Video killed the radio star. The Buggles even sang about it back in 1979. And fifty-odd years later, we live in an audiovisual era where media platforms like YouTube and TikTok have become deeply entrenched in young people’s psyche. Having and nurturing a video channel is simply a must-have if you want to be noticed these days.
This is true for so-called ‘influencers’ and brand marketers. One could argue that these two personas are related. In both cases, the goal is to make a product stand out. And according to video marketing statistics,it works.
Why is a video marketing strategy important, you might wonder? Well, nothing says ‘buy me’ better than a well put together video.
Video Marketing: Why Do You Need It?
Intro
Advertising has been around for as long as there has been stuff to sell, which is to say, always. Egyptians used papyrus to create what today we’d call sales brochures. In ancient China, candy sellers would play bamboo flutes to herald their arrival to children, a strategy akin to the child-friendly chimes played by ice-cream vans today.
But things are slightly more complex in the world of 2020. Civilization has certainly moved on, and present day’s video marketing has taken a prominent (some would say, crucial) role in today’s advertising business.
Still, the adage an image is worth a thousand words rings true today.
Video is a powerful marketing tool for several reasons. It’s quick, immediate, engaging, and entertaining. It’s very accessible, too. Modern smartphones are powerful enough to render video in high quality. The younger generations are practically born into a world of video consumption.
Here are five compelling reasons why your business needs a video marketing strategy:
Education and information – Video is a great educational and informational tool. Nowadays, potential customers are likely to look for video material before making any purchase to see and feel the product and learn about it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Your brand’s position in a search engine’s algorithm can significantly influence your sales. Video footage with the right keywords and a proper meta description will enhance your brand’s prospects of conversion.
Relevance – This is where the storytelling aspect comes into play. Creating a unique and consistent look and feel for your brand’s strategy will make it memorable and stay relevant in your customers’ minds.
Enhanced conversions – Statistics say that up to 90% of customers will make a purchasing decision only after watching a video of the product in question. This only highlights the crucial importance of a dedicated video marketing strategy again.
Video Marketing Strategy
There was a time when video production was a centralized, expensive, and time-consuming affair. Specialized companies would employ videographers wielding bulky equipment to shoot footage, which would need to be edited, formatted, etc. Image-capturing equipment (both static and dynamic) is now relatively cheap.
Even entry-level mobile phones can capture usable footage. Of course, this probably wouldn’t do for big-time advertising campaigns, but the process of capturing and processing video footage is now far simpler. Footage can be captured and processed in-situ with the aid of a laptop, for example.
Technology certainly facilitates and supports the creation of a video marketing strategy.
But shooting the footage is the outcome. Before getting behind the camera come many hours of planning and development of the strategy to follow.
A few figures to highlight the importance of deploying a video marketing strategy: Back in 2017, for example, Hubspot reported that almost half of marketers would invest in the creation of video material for YouTube and Facebook over the next 12 months. And according to another report from Hubspot, more than half of consumers would prefer to see more video content from their favorite brands.
These are just two facts that provide more than enough motivation for brands to create more – and more accessible – video for their products, but here are some more statistics that hammer home the point.
Video Marketing Goals and Targets
Marketing and selling a product is a long and complex process that involves countless hours of research and hard work. Because of this, marketers want to see payoffs to their efforts, and watching that sales bar inch upwards on the chart is a marketer’s preferred sight.
Goals and targets for a marketing department are well defined:
Attract video views (remember, there are more than 5bn videos watched on YouTube every single day. More views = wider reach.
Inspire customer engagement and loyalty – You want to foster interactivity with your brand. Get potential customers to engage with your product, to create a vibrant community around it. And once you’ve established a solid base, you want to induce loyalty, using reward programs, for example, so customers keep coming back to your brand.
Target the right audience – Market segmentation is an obvious but crucial consideration. Your product will appeal to a particular demographic, so make sure that your video’s message addresses the right audience. Anti-aging cremes are unlikely to attract many views from younger demographics, for example, and the reverse is true if you’re, say, advertising camping gear.
