How to Create Marketing Videos - Video Content Marketing Strategy

If there’s one thing businesses want to know in today’s digital world, it’s how to create marketing videos that have a big impact.

Video content dominates the online space. If your business isn’t implementing a video marketing strategy, then it’s time to start.

Video marketing may not be a new idea, but the way that video content should be used in marketing has completely changed. This is especially true in social media.

When it comes to content, video is insanely engaging. The way video is used to capture audiences is also constantly changing. Right now, brands rely on video more than ever to captivate and engage their audience.

This means there are many different formats that video content can take. From long-form informative videos to short and snappy clips, there are many ways you can use this type of content to grow your business.

So, wondering how to start video marketing for your business? Follow our guide below to help you create a video strategy that has a real impact.

What is Video Marketing?

Video marketing is the process of using videos to attract and engage our audience, push important messages for your brand, and sell products or services. These days, there are many different channels and forms for video content. This means brands can develop diverse video content marketing plans.

Video lets brands catch their audience’s attention and engage them in an emotional way. Unlike using text, images, or audio, video offers a more complete experience. This means it can be used to achieve many different objectives.

When looking to create video content for your marketing strategy, it’s important to consider your brand’s goals and metrics. You also need to know where your customers are in the sales funnel, so that you can target them with relevant video content.

Why Should You Focus on Video Marketing?

Whatever product or service you’re selling, video is one of the most effective ways of selling it. In fact, 94% of marketers say that video has helped them increase audience understanding of a product or service. Let that sink in.

Adding video to your marketing funnel is highly effective because no other form of content is quite as engaging or attention-grabbing.

The fact that YouTube has nearly 3 billion users shows just how popular video content is. And when it comes to content marketing, using video consistently offers some of the best ROI. Video can lead to fast revenue increases compared to other forms of content.

And today, video production is nothing to be afraid of. You don’t need to hire a production company and spend loads of money. If you’ve got a smartphone, then you can get started with video creation straight away. A simple phone camera and free editing tools are enough to create the types of videos that can make your business go viral.

How to Start Video Marketing in 7 Steps

Want to create marketing videos that achieve the best possible results? Then follow these steps to effectively add video to your content marketing strategy.

1. Set Your Video Marketing Goals

Before you put a video marketing strategy into place, you will need to set some goals. This gives your marketing campaign a clear direction, with actionable targets for your videos to achieve.

Video marketing goals can include things like driving more brand awareness, offering helpful content, promoting a certain product, educating customers, showing your authority, or simply just creating something entertaining for your audience.

Having a clear set of goals will help you create video content that is more suitable for your marketing objectives and target audience. Always start with the end in mind, and think about what you want to achieve from publishing the video?

Always align your goals with measurable KPIs. This is essential for measuring the results and successes of your marketing strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, then your KPIs could be followers on your video channel. Then you can create a specific goal, like “Increase YouTube subscribers to 20K by the end of Q2”. Understanding SMART goals is important here.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Your video marketing strategy needs to align with what your target audience wants to see. This will help you reach the right people on the right channels, increase engagement, and generate more customers from your videos.

Take a look at your previous content marketing efforts and social media stats. Understand what kind of content your target audience likes and what they engage with. This should give you a better idea of what type of video content you should be creating.

You could also look at your email marketing strategy, and see which emails got the highest open rates and clicks. Look at what types of questions your target audience might be asking your brand, or what kind of topics your customers are most interested in. This will help you create the types of videos that your audience wants to see.

Of course, you also need to have a detailed understanding of your target audience’s demographics and online habits. This will help you focus on platforms where your audience is most present.

3. Choose the Right Channels for Video Marketing

Understanding the interests and needs of your target audience is one step. The next step is knowing where your audience is.

You can publish video content over many different platforms. Obviously, there’s YouTube, but there are many more social media options – like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on.

You could also post your videos on your landing pages or website, with a dedicated landing page made for each video. Maybe you want to include videos in your blog posts.

Video content works well all over your marketing funnel, so you can create videos for all kinds of audience touchpoints. It’s just important that you publish the right kind of content on the right platform.

