Video Marketing

Video marketing has become a major part of content marketing strategies for brands and businesses worldwide now. More people are watching videos online than ever before and this trend is only continuing to rise and take over.

More and more people are starting to favor this form of content marketing as it’s easy to consume and keeps them engaged. A lot of people will find that they can easily watch a video for 10 minutes but not read an article for the same amount of time. Even if the video contains the exact same text as the article but it’s just presented in a visual format.

Creating videos can be a useful technique that usually includes clips with educational content about the most interesting aspects of the topic. Digital content is an unbeatable opportunity for small and medium-sized companies to gain visibility while adapting to what users want.

Nowadays, a large number of companies use or have used video with instructional content as a marketing tool. Social networks such as Facebook or Twitter are becoming a great ally to promote audiovisual content for companies now whereas the only option really just used to be YouTube.

Video Marketing for eCommerce

Why Do Video Marketing?

Video marketing has quickly become one of the most popular forms of online communication, although for some companies it is not a vital part of their marketing strategy, largely due to the misconception that it’s too hard or too expensive, while the companies which can see the amazing power of video marketing develop marketing plans increasingly oriented to audiovisual formats.

Many companies are creating specialized departments for the production of this type of content or hire other companies or freelancers online to do the work. Even if you’re a small business and want to make your own videos in-house there are plenty of software solutions out there that you could try your hand at. In any case, the objective will always be to increase positioning, boost traffic and gain greater brand visibility.

Video marketing traditionally has been measured by the number of views generated (on YouTube), viewing time, number of subscribers, and amount of likes and dislikes.

What many businesses are not taking into account is the conversion rate, the reduced % of cart abandonment’s and the increase of time spent on the site when a specific video is included on a page. This is what really matters when measuring the ROI of your video marketing, not some vanity figures.

Video Marketing Examples

Clinique

Clinique launched three separate 6-second videos called Balloons, Tribe, and Lips.

After the advertising campaign was completed, it was identified that there was an ad recall increase of 69.4% and that product awareness increased by 26.1%.


Brita

Brita tried their hand at influencer marketing and got influencer King Bach to appear in a video with their brand ambassador and basketball superstar Stephen Curry.

This campaign resulted in over 2 million views for the video on YouTube, a 2000% lift in mobile search traffic for Brita, and a 36% increase in brand favorability.
Source

 

Benefits of Video Marketing

Increase Traffic

A video can be promoted through a wide variety of different channels. This means there are a lot of potential audiences that you could tap into. The most common places to promote a video are YouTube and Facebook, but that doesn’t mean you can’t embed the video on your website, promote it on other social media platforms, and drive more traffic to it through paid advertising.


SEO

Videos can improve search engine optimization and potentially result in increased rankings and more traffic. Any SEO professional knows the importance of using video to achieve a good position in Google searches.

Videos can be optimized for both YouTube and Google, which are the largest two search engines in the world. Some search phrases on Google are heavily favored towards videos, so ranking for these terms could lead to some good results.


Brand Presence

Videos that impact and please users make it easier for the user not only to remember the video but also to remember the brand. Do you remember some great commercials from many years ago?

Everyone can remember a video that they have seen at some point in their life that still resonates with them. Some videos have gone on to become extremely memorable and associated with the brand behind it such as Superbowl commercials and music videos for bands.


Boost Reputation

Instructive videos are an excellent tool to improve the reputation and prestige of the brand. The user will see the effort used to generate content in multiple formats and thus you can become a reference point in the sector to which you belong.

Some brands are widely known for putting out resourceful video content that users keep flocking back to it. From an eCommerce perspective, this could mean creating videos such as guides or tutorials for your products.


Build Loyalty

Having a consistent video publication schedule can keep people coming back for more. Are there some YouTube channels or websites that you visit daily? Then you are loyal to that brand and what they are doing.

Creating consistent, quality content can help you achieve brand loyalty and these are the people who are going to promote your brand via social media and word of mouth.


