It’s been over a decade since the first YouTube video was uploaded online. As the first platform to enable the public to share their home-made videos, one could say that it served as a catalyst that kick-started our obsession with distributing visual content.

Yet its impact has gone far beyond the enjoyment of watching ‘cute kittens’ – it has catapulted video marketing into becoming one of the most powerful marketing tool for businesses of all sizes.

For your brand to remain successful, it’s crucial to implement a video marketing strategy to communicate your product or service. If you opt not to integrate video within the content marketing of your business, then you’re simply missing out on a huge percentage of potential customers.

Social media platforms give us the means to share videos at the click of a button on a smartphone or tablet – and other marketing media just cannot rival the powerful connection that video makes with its users. The numbers, according to Hubspot, speak for themselves:

• 90% of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision process
• Video in an email leads to 200-300% increase in click-through rate
• Including video on a landing page can increase conversion by 80%

In this data driven society, it’s also valuable to understand the behaviour of online users:

• 33% of all online activity is spent watching video content

• 75% of users visit a marketer’s website after viewing a video

• Four out of five internet users remember the video adverts they watch online
• 64% are more likely to purchase a product from an e-commerce website after watching a related video

This data demonstrates just how powerful video marketing is as a channel. The benefits to your business in influencing the journey your potential customers make cannot be underestimated. Keeping your audience engaged and retaining their interest is no mean feat.

Awareness is paramount to building a solid customer base. Inspiring video experiences can help to increase your brand’s reach and engagement, driving more traffic to your website. Live video streaming can also broaden your reach.

The beauty of video marketing is that only one platform is required to publish on every medium available, including your own website, video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. This alone makes it worth sound investment. Once your customer base is established, you can use the power of email to send out links to any new campaigns.

In an era of content overload, videos are more instant and easier to absorb. If you create a video that engages, entertains or inspires your audience, then they are likely to share it, as well as stay on your website for longer.

Videos can be featured anywhere and everywhere: in blog posts, social media posts, landing pages, online adverts and email campaigns. A video with a clear call to action can increase website traffic and give potential customers a reason to visit your website.

Once they have arrived, you have the opportunity to engage even further with them, increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Crafting a Video Marketing Strategy

Carefully crafting a video marketing strategy is vital in maximising the reach you want to accomplish. A strategy is a road map outlining your goals; how you’re going to achieve them; and how you’ll measure success. It ensures that you stay on track and avoid creating aimless content that fails to achieve your objectives.

1.What do you want your video content to achieve?

Video content for businesses must always have a purpose. For example, if you are just starting up and people are not familiar with your business, then your videos should aim to build awareness of your brand for the start of the customer journey. Or perhaps you’ve established your customer base but you’d like to drive more sales – so videos could help to better position your products to increase revenue. This will define the style of your video content.

Videos can be educational, entertaining, insightful, inspirational, or a combination of all . How you decide this depends on the tone of your brand and the needs of your audience. Determine what you want your audience to take away from your videos.

2. What’s your story?

Audiences now expect you to do much more than simply tell them why they should buy your product. Today, it’s more important than ever that you do everything you can to forge an emotional connection with potential customers, and the best way to do this is through effective storytelling in your video.

But why is storytelling so important in your video marketing efforts?

Stories produce experiences. Experiences then leave a lasting impression- a lot more than features, facts or figures.

Storytelling is more subtle. Even though your objective may be to sell your product or services, people don’t respond positively to direct sales pitches. Crafted in the style of a story, video marketing then allows you  people to pick up the key message themselves without having direct messages hammered into them by repeated sales pitches.

This is much more effective, as it feels like the viewer is sharing an experience with your brand, rather than being pushed into buying something by a sales person.

Stories are the emotional glue that connect you to your customers. You can tell people how great your products and services are as much as you want, but it’s always going to be more effective to show the benefits of your product/service and, more importantly, what it does for people.Effective video marketing will craft a story around key marketing to create meaning for the audience.

3. What types of videos do you want to create?

Identify the areas of your business that will benefit from video content and whether this content is to be communicated internally, externally– or both. For example, an HR department may benefit from communicating internal videos to visually communicate aspects of your business or new messaging to your employees.

Once this has been confirmed, it’s time to review the different types of videos out there to find those most suitable to communicate your messages. These include:

• Short form clips to drive social engagement. We’ve shown some examples here of the work we completed for Trainline which have been very effective for mobile marketing :

• Motion graphics, a digital technique that combines pictures, words, sounds and video.
• Animated videos. In the below examples , we partnered with WGC to produce a series of explainer videos to explain the complexities of  how gold is mined, the project life cycles and the importance of minimising the environmental impact:

• Webinars
• Instructional ‘how to’ videos and product demonstrations
• Customer testimonials
• Case studies.

4. Keep it Short.

All your videos should be short – your audience is more likely to watch a 1 or 2 minute video than a 5 minute video and the majority of people watching your videos are likely doing so ‘on the go’ from mobile devices and tablets. If you have 10 minutes of content you need to communicate, create a narrative and then break it down into 2×5 or 10×1 videos- this method is also going to keep your audience more captivated and engaged.

5. Measure Performance. In order to warrant your investment in this marketing channel, the performance of your video content must be measured by meaningful metrics. Useful data to track includes drop off rates (what percentage of customers watch your videos from start to finish?), click through rates and the number of times a video has been viewed.

If video content is a tool that you haven’t been utilising successfully, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. It’s our job to help you identify the aspirations for your business and determine how video marketing can fulfil these objectives. By creating video concepts based on your goals and target audience, we can address each stage of the customer journey – from raising awareness of your brand to keeping customers coming back for more.

If you’d like to know more about how we’ve helped our clients with video marketing and what we can do for you, please contact us for a no-obligation chat.