Video Marketing | 5 Simple Steps to Get Started in 2020

Video Marketing can be used for everything from building customer rapport, to promoting your brand, services or products. Additionally, video marketing can serve as a medium to present how-to’s, promote customer testimonials, live-stream events and deliver viral (entertaining) content.

With the prominence of video content on social media platforms and search engines continuing to grow, having a video marketing strategy for your business has never been more important.

That’s why I’ve created a free and exclusive product video marketing guide below in order to help you get started on your video journey, or simply have a refresher.

By 2020, the video industry will account for 82% of all internet traffic, according to Cisco. And it’s easy to see why. The combination of visual and audio content has long been compelling to people, as we saw with the groundbreaking inventions of film and television.

Television is still, today, the most effective way to advertise, and certainly one of the most expensive. Online video can be a powerful tool, but it is, like television, pricey when compared to banner ads, and audio ads.

How are Videos useful?

It’s not too hard to see why video is so popular these days — for one thing, it’s an easy-to-digest format that gives our eyes a rest from the overabundance of textual information online. This would be why the world reportedly watches 1 billion hours of YouTube social video per day.

And those of you who are headed towards digital marketing careers should have a complete understanding of the power of video as a marketing tool. This is not only because they might be interested in making amazing videos, but because they’ll probably have to learn to incorporate video into their content in order to remain competitive.

Video is a versatile and engaging content format that not only gives us a real-life picture of what is going on; it’s also easy to share across multiple platforms. Consumers like it because it’s easy to digest, entertaining and engaging, and marketers like it because it can give a potentially huge return on investment (ROI) through many channels.

Video is also very accessible to anyone with internet access, both to watch and to produce. While there is certainly a trend towards higher quality video on a professional level, anyone can hop onto their laptop and create their own video in under an hour.

To develop your Video Marketing strategy, you’ll want to:

1. Allocate resources. You’re going to need to designate some budget for video – at the least, decent equipment, good editing software, and a video marketing guru (or, better, team) – as well as time to create it.
2. Tell your stories. Storytelling has never been as important as it is in the video, so get brainstorming: What stories do you want to tell? How will you tell them?
3. Engage. It’s not enough to simply tell your stories; you must engage your audience while you do so. How will you make your stories interesting? What will hook your audience?
4. Keep it short. There’s no set length for marketing videos (although there are recommendations), but the general rule is that shorter is better. Be ruthless with your editing. Cut, cut, cut out everything extraneous. Attention spans are short, so make the best of what you get.
5. Publish. Publish your videos far and wide – embedded in your website, uploaded to Google-owned YouTube, and on all your social media channels. Then, promote, promote, promote.
6. Analyze. Track metrics and stats, to determine which videos do the best – and why.

Why is Video Marketing important?

Simply, because product video marketing is all over the Internet. Look no further than your favorite brands, your Facebook, your YouTube homepage, and there it is: successful video marketing that has found its way to your eyes. If a photo’s worth a thousand words, then how much more valuable is a video? That’s the basis of video marketing.

A forward-facing marketing strategy that integrates engaging video into your marketing campaigns. On the surface, the how of video marketing is pretty simple: Your brand creates videos that, in some way or another, promote your company, drive sales, raise awareness of your products or services, or engage your customers.

In practice, it’s a little more complicated. Like many of your marketing efforts, video marketing is data-driven, so you’ll want to monitor various metrics and track customer engagement. As a medium, it takes more time to produce a video than any other kind of online marketing. Therefore, to ensure you get the best value, a video marketing strategy is required.

What are the Benefits of Video Marketing?

In 2017, video content accounted for an estimated 74% of all online traffic. Your customers love video. Would-be customers also love video, which means good video marketing can attract new visitors.

The benefits of video marketing are many. In that case, let’s begin with easily quantifiable statistics, numbers, and data for instance.

Whereby

• Video helps you connect with your audience. Today, so much of a company’s marketing efforts are designed to help build trust. Video is the bridge that links what you say to who you really are, allowing customers to peer behind the curtain and get to know your brand.
• Video is an SEO gold mine, helping build backlinks to your site, boosting likes and shares (which can affect search rankings), and driving traffic to your site. And let’s not forget that YouTube is owned by Google, so be sure to post your videos to YT and tag, tag, tag with keywords/keyphrases!
• Videos boost information retention. If your customers hear something only, they’re likely to retain about 10% of that information three days later; by contrast, if what they hear is accompanied by relevant imagery, they’ll retain an average 65% of that information three days later.
• Email subject lines that include the word “video” see a 19% increase in open rates and a 65% boost in click-throughs.
• Four times as many customers would prefer to watch a product video than to read product descriptions.
• Do you like money? Then consider this: after watching a video, customers are 64-85% more likely to make a purchase.

Which are the Best Practices for Video Marketing?

From these challenges, rise video marketing best practices. And it all comes down to strategy: If you want your video marketing to have results, then you must plan, test, analyze, and test again. Yes, the goal of your videos is to tell a story and engage your customers. But, from a marketing perspective, your videos must also align with your sales funnel. Like;

• What is the purpose of each video?
• Who is the audience?
• How does the video further your marketing goals?

The bottom line, overall strategy, and data should drive your video marketing strategy. First, plan a solid strategy to develop video(s) for each level of your sales funnel. Outline the content and goals of each individual video.

Determine what metrics will best determine a video’s success. Then, test. Analyze. Tweak your videos (and their deployment), when necessary. Work to make them more effective. And whatever you do, do video; in 2017 and beyond, it’s the cornerstone of your brand’s marketing efforts.

Today, let’s look at what you need to know to put a video strategy together. And I’ll provide tips to make it both robust enough and agile enough to use in the short, medium and long-term.