Each social media channel has its own unique audience and demographic. Each social media channel also has its own best type of video content. Your video marketing strategy needs to match this.

So, understand who your audience is through a detailed analysis, and then you can figure out what kind of content they’re looking for.

To help you out, check out this guide on using YouTube vs TikTok for your brand.

4. Understand the Different Types of Videos You Can Create

There are all kinds of videos you can create. Each type of video offers a unique purpose and seeks to achieve a specific goal.

Before you just go out there and start filming, you need to create a video that aligns with your overall marketing goals and your audience’s interests.

Here are just some of the different types of video content that you can create:

Brand videos: This type of video helps to boost brand awareness by showcasing your company, its vision, goals, etc.

Educational videos: How-to videos are used to teach your audience something new, or spread knowledge about your product or service. This type of video creation can also be used by sales teams to educate new customers further on your product or service.

Demo videos: This is a popular type of video that offers a run-through of your product or service.

Customer Testimonials: Many companies are using testimonials in their video strategy to help spread brand awareness and show real-life examples of how their product or service is actually being used. Happy existing customers describe their experiences of the brand they’ve been using. This is a great way to build trust around your brand.

Live videos: Live video content is a great way to engage with your audience in real-time. You can stream these videos on platforms like Facebook or YouTube and you can show a behind-the-scenes look into your business, answer questions, introduce yourself, offer a presentation, or more. Live video content works well as long-form video content, and it doesn’t require the use of a production company – these videos could just be made with a phone or laptop camera.

Expert interviews: Interviewing experts within your industry is a powerful way of positioning your brand as an authority. You could interview people within your organization, or ask other outsider leaders in your industry if they want to do an interview. Just make sure that the expert appeals to your target audience.

Animated videos: Animated videos are becoming increasingly popular on social media and ads, but they can be used anywhere. Animation can easily translate tricky topics, or make potentially boring topics exciting.

Explanation videos: Adding explainer videos in your video strategy help to show your audience why they should use your product. Creating a video like this could focus on the features of a specific product, or reveal real-life use cases of your product.

Entertaining videos: Of course, you can also create fun and entertaining videos to keep your audience engaged and interested in your brand. TikTok and Reels are ideal for this.

Putting together a video marketing strategy is also about getting creative. You could use things like virtual reality, 360° videos, roundups, presentations, and more. This all depends on your business and your target audience.

For example, B2B companies could do really well showcasing their product through a live webinar and creating educational video content. B2C companies may get better results from explanation videos and entertaining how-to videos.

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5. Create Your Videos

Now that you’ve got a proper understanding of what kind of video marketing strategy you’re going to implement, it’s time to actually start creating video. This is where many businesses get scared away, but creating a video shouldn’t be as difficult as you think.

Not all small businesses can hire a professional video production and post-production company. But when you’re getting started, this isn’t necessary. The most important thing is that your video content is honest, and adds the right type of value to your customers.

If you’ve got a smartphone with a camera, then you’re halfway there. In fact, homemade, simple videos are often even more effective on certain social media channels, like TikTok or Instagram, because this makes the video more relatable.

When going through your video production process, map out your video, create a script, and test out some shots, angles, and backgrounds. If you really don’t have any video production skills, that’s ok. Keeping it simple is often best.

Video marketing content like testimonials, webinars, unboxing videos, how-to videos, presentations and interviews don’t need to be made with Oscar-winning production quality. As long as they’re entertaining and offer the right amount of value to your audience, that’s all that really matters.

You can always scale up your video production efforts as your business grows.

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Post-Production

It’s so important to focus enough time and energy on post-production. This is where you edit the video, add music, effects, voiceovers, subtitles, and make it look perfect. There are many easy post-production tools out there, including plenty of great free options.

If post-production seems like a challenge, then don’t worry too much about it. The more you do it, the better you will get.

If you’re really unsure about post-production, you can always start with live videos and short social media clips that don’t require editing.

6. Publish and Promote Your Video Marketing Strategy

Now you’ve got your video content created. You know where your audience is, and you know what social media channel you’re uploading the video to. Success, it’s time to get your videos out there!