Increase Consumer Confidence

Videos can increase users confidence in a brand, as they make it easier to show the people and personality behind it. That’s why videos can help make users trust you. You can utilize videos and record interviews with your staff or recognized figures in your industry, make product demonstrations, how-to’s, and much more.

But video alone is not a magic solution: you need to be able to create content that transmits and resonates with your audience, and for that, the first thing is to know your target audience.


Cost

Recording and producing a video doesn’t have to be expensive. We have a huge variety of high-quality tools at our fingertips, starting with the most obvious one: our own mobile phones.

Only with a smartphone, a microphone, and an editing program, you can produce a lot of attractive videos for your brand. But if you want to go a step further and hire a professional, you also have many options at an affordable cost too.


How to Get Ideas For Video Content

There are times when we try to respond to our potential customers and text is not enough to convert them into leads. A video can be a good communication tool for achieving a greater connection with your target audience and making those sales.

If a brand has a very broad range of products, they can select the most significant categories and consider the most common questions and requests related to them. Then, if you perform a search on YouTube with the answer to some of these questions you will find different videos with content that directly address these issues.

This is where you need to analyze those videos and determine how you are going to do them better. In addition, reviewing the comments of the related videos may include other suggestions or topics to be discussed that may be of interest.

For example, in regards to a brand of natural sweetener, it would be interesting to show different tutorials of the different uses that can be given to your product, not only as a substitute for sugar in coffee but for its use in the kitchen as well.

Products like this are often considered to be one-dimensional and only serve a single purpose. You probably know your products better than the consumers, so show them how many uses they have.

If you want to get into video marketing you need to decide what type of videos you’re going to create. You don’t necessarily have to type-cast yourself and always produce the same type of content, but you should always have a main objective that the video will cover.

This would generally come down to the following:

  • Does it solve a problem?
  • Does it explain something?
  • Does it show the benefits of something?
  • Does it provide entertainment?

Once you have an objective for the video it’s time to do some more research.
First, type in the keyword of what your video is about into the YouTube search box.

For example: If you have decided that your video will be about solving a problem, enter the phrase into the box such as “how to do bicycle tricks”.

Study the other videos. Make note of what they do right, what they do wrong, and what points they have not covered.

This is how you are going to form the structure of your video in addition to what you already thought of including.

Look at the other videos that have the most views and engagements. As we have already stated, this is not a metric to go by for determining ROI. We can, however, use this as an indicator that the content is at least watchable and the consumer could be receptive to it.

By analyzing this and making videos better than the other ones out there, you very well could have a much greater chance of generating revenue than they did.

Video Marketing Tips

Tips for Video Marketing

Hook Them From The Start


One of the great enemies of video marketing is abandonment. Many users stop watching a video after a few seconds, so you need to hook them from the very beginning. The first 30 seconds are the key to making sure they stay with you so make sure you provide incentives for the user throughout the whole video.


Tell Stories

If you want to win over your users and make them remember your brand, tell them a great story! Nobody wants to see, and much less share, more advertisements.

It turns the consumer into the protagonist. For your content to have an impact on the user, they must feel that it speaks to them. We live in a world full of content and we have become accustomed to quickly filter what does not relate to us, so if you want to win the attention of users, make them feel a central part of the story.


Match Your Brand

Digital marketing in general and video campaigns, in particular, are one more ingredient for your advertising and branding strategy. Create videos that reflect the style, values ​​and unique personality that defines you and your brand. If you have a set color scheme that you use, make sure it is consistent across everything you produce.


Pay Attention to The Audio

We know that videos are often played without audio, especially in some locations such as the Latest News section of Facebook. So you need to create videos that can be understood without the need for audio. But at the same time, you have to make sure that the users who do hear it are left with the feeling that it was worth it.


Subtitles

The sound section is very important, but as we have just seen, you also need users to be able to understand your videos without sound. And this is where the subtitles come into play.

In addition to facilitating the understanding of your content, subtitles can serve to highlight the main messages of a video.

