Digital marketing is designed to draw attention and pique the interest of a target audience. Online business and ecommerce websites utilize a wide range of marketing tools in order to boost website traffic, brand awareness, as well as online visibility.
The use of video content has been increasingly popular among ecommerce businesses today. Many content marketers consider video as a quick and easy way to grab the attention of millions of users online. However, utilizing video as part of a marketing campaign is not as easy as one may think. While it’s easy to just post a video on social media platforms, designing and optimizing it to reach your marketing goals require more time, effort, and resources.
Taking this into consideration, here are five easy steps that can help you start a quality video marketing campaign for your ecommerce business.
Step 1: Determine your marketing goals and objectives
In order to create a good video marketing campaign, it is important to identify what your goals and objectives for this campaign are exactly. Is it to increase your brand’s online presence and visibility? Are you focused on boosting brand awareness and reaching different markets and audiences?
Generally, marketing strategy goals fall under three primary categories. Depending on the purpose of your video marketing campaign, it may fall under the awareness, consideration, or action category. The process of your video content creation should align with your marketing goals and emphasize achieving these objectives. To give you a better idea, here’s a quick overview of the role of video content in the three marketing goal categories:
Awareness
The awareness marketing objective focuses on reaching new audiences and effectively delivering a message, idea, or emotion in order to create a lasting impression or relationship. Startups or small businesses can use videos or share videos that allow them to easily reach and connect with their target audience. At the same time, short explainer videos are also effective in introducing a product, service, or brand to someone who just happened to pass by your social media profile or website.
Consideration
Using online videos for the consideration objective is typically designed to encourage those who already know about the product or service that you are offering. Promotional videos highlighting the newest features of your product or the advantages of acquiring your service can help potential customers decide. At the same time, adding customer testimonials and reviews can help strengthen your case of how good your product is and push your targeted audience to further consider buying from you.
Action
While online video content is generally considered most effective in the awareness and consideration marketing stages, digital marketers have pushed video as a tool to directly encourage sales. Aside from using video ads, marketers add a call to action tag (CTA) to direct a viewer to directly purchase a product. Aside from that, social media platforms such as Instagram included ecommerce features that allow users to place a button within their social video that corresponds to a specific action – whether it’s to buy a product, sign up to a website, or any other landing page.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
Source: Unsplash
To ensure that you are creating video content effectively for your marketing campaign, the next step is to identify your target audience and determine your buyer’s personas. Social media sites generally include user-generated video content for their platforms. This means that a user is more likely to see videos that are similar to or related to their interests and online activity. Those who like to watch a bunch of NBA highlights would most likely get more and more basketball highlights and sports-related videos suggested on their social media feed.
To make sure you are reaching your target audience, it’s important to design your videos depending on your targeted audience’s demographics. Create relatable and valuable content depending on specific audiences and simply repurpose the same content for other markets.
Step 3: Choose a suitable digital channel or online platform
In line with determining your target audience, a good video marketing campaign also relies on the digital channel or online platform it’s posted. Generally, video marketing campaigns are tied with popular social media sites such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. They provide the fastest and easiest way to post and share videos to millions of its users online.
However, there are also factors to consider when it comes to choosing the best social media platform for video marketing. Content marketers need to look into the platform’s demographics, their target audience, and the type of video content they are producing. Here’s a quick overview of the different video hosting platforms popular among content marketers:
YouTube
YouTube is recognized as the largest and also one of the most popular video sharing and hosting platforms today. It is home to a wide array of video content from short explainer videos, hour-long documentaries, and even 60-second snackable content through the introduction of YouTube shorts. YouTube works particularly well for marketing as it utilizes search engine and keyword research to find relevant and valuable content on its platform. Recent data shows that the majority of its average daily users belong to the 18 to 29 years age group.
TikTok
TikTok is a relatively new social media site that is primarily used by the younger generation. According to the latest data, most of the app’s users are between 10 to 29 years old. Unlike YouTube, TikTok is focused on short-form or snackable video content that is easy to produce and quick to consume.
Aside from social media sites, there are other platforms that can utilize video content as part of their marketing campaign. Email marketing campaigns with video provide high click-through and conversion rates. Furthermore, ecommerce websites embedded with different types of video content also improve web traffic as well as improve user interface and user experience.
Step 4: Optimize for search engine
Source: Pexels
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most utilized marketing strategies in the digital marketing sphere. So for your online videos to increase awareness and boost your online presence, it’s important to optimize your content to top search engine result pages (SERPs). There’s a ton of ways to make your videos more visible for search engine analytics. This includes:
- Including reliable sources and links in the video’s description
- Adding primary and relevant keywords to your video title and description.
- Allowing close captions and embedding video transcripts.
- Adding timestamps for better usability.
Step 5: Measure and gauge video marketing success
Your video marketing campaign does not end the moment you post or publish your video ads or end a live video. To find out if your marketing efforts are worth it and effective, it’s crucial to gauge, measure, and analyze its performance through time.
Its success all depends on your established marketing goals and objectives. Is there an increase in your profile’s followers and subscribers? How many shares, comments, and reactions did your explainer video get? Is there a significant increase in conversion rates from video ads posted on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook? Are your videos ranking at the top of search engine results pages?
Find out which aspects of your video marketing campaign are contributing to your overall digital marketing efforts and strive to modify and improve the parts that you are lacking.
Want to know more about effective marketing strategies? Sidekicks is an on-demand virtual company and we’re eager to help visionaries and entrepreneurs like you. Get a free ebook and learn more about how we can help you by signing up for our newsletter. We also offer a free 30-minute consultation if you prefer something more personal.