Just don’t forget to promote your video content properly.

Videos shouldn’t just be uploaded and then left alone. They will soon fade away into the distance. Make sure that your video content strategy involves a clear promotional plan. Your promotional strategy is what will end up getting your video the views you’re after.

You need to generate awareness around your videos and drive traffic to each video – much like you would with a blog post or social media promotion.

Check out this easy guide for content promotion ideas that any small business owner can use. (The article is written about promoting a blog post, but these practices also apply to video content).

You also need to make sure you post videos at the right time. Here are the best times to post on:

Optimizing Your YouTube Content

YouTube SEO and optimizing video content for YouTube is a whole new topic in itself. Remember, YouTube is just another huge search engine, like Google. This means that if you’re uploading videos to YouTube, your content strategy should pay attention to targeting the right keywords.

Some best practices include using the right keywords in your video description and title, making use of YouTube hashtags, using the right thumbnails, and engaging with your YouTube subscribers and comments.

You can check out a more detailed guide on how to grow your YouTube channel here.

7. Monitor Your Video Performance

Just like with any marketing plan, you want to make sure that you monitor the success of your content and viewers. This needs to align with the goals and KPIs that you originally set.

Always take a look at how your videos are performing, and understand how your customers and viewers are engaging with your video content.

Different platforms will offer different metrics and analytics around your video content. The main metrics are the number of viewers you get, social sharing, and (if relevant) the conversion rate on your videos. For YouTube, it’s also important to look at where your viewers came from. This helps understand the success of your distribution efforts.

Pay attention to how many comments your videos received, how many likes they got, and how far into the videos your viewers watched.

Keep in mind the insights you gained from these metrics, and use them to create future content that you know your viewers will want to see. No matter how many videos you upload, you can always be improving the quality and relevance of your content based on how your viewers enjoyed the content.

Video Marketing Best Practices

The more you use social media to post videos, the more you will improve and refine your process. Of course, all videos are different, with each social media platform and marketing strategy requiring unique video content. However, there are always a few best practices to follow when creating videos.

Include a call to action: If your video has a goal (which it should), then you want to have a clear call to action in your video to get your audience to make the step that you want. This can be included at the end of the video.

Create short videos: Sure, this doesn’t apply to every video and every platform, but making short videos is often best. You want to make sure that your videos are engaging, interesting, and to the point. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram use videos that are generally only around 30 seconds long. Of course, your video could be longer, but then consider more suitable platforms, like YouTube, for more in-depth content.

Promote your video across various channels: Even if your video is only posted on one social media channel, you can get more viewers by sharing it in your email newsletters, blog posts, and other social media channels.

Repurpose your video content: Each channel is unique, which means you should publish unique content optimized for each channel. However, you can create its content based on the same ideas. For example, you could publish a long video on YouTube, then use the same topic for shorter more enentartianing videos on Reels, Shorts, and TikTok.

Have fun with it: Keep in mind the fact that your audience and viewers will want to get some kind of entertainment value from your videos. Wherever you use video in your marketing campaigns, always keep things fun and friendly. Your customers won’t be interested in boring, lifeless videos. Video is a great opportunity to bring a face to your brand and engage with your audience, so try to have some fun while you do it. As long as you have the right attitude and share the right content, even the most low-budget videos can be a great success.

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Wrapping Up

It doesn’t matter who you are or what business you run, you should use video in your marketing campaigns to boost your results. There’s no need to get intimidated by the thought of lights, camera, action! Video content can be quick and simple, and it can make a big difference to your marketing success across different platforms.

Whether you want to boost your social media, create educational videos for web pages, or just share some fun content, then video is one of the best ways to do it. Videos could be your secret to gaining far more new customers, generating leads, or increasing your engagement.

Follow the steps above, keep in mind the video marketing best practices, and your business will be able to start creating video content that makes a big impact. If you’re not creating video content, then now’s the time to start.

How to Create Marketing Videos – Video Content Marketing Strategy in 2022