Video marketing is one of the most popular and successful digital marketing strategies. In 2022, reports showed that nearly 93% of web users globally watch online videos weekly, and the average daily digital video consumption is around 100 minutes. That is a 50% increase compared to video consumption records in 2019.
In addition, 86% of web users say they want brands to produce more video content, primarily educational videos. Considering this, the potential of video content as a marketing tool for ecommerce businesses is at an all-time high.
However, video marketing campaigns are more complex and challenging to plan and implement. Given its popularity, many online businesses also utilize videos as part of their marketing strategies. This makes it difficult for startups to quickly gain traction, grow an audience, and establish a loyal viewer base for their video marketing efforts.
To help guide you through the process of starting a video marketing campaign, here’s a quick overview and some tips to make your video and marketing tactics successful.
Why Is Video Marketing Essential?
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Before we dive into the steps of making a video marketing plan and creating video content, let’s first look at the advantages of using videos for digital marketing.
Increase brand awareness
One of the reasons why digital marketers use video marketing in their strategies is because it is one of the most effective ways to rack up an audience and increase brand awareness.
A viral social video can get millions of views and be shared on multiple online and digital platforms, even with people who are not particularly interested in your product or niche. Thus, video content has the potential to significantly increase brand awareness by extending your reach even to demographics outside of your target audience.
Improve search engine ranking
Video is a marketing tool that can also be used to improve your search engine performance. While you can use videos primarily as a marketing tool, adding videos to your website’s content helps boost its search engine rankings, making your website more visible to users online.
Effectively connect with your audience
There is an increasing demand for video content online. But why is it that people love to watch videos? Digital marketers believe that videos provide a more entertaining and engaging way to connect with an audience. Thus, it makes it easier for them not only to consume but as well as retain their messages.
Utilizing video content as a marketing tool is an effective way to deliver a message, whether it’s to encourage sales, promote a product, or establish yourself as a reliable and trustworthy brand for your audience to connect and follow.
How To Make A Video Marketing Plan
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When it comes to video marketing, digital marketers don’t immediately jump into creating video content. Instead, it starts with a comprehensive plan. With that, here are the steps in making a video marketing plan.
Step 1: Identify your marketing goals and objectives
It is important to list specific goals and objectives at the start of any marketing campaign. In your video marketing plan, it should provide the answer to the question “What do you want to accomplish?”. For startups, it is best to identify a few goals or smaller objectives so that the list doesn’t become too overwhelming.
Some of the common goals and objectives of video marketing campaigns include:
- Boosting online presence and visibility
- Building demand
- Educating and entertaining audiences
- Promoting and advertising the brand or product
- Introducing a new product or service
- Increase website traffic
Step 2: Find and determine your target audience
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Knowing your audience is essential when it comes to creating content. It is important that you understand what they like, dislike, and prefer in the types of content they regularly consume. This will help guide you on how you should plan, design, and even publish your video content online.
You can identify your target audience based on different factors. Digital marketers use characteristics such as age, gender, race, location, education attainment, and the like to identify specific target groups.
However, you can also look into people’s watch habits and behavior, the type and styles of content they like, or even the kind of content creators and personalities they follow. Finding and identifying similarities and patterns can help you pinpoint the best audience for your content.
Step 3: Choose the right type of video content
Once you’ve identified your targeted audience, the next step is to choose the right type of video content. The type of video you would use on your campaign should depend on two things to be effective – your marketing goals and the preference of your target audience.
Basically, your marketing objectives decide what the content of your video should be while your target audience guides you on how it should be delivered.
If you want to increase brand awareness with the younger generation as your target audience, the suitable video type would be short-form video content that is extremely popular on social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook.
Step 4: Set a video marketing budget
Ecommerce startups don’t need to invest so much when creating content. Considering that even mobile phones are capable of shooting high-resolution video, it’s possible for marketers to high-quality video with a minimal budget.
However, it is still important to establish a video marketing budget as part of your plan. Not only will this keep you from spending too much, but it can also be used as a metric for how effective and cost-efficient your video campaigns are.
Step 5: Create, publish, and promote your videos
Once you’ve successfully set up a plan for your video marketing strategy, all that is left to do is to actually start creating content and publish them online.
Keep in mind that your content should go back to your marketing goals and objectives and cater to the preferences of your target audience. The same concept applies when it comes to choosing the marketing platforms where you publish and promote your videos.
Tips When Creating Video Content For Marketing
Optimize your videos for search engines
Optimizing your video content for search engines provides it with better performance and, thus, better online visibility. To do so, it is important that you understand how to create optimized video content. Elements such as the title, video description, thumbnail, and meta tags can help in video search engine optimization.
Atomize and repurpose your content for different social media platforms
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Social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are some of the most popular places for people to watch online videos. However, these platforms have different formats when it comes to video content. YouTube is known for long-form video content while TikTok features short-form or snackable videos. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are filled with social videos of varying shapes and sizes.
To maximize the use of your video content, consider atomizing and repurposing them for different social media platforms. You can publish your long-form video on YouTube while also creating snippets, highlights, or clips that can be posted as TikTok or Facebook Shorts. With atomization, you get better value as each video format serves the same purpose of marketing your brand, product, or service to a wider audience.
Add a call to action
Call-to-actions (CTAs) are designed to encourage and lead audiences to perform a desired action. While it is commonly found in written content such as blog posts, you can also add it to your video content. You can urge your viewers to subscribe to your channel, continue watching one of your videos, join an exclusive subscription, or even head to your ecommerce website.
Bottomline
While it’s fairly easy to post any kind of video online, it is not the same thing when you want to use it as a marketing tool. Video marketing campaigns have a ton of potential if it’s done correctly. If you’re just dipping your toes into video marketing, keep in mind that is essential that you make a comprehensive plan.
Start by listing your goals, identifying your target audience, and allocating a budget. Just then can you begin creating content and then publishing and promoting it online to market your business.
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