video marketing is taking the stage front and center.
Everywhere you look, the latest figures show an upwards trend in online video consumption.
A recent survey revealed that 27.2% of online viewers watched more than 10 hours of online video every week:
It’s a fact not lost on the social media networks as each platform from TikTok to LinkedIn and YouTube promotes more video-orientated content to satisfy user demand.
If you haven’t embraced video as part of your digital marketing strategy yet, then now is the time to reconsider.
In this guide, you’ll discover:
Let’s begin.
Video marketing involves using video to promote or market your brand, product, or service.
You can use different types of video, such as how-to videos, explainer videos, and customer testimonials, to reach your audience, raise awareness, increase engagement, and drive sales for your marketing campaign.
There are three broad categories of marketing video viewed by people in different places at different stages of the marketing funnel:
Social media videos attract new customers. They’re usually short video clips designed to play automatically with the sound off (but captions on) that show your brand’s personality.
Content marketing videos educate and entertain. You can expect to see explainer and how-to videos that show how your product or service helps solve a customer problem, plus thought leadership videos that establish you as a source of industry news and insight.
Conversion videos nurture your prospects and build trust. By this stage, you can expect to see product demo videos, landing page videos, case studies, and customer testimonial videos. These are generally longer in duration compared to the short social media videos.
Wherever you look online, video is taking the stage front and center.
There are three main reasons why:
People are watching more video content, whether that’s on their mobile or streamed to their TV. Let’s examine the figures:
Zenith estimates that the average person will spend 100 minutes every day watching online videos in 2021 — almost 19% more compared to 2019:
According to HubSpot Research, over half of consumers want to see videos from brands more than any other type of content:
Google’s research shows that 6 out of 10 people prefer to watch online videos than television:
To meet user expectations, social media platforms have become “video first” and created video-friendly formats like Stories, Reels, and Live broadcasts.
Social media videos are typically short clips that you see in the respective Feed/Stream and are designed to grab your attention. But there are also longer formats, including live broadcasts, vlogs, customer testimonials, product demonstrations, and tutorial videos.
Aside from native video posted to your timeline, each social platform has other video features.
Instagram: Stories, Reels, IGTV, and Live broadcasts.
Facebook: Stories and Facebook Live.
LinkedIn: Stories and LinkedIn Live.
Twitter: Fleets and Live broadcasts.
TikTok: Short videos with multi-effects.
YouTube: Multiple video formats, including live broadcasts and webinars.
The latest software, hardware, and infrastructure make video production and consumption easier.
Hardware progress: As 4K cameras bring higher quality video, content marketing and advertising through video continues to grow. You don’t have to hire videographers and studios to produce high-quality videos. You can use the latest smartphones to record 4k high-definition video.
Network evolution: As high-speed internet and 5G rolls out worldwide, more people have access to faster streaming. There’s close to 1 million minutes of video crossing the internet per second. Plus, by 2021, Cisco reckons online videos will account for more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than in 2017.
Software apps and tools: Today, it’s possible to record high-quality videos on your smartphone and post directly to social media platforms without creative skills or a large budget. Plus, there’s other free video editing software that allows users to create different types of videos.
To summarize, these developments mean that video is now easier to produce and is more popular to watch than ever.
Video marketing is effective and emotional as it makes a deeper human connection. It helps your audience:
Here are four examples of successful video marketing campaigns to inspire you.
Dollar Shave Club is a DTC subscription service for razor blades, priced at one dollar. There’s no hard-sell, but the video (which went viral) strikes the right balance between humor and information. They spent $4500 on this video and received 12,000 new orders within 48 hours of rolling it out.
GoPro videos typically feature action-packed adventures of mountain climbers, skydivers, and surfers. But in this video marketing campaign, they switched emotions to a fireman equipped with a GoPro helmet camera saving a kitten. The different style of content allowed them to reach a broader audience.
Animated explainer videos are short branded videos (on average, under 1-minute) commonly used to describe a product or service quickly and creatively. They allow brands to reveal their unique personality through custom illustration and animation styles. Spotify’s animated video was created to appeal to a global audience with wildly diverse tastes and attract potential Premium subscribers.
Customer testimonial videos help to build trust with your brand. In this example, Applied Fitness Solutions shares a customer success story in which Kristina delivers her message in a genuine, personable way that makes the testimonial video feel and sound authentic and trustworthy.
