5 Best Practises While Building a Video Marketing Strategy
With the manifold increase in social media users, brands have to constantly adapt to newer means to engage the audience every now and then. It is a proven fact that brands that snooze, lose out on the precious hours through the day which their users spend casually browsing through various social network feeds for latest topical updates, global trends or even just for entertainment.
Gone are the days when brands used to publish posts with two or three lines of content along with images on their social media handles to gain the attention of their target audience. Nowadays, this content creation format is considered obsolete and uninteresting.
The new-age winner is ‘video streaming’ and engaging in ‘live conversations’ with followers across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. The importance of sharing video has become paramount for brands, as consumers demand video content and absorb the information with much enthusiasm. Video has single-handedly become the number-one way to connect with audiences, viewers, and followers.
According to statistics, video as a format for storytelling and advertising is being explored by 81% of brands to keep their followers engaged. The consumption of video streaming on mobile devices has increased by 100% year-on-year. It is also interesting to know that users view over ‘1 billion’ hours of video each day on YouTube alone. Considering these facts and figures, content marketers must immediately evaluate their strategy and make it video-centric, if they haven’t already.
A single engaging video can help boost your brand image, provide information about your product or service, increase engagement and reach out to more audiences. Hence, having a well-planned video marketing strategy in place is beneficial for most marketers. So, what are the pillars of a strong video marketing strategy? Let us find out some of the best practices assimilated by InVideo to equip you in becoming better video marketers.
Determine the objective of creating the video
Each video message must be crafted to establish the goal it has in mind. The marketing manager must have clarity on ‘why’ the particular video is being shot. Is it to increase brand awareness or to launch a particular product which the company is offering? Accordingly, videos can be conceptualized to generate brand awareness, showcase a product or service, share the management’s thought leadership or even be event-specific.
Define your target audience
Now that you exactly know the purpose of your video creation, the next step is to define the target audience. It is apparent that a product or service-specific video would be targeted towards the end consumers while a brand awareness video is targeted not only towards all the current stakeholders of your organization, but also the prospective ones. To encourage and delight your existing customer base, an appreciation video can be sent across so that your customers feel valued and the chances of repeat purchase are higher.
Set a budget for your video
Without strategizing a proper budget for your video, you are not likely to get the desired results. Plan on whether you want to have the video produced in-house by using an easy video maker tool or outsource the production to an agency. Spending too much money on video production doesn’t necessarily guarantee overnight success. On the other hand, having a lousy video commercial within tight budgets is just a put-off for the brand. Be careful to strike the right balance. Also, keep the objective of the campaign in mind while setting a budget. If your current objective is to get over a million followers interested in your product, then a good-quality video that captivates the minds of viewers may cost you heavily. Some brands set aside budgets to partner with influencers for their videos, as two plus two only increases viewership and the chances of lead generation are higher.
Use the appropriate platform to publish videos
Depending on the channels your audiences are most active on, you must optimize your videos to maximize engagement and reach. If you are choosing Facebook as your platform, keep the videos catchy, add a bit of surprise element to it, and keep the length of the video between 2 minutes to 6 minutes max.
For Twitter, the ideal length of the video should be about 140 seconds. Also, it is more beneficial to upload videos directly on Twitter and Facebook, instead of sharing a link from your brand’s YouTube page. Doing this increases the chances of retweets by 2.8 times and makes the post easily shareable on Facebook. While using your Instagram handle to upload videos, the message should be concise and be able to deliver the content within a short span of 3 seconds to 60 seconds.
Measure the campaign’s performance
Once the videos are live and your audiences have consumed the information, it is time to analyze and track the performance of the video campaign. There are various parameters that help you decide on how well the video was received by your audiences. The video engagement rate reveals how much time users spend on viewing your videos. It helps you understand whether the video was good enough to be streamed throughout or was it closed mid-way.
The view count is another variable that helps you gauge how the video is performing on different platforms. For example, the same video message on YouTube might have more views compared to that on Facebook. You can even decipher how often your videos are being shared across social media platforms and therefore conclude whether the videos are interesting to the target audience or not.
Conclusion:
Now that you have a few tips at hand for making video marketing work in your brand’s favour, we are sure you must be excited to get started with your very own video strategies. There is no better way to learn than actually publishing your campaigns and trying out different methods to constantly deliver breakthrough video content, based on the analytical feedback and reaction of your viewers.
