Videos are one of the most preferred media worldwide. Online users spend an increasing amount of time watching them. For businesses, it is the opportunity to develop their video marketing strategy.
Getting started with video campaigns requires preparation. We will guide you in crafting a plan & handling the video production tasks in this article.
What is a Video Marketing Strategy?
A video marketing strategy is a process of building video content that will reach the business objectives. It goes through several steps that we will detail below.
Brands running video marketing campaigns are mostly medium & big-size enterprises. Video production has a high cost in terms of time & finance. Small companies rarely can afford it.
Solid video marketing strategies make a significant difference in brand awareness. They work best by running along with parallel campaigns (for example, conversion ads). Of course, it depends on the business target you must achieve.
Define Your Video Purpose
There are millions of ways to produce a video. To narrow this number down, brands must be clear about their business objectives. Failing at this essential step leads to wasted time, effort, and money.
What is the purpose of the video(s)? They can serve to reach the following goals:
- brand awareness
- website traffic
- phone calls
- signing up
- online conversions
Make sure to brainstorm & get a precise end in mind. The whole video marketing strategy will depend on this factor.
To help you out, check what the competition is doing. If they also publish videos, understand the reason why. Do they want to inspire their audience? Or let them know about a new variation of their product? Based on this information, you will build your plan.
Know Your Video Audience
Companies build different videos depending on their ideal customer persona. Before starting any production work, they must clarify this.
In case a video must target several audiences, the best practice is to create separate videos for each. Like ad campaigns, segmentation is extremely powerful when it comes to video impact.
Businesses must identify who their audience is. It delimits the foundations of creative production & maximizes its performance.
Calculate Your Video Budget
Let’s face it: a video marketing strategy is expensive, especially in the video production phase.
Before unlocking a budget to make it true, companies must decide if it makes sense to invest in the first place. Do they expect any Return On Investment (ROI) from this video?
There is no point in creating a video just for the sake of creating a video. It must have a purpose (see the first point of this article) that is financially viable.
In most cases, creating a unique video is not enough to run an impactful campaign. We need several videos. We need a decent budget. It is better to anticipate than realize when half-production is done that the video marketing strategy is not affordable.
Produce Your Video
Make sure to carefully review the previous steps before launching this one.
If any marketer can handle alone the preparation phase, video production requires professionals & the right equipment. You can consider working with experienced video producers. You can also use a high-quality online video maker tool offering a huge range of custom templates and audio sources.
Here is a list of the most important phases of video production:
- ideation
- brief
- art direction
- storyboard
- animatic & design
- voice & sound
- recording
- post-production & editing
Businesses creating multiple videos for the same campaign must keep consistency. Each video should follow the same concept.
Integrate a Call To Action (CTA) into your video. People willing to engage should find a convenient way to do so.
Choose Your Video Publication Channels
When the brand finalizes the videos, the next step is to publish them online.
Following the video marketing strategy, the choice of platforms should be intuitive. Overall, there are 3 main channels to upload a video across the internet:
- on a website
- via emailing
- on social media
Websites are the best digital assets of businesses because, unlike social channels, they completely own them. Brands can do whatever they want on their web pages. By keeping their art direction, they should embed their videos from YouTube & make them look native.
Emails are an excellent way to reach out to audiences. As their design strongly weighs on the reader’s engagement, we recommend including appealing videos to maximize conversions.
Social media platforms benefit from an important natural reach. Most people consume video content on social channels, YouTube being the top one worldwide. Be careful though, as you do not want to publish a link to the YouTube video on your Facebook page. To ensure a decent layout look, Facebook prefers its users to directly upload the video on the platform.
Implement Video SEO
We will see in the next section how to promote your videos by running ads. For now, let’s discuss how it can be done organically. Without paying a dime, marketers have the possibility to boost the visibility of their videos thanks to some optimizations.
The acronym “SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of making sure that the content (which can be a web page, or here in our case a video) can be found on the internet via the algorithms.
YouTube is the second most-used search engine in the world after Google. This social channel hosts billions of video content. By implementing some SEO, brands can boost their videos’ reach.
There are several factors to consider when optimizing videos on YouTube. The most important ones are:
- keywords
- video title
- video thumbnail
- video subtitles & captions
- description
- tags
Take time polishing all those items as they significantly help rank your videos higher. We recommend using free tools like the Chrome extension of vidIQ to ease this task. You can also work with video SEO (vSEO) professionals to maximize your organic performance.
Promote Your Video with Ads
Organic optimizations should be at the top of the to-do list to promote videos. Unfortunately, it takes some time to get significant results.
Running ads is the perfect way to get noticed quickly. Of course, it comes at a cost. Marketers must have a media spending budget to get started.
Go to YouTube ads, which is another free service from Google. You need a Google account to access this tool.
For more information, please read our blog section. We published a complete guideline for running Google ads, including video ads. It will help you understand the logic.
Like we said in a previous section, make sure that it makes sense to invest in ads before launching your promotional video campaign. Your expected ROI should be at least x2.1 to look sustainable.
Contact our Prodima experts if you need to promote your YouTube channel.
Follow Up on Your Video Performance
Once the video is published on the internet, optimized for good organic performance, and supported by ads, brands must follow how well they are doing.
In the YouTube Studio, have a look at the Analytics tab. It is the right place to follow up on the most important video metrics like:
- view count
- engagement rate
- video shares
- comments
- click-through rate
- percentage watched
Based on this precious data, marketers can adjust their live videos or change their strategy for future ones. Performance measurement is as important as video production itself.
Wrap-Up on Video Marketing Strategy
A video marketing strategy is much more than recording a movie to publish it on the internet. There is a lot of preparation involved. The post-publishing phase is also extremely important to boost the video’s reach & measure its performance as well.
YouTube is the channel to go to. However, there are different video options available based on your specific needs. For more information, don’t hesitate to contact us & get a free consultation!