Now you have an idea of what’s possible with video marketing, it’s time for you to implement your video marketing strategy with this 5-step guide:
The first step in creating your video strategy is to align your business and video goals to the marketing funnel:
Credit: LemonLight.com
Videos in the awareness stage should attract users and introduce your brand to a new audience.
You’ll want to set targets linked to the discovery of your brand, like total views, 3-second views, and view duration.
At this stage, viewers are researching how to solve their problem, so you’ll want to consider creating product/service videos and explainer videos.
You can use metrics such as click-through rate and view length:
By now, viewers are almost ready to purchase your product or service, so it’s good to build trust with social proof through customer testimonial videos, plus explainer and product/service videos.
For your conversion videos, the most important metric is sales or sign-ups, but it’s also worth monitoring the click-through rate to see how many people visited your sales page but didn’t buy.
You can also create videos to delight customers who’ve already purchased your product or service. Consider producing beginner and advanced tutorials to help customers get the most out of your product or service.
The next step in creating your video strategy is to plan your content ahead of time to tell a consistent story.
There are four main elements to include in your story:
Credit: LemonLight.com
Telling a consistent story will take your viewers on a journey that unfolds with every new video.
As you plan your content, make sure you build in an approval workflow and allow adequate time for each video creation stage. For example, you might need to include colleagues from other departments, such as:
Aside from approvals, you’ll need to build your editorial calendar so that you get the right mix of content published at the right time.
Your video marketing calendar will most likely contain two types of content: organic and paid.
The next step in creating your video strategy is to produce your video content. There are three phases of video production:
The pre-production phase covers all your preparation before you start recording. You should have a good idea of what you want in the content from the planning section above. But you’ll also want to cover:
The production phase is where everything comes together, and you get to create your video. You’ll want to ensure everything is right, including audio and visual quality, lighting, and styling.
The post-production phase is where you can add the finishing touches, such as visual, sound, and graphic effects. You’ll also want to consider adding captions (remember many videos, especially on social media, are played without the sound) and a call to action.
As mentioned earlier, with the advances in technology over the past decade, it’s now possible for anyone to produce videos.
There are a couple of options for video self-production:
These include tools like Biteable, InVideo, or Adobe Express, where you get a library of pre-made templates plus stock footage and images. These are the most straightforward tools to get started with and are suitable for producing videos for the top and middle of the funnel.
The next step up is to use video editing tools like iMovie, Adobe Premiere Pro, or Final Cut Pro, where you use your own footage and skills to produce more-refined videos.
The other option is to outsource video production. If you don’t have the time or resources in-house, this is a safe option. Plus, you’ll also want to consider this option for producing more polished, bottom of the funnel conversion videos. At this stage, viewers will expect more refined production quality compared to the more raw, edgy social media videos.
In this step of your video marketing strategy, you need to review your video performance and see if you met the goals you set out in Step #1.
Based on the marketing funnel, here are the metrics to focus on at each stage.
At the top of the funnel, you want to attract new customers. You can focus on metrics like views, impressions, and unique users to see how many visitors you’re attracting.
Now your audience knows about your brand, you need to keep them engaged. View duration and view-through rate are two of the most important metrics here as they indicate how engaging your video content is. You can also use metrics such as likes, comments, and shares to measure engagement when posting your video on social media.
If you nurture your prospects successfully, you’ll see the results in conversions, including sign-ups to newsletters, free-trial subscriptions, and purchases.
The goal here is to keep customers interested in your brand for future purchases or added value. Focus on return visits and social engagement to see how much your brand is trusted and championed by your customers
Finally, after reviewing the performance of your video content, you need to learn the lessons of what worked and what didn’t.
For example, if the view-through rate of your video is low, you could try creating a shorter version of the video to keep your audience engaged.
If you want to improve your video marketing campaigns, you need to fine-tune and adjust your content continuously.
Craft, schedule, & auto-post content to all your social channels, then track analytics and manage interactions from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
Video marketing is an essential part of digital marketing since more people now prefer to watch videos from brands than other types of content.
Video marketing can help your brand, product, or service to be SEEN, HEARD, and UNDERSTOOD by your target audience.
Follow this 5-step guide to implement your video marketing strategy: