5 Pillars of Successful Video Marketing

If you’re a marketer, you will find a lot of buzz around video advertising.

Video marketing is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and your business. Many businesses know this strategy is best to highlight them in the market so convincing them that their marketing could greatly benefit from some video campaigns is easy.

Numbers amazed them the most:

  1. Over 85% of USA internet users scan online video content.
  2. Nielsen found that with a wifi connection, 64% of users stream online videos. (17% increase in a year)
  3. 27% of 17-49 years olds don’t aver television videos.

Companies of all shapes and sizes are finding ways to integrate video into their overall branding, marketing, and sales programs because it works!

But, wait…

Today’s audience is savvier and more difficult than ever to make up their mind. They may not think you’re cute or funny with a typical 30 seconds commercial you hoped would surely get the word out about your product or service.

Brands are already spending on TV commercials every year, including copywriters to draft brilliant scripts, actors to appear on-screen, and directors to transform the idea into reality in the viewer’s mind. Sometimes, this spending and hard work pay off, but other times, the viewers are not that much affected.

statista2021

Source – Statista 2021


But to be honest, small businesses don’t try their luck spending a massive amount of money on TV video commercials. They can have an effective explainer video to reach their target audience within a surprisingly reasonable budget. The new digital age of marketing is all about storytelling – video is perfect for this.

Sharing your story on the camera allows customers to quickly connect with your message and get a more in-depth perspective of your service or product.

“When you give your potential shoppers a behind-the-scenes look, you show them the high integrity at which you run your business. And, the best part of this, you can compose something cute, funny, dramatic, musical, or, whatsoever, you wish to portray yourself as long as it is authentic.” – Rich Willmott, Squawk Voices Agency, London

Of course, videos demand planning and practice, but everything worth creating does!

Your Marketing Objectives and Targeted Reach?

These criteria are usually applied to marketing activity, but particularly for videos. Below are some questions whose answers will determine the kind of video you want to create.

  • Does your business target kids and their parents (Maybe you’re a tuition agency)?
  • Are you looking to educate parents on how to teach their children during a pandemic?

If so, an animated how-to video might be the best approach.

Whatever the intentions are, make sure you think about them first because a video without any goal in mind makes it much harder to measure return on investment.

Brand Identity

A clear vision and marketing strategy wouldn’t allow you to presume your target audience. It will evolve effortlessly over their YouTube or Facebook videos gallery if you just go on creating and publishing more videos.

When people watch a video, they relate to a personal connection, and to make the most out of this (before your competitor captures them), you need to bond deeply with those notable individuals who want to learn more about your products.

Align your brand identity with a custom character and a unique voice. Every successful animated video has one. They connect a personal human sense to your brand and draw emotions attached to your products.

Potter Puppet Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Noise

Viral animated videos have introduced voice broadcasts to strengthen communication with people and be very close to your message.

Ask others; your employees, family members, partners, and even customers. They can have a unique perspective on your business and would probably be glad to give input.

You’ve Got a Story to Tell

While you don’t have to shoot “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” the necessity at the moment is to have some narrative arc to your video.

  • What is the plot of your story?
  • And its structure?

Your creative canvas can go as simple as you want or as complex as you can imagine. But all impactful stories have a beginning, a middle, and at last, a resolution.

And I stubbornly think you wouldn’t miss a conflict here.

As they say, a story blunder with conflict is not much of a story.

On top of that, it should be a no-brainer; think of a conflict according to the targeted audience’s point-of-view, making it easier for them to relate.

Mix some musical sense. The sound complements your images and makes your video more engaging.

Hmm, CTAs for Driving Business…

What do you want viewers to do? What’s your call-to-action plan? Your viewers may find it excellent, but what’s next? You need to plug some marketing mix at the end of the video and maybe in the text surrounding it.  

  • Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter?
  • Do you want them to share it socially?

Tell them.

Spend 4x Time to Promote Your Work

You’re not done with this. It’s just a derivation.

The next step is to optimize and promote it.

There are too many technicalities (they call it Video SEO) to optimize your video to go into detail in a single post. This is to only highlight your video or suggest to your viewers the videos on the top. But sometimes it becomes difficult to get it indexed and rank on the Google SERP for relevant search queries (you may call them the keywords, the SEO tone).

It takes a lot more than anchoring up a thumbnail image, transcript text, social media signals, and even video sitemaps and schema mark-up; let’s scan the essential points to showcase your video on the top:

A) The selection of video hosting platforms shout-out matters. Entirely depends upon your goal!

  • Do you want to rank in Google for specific search terms?
  • Do you want to increase brand awareness? Or
  • Traffic gain is your key area of focus…

Some platforms automatically add Schema mark-up, while at other platforms, you’ll need to add the code your own.

B) Video’s Meta Information

Just like you pay attention to optimizing a web page or blog post, similarly, you need to craft an engaging video Meta title and description. You will naturally include your targeted keywords in them.

C) Thumbnail image should be engaging, without saying.

D) Include video transcript. You can see the inspiration from MOZ’s Whiteboard Friday videos.

E) The context of the page should match the intent and relevance of the video.

If the landing page is too generic and doesn’t relate well with the video, then the chances of its ranking in Google are pretty low.

F) If possible, invest in paid video advertising to leverage the maximum output.

Creators relying only on YouTube and Facebook only can’t get their audience hooked. IGTV, Watch Party, Vine, Snapchat, Periscope, etc – your promotion activities should follow a multi-dimensional route.

Let’s take a look at three ways to use videos you might not have considered.

1. A Handshake to Your Newsletter Subscribers

What better way to make people feel welcome into your community than addressing them face to face?

You can upload the video to your website or Vimeo, or YouTube. Or there’s a video hosting business called Wistia that makes the viewing process easier and provides all the data you need to see who is watching and for how long.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s on the list!

2. Promoting Products

Instead of that plain ol’ text Amazon Affiliate link, why don’t you offer a quick book review first?

If you have sponsors on your blog, what about a video shout-out mentioning why they’re awesome? Videos are terrific tools to promote product giveaways on your site as well since the audience gets to see with the prize in hand. Ooh, exciting!

3. Make-Overs

 If your business offers tangible products, consider showing a before and after. If it’s service-based, ask a willing client to let you walk through the process with them. Even if your business doesn’t involve face-to-face interactions (like with copywriters or graphic designers, for example), you can do an interview and use services like Screen Flow to walk through a before and after-sales page.

All the web traffic in the world means absolutely nothing without conversion. A conversion refers to the number of people who turn into an opportunity for a sale from any page on your site. You want your traffic to be active, not passive. If your bounce rates are high and your conversion rates are low, your site is not working for you. It means people are leaving your site without leaving their names.

Video does a few things to help boost conversion rates; the first is that it keeps people on your site for longer. Trends show that an increase in time-on-page/on-site rates can be directly related to higher conversion rates, and video marketing is a great way to engage an online audience for longer on your site.

Summing It Up

People (especially millennials) are smarter than ever today but way more passionate about technology and products they connect with. When you make a trustworthy connection, you make a new buyer. So think about the stories your company wants to tell.

For marketing benefits and empowering your communication tone, you’re ready to go with video stories but remember the style – entertain + inform them.

Contributed by Shyam Bhardwaj

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