Increase sales – There’s no sugar-coating this one. The ultimate goal of a marketing video is to sell something. Have a look at Infographicworld Stats to see how does video marketing increases revenue.
The video marketing funnel infographic perfectly represents the marketer’s journey:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
Video for Your Business
Defining Your Audience
The right product for the right client. This is a motto that many marketers swear by. Knowing who your audience is, understand it, and how to reach it is a crucial skill. You need to be aware of what interests them, and why, and be able to communicate in a language they will understand.
Ideally, it would help if you created a persona for your ‘ideal’ customer. Defining ‘ideal’ is subjective, but a good rule of thumb is to consider ‘ideal’ a customer who would be the best fit for your product. Customer needs and requirements change with age, socioeconomic status, culture, and many other factors that you need to consider when creating video marketing campaigns.
The bottom line is that the deeper you understand your audience, the easier it will be for your marketing video maker to craft material relevant to the intended customer.
Types of Marketing Videos (Depend on Audience and Business Goals)
Three words: Personalized video marketing. The type of marketing videos you create correlates to the persona you’re targeting. A traveling video that features attractive people, vibrant nightlife, and suggests good entertainment value will likely appeal to the younger population but would be overlooked by people in their 50s and beyond, for instance.
But if you feature cruises, for instance, with beautiful city landscapes, relaxed restaurants by the sea, and a slower pace of life, mature and older generations might be interested. It’s all about personalization and customization.
Topics to Cover
Video marketing evolves with time and cultural shifts. In other words, what worked a year or two ago, might not necessarily work today. And vice versa, of course.
Here are some of the most prominent video marketing trends of 2020:
‘Shoppable’ videos
You’ve probably seen these on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Videos that feature links to products within the video’s environment.
Interactive 360 technology
As technology evolves, so do the possibilities. We’re on the threshold of achieving fully immersive video technology through Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR).
Searchable videos
There are billions of videos out there, so marketers face a mammoth task in making their content easy to find.
Tech giant Google recently announced plans to use Artificial Intelligence routines to identify video segments related to searches, so relevant video material might be easier to find soon.
Video Marketing: Approach
Video Marketing Tips
Col. Hannibal Smith from the A-Team used to love when a plan came together. Video production is a combination of painstakingly produced elements that create a single, coherent whole: Sound, images, lighting, etc., need to be combined into a product that is the end result of a lot of work.
Develux has in-house expertise that can help you create the right campaign for your products.
Here are six video marketing tips that might just put you on the right track:
- Tell a story through your video – Storytelling is something that can be applied to many aspects of life outside books. Video marketing is certainly one of these aspects. Engage your potential customers through carefully constructed tales. Focus on stories, not sales.
- Create a powerful and gripping beginning – The first few seconds of the video are crucial to grabbing your audience’s attention. Your story has to come alive quickly, or people will disengage.
- Display your brand’s personality – Every brand is, or should be, unique. Ensure your marketing video tells who you are, and how you’re different from your competitors.
- Use Facebook wisely – Facebook has as many supporters as it has detractors, but the platform’s sheer reach offers enormous potential for growth, as long as you use it wisely. This means targeting relevant audiences through age, gender, location, interests, language, and other factors.
- Craft videos that are engaging with and without sound – You might think that this is a throwback to the silent movie era (it is 2020, after all), but it recently emerged that as much as 85% of video content in Facebook is viewed without sound.
- Create a compelling video that communicates a compelling story through visuals alone. Don’t rely on sound to tell that story.
- Always include a call to action – After watching your video, you want to direct your potential customers to your website, or whatever other outlet you use to sell and distribute your products.
Conclusion
Video marketing is as much as a business tool as it is an art, and there’s no better art than storytelling. By creating memorable advertising campaigns, your audience will remember your products long after the campaign is finished. Think back about your childhood. Don’t you remember your favorite toys, and how they were advertised? Was there a story around them?
If you’re old to remember Hasbro’s G.I. Joe toy soldiers from the 1960s, for example, you’ll remember how they were pitted against the Cobra faction, thus creating an engaging universe. And the same concept applies to products today, because storytelling is universal, and as the old adage goes, stories -good stories – sell.