Even when we are listening to something, reading it at the same time reinforces understanding and memorization and reassures that nothing important is overlooked.

Of course, do not be tempted to use the function of automatic subtitling of YouTube or Facebook, since its quality usually leaves a lot to be desired. At a minimum, have a human review the subtitles and correct the errors.


Get Moving

Few things have more potential to bore your audience than a totally static video content (for example, an interview with a fixed camera).

There is no strict rule that dictates how much movement is needed in a video, but as a reference, television series and movies usually change angles or scenes every few seconds. Spectators are used to landscape changes, close-ups, background movement, and other resources to add to the dynamic.


Create Emotional Content

Recourse to emotion is one of the most effective tools to persuade and move the masses. Video is one of the best formats to provoke an emotional response so take advantage of it! Create video content that is based on a certain emotion and try to get that feeling across to the viewer. This can strike a chord with them and lead to good results.


Adapt to The Platform

Think of the different ways in which networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat behave when sharing content. For example, the last hour is on Twitter, on Snapchat the content is ephemeral, while on Facebook you can count on longer times for users to react.

Because of this, different social networks require different methods for promotion. On Twitter, you could get away with posting the same thing every few hours as it would be lost in your followers feed and perhaps not seen the first time. On other networks where the feed is chronological, you only need to post the content once, but at the right time.


Pay Attention to SEO

In particular, if your video campaigns include YouTube it is crucial to have good optimization to increase the number of views. The views can come not only from YouTube itself but from Google search results as well. Always title your video with your target keyword and be sure to mention it in the video as well.

Social Media Video Marketing

Once your videos have been created it’s time to actually market them. This is where social media comes in. We would also strongly recommend that you embed your videos onto your blog as well, even transcribe them to create a blog post surrounding it to really give it a boost. Here are some platforms you could utilize to promote your videos depending on your niche:


YouTube

Still the King and obviously the original. YouTube is an absolute juggernaut when it comes to video and is undoubtedly the platform to start with. If you create a video, make sure you upload it to YouTube because you never know if it will take off and get you a lot of views and exposure.


Facebook

Facebook is one of the most important video networks of today, with no less than 100 million hours of views per day. It has risen quickly as it already had an existing user-base to draw on, but this platform is incredibly effective for video marketing.


Instagram

Instagram has more than 1 Billion million active users per month and its audience is mainly female and under 40 years old. It launched its video function in June 2013 and one of its main features is its brevity: initially, videos were limited to 15 seconds, although now they can be expanded to 60. Don't forget to include awesome Instagram captions on your posts and hashtag them for more traffic.


Twitter

This network brings interesting news in the video marketing sector thanks to GIFs and the integration with Periscope. Videos can be promoted on Twitter and combined with a few good hashtags could get you a lot of views.


Snapchat

The ghost network has over 350 million active monthly users and has a particularly young audience. Each day more than one billion snaps are created on this network. The videos on this network last for seconds so if you really want to win your audience, be brief! The majority of its users fit into the 18-24 year old demographic.


Vimeo

Often forgotten but not to be neglected, Vimeo is a very popular video platform that you can upload to and promote your brand. Quite a few brands use Vimeo, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to tap into their audience as well.

Twitch

Live streaming is growing fast and Twitch is the place to do it. Your streams can be saved to the platform after they are completed so users can continue to watch them long after recording has finished.

The work does not end when the user has just watched the video. On the contrary, watching your video can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between you and your audience.

There are many options to keep interacting with the user: you can do retargeting campaigns among people who have seen your videos, show them a related video, take them to a landing page or even encourage them to visit your store.

Remember that no strategy is complete without a good measurement system. Think about the most relevant metrics of your videos, the ones that really contribute to the objectives, and measure them over time.

With the new attribution tools, you will be able to see the impact of your content for video throughout the conversion funnel and thus know what is really working to make videos better and better.

In short, your video should be part of the journey for the consumer planned step by step. After watching your video, what would your ideal client want to do and how can you satisfy that desire?