How Businesses can Streamline their Video Marketing Strategy

There are different types of content format available, out of which video tops the list as the topnotch and engaging content format. Sharing videos are the best way to connect with your audience and give them a real peek into what your business is doing. The more your audience know about your business, the more likely they are to trust you.

In this digital world, we’re craving a personal connection. We want to see and hear people as they live their life.

Marketers prefer using videos when compared to text because it can give a potentially huge return on investment (ROI). Consumers like to watch videos because it’s easily digestible, entertaining, and visually engaging.

Therefore, using videos to interact with your audience is a win-win situation for both marketers as well as consumers.

Before we hop onto discussing the different steps in streamlining your video marketing strategy, let’s get started by understanding the definition of video marketing.

Having a clear understanding of video marketing will help you optimize your video marketing efforts.

What is Video Marketing?

“Video marketing is attracting prospects, engaging visitors or generating leads through videos that are relevant to your audience interests or needs.”

Video content can be short-form or long-form depending on the purpose that your video will serve. Short-form video delivers a quick and powerful message while longer videos provide your audience with more in-depth content. Both forms of videos should typically end with a call to action.

Now that you have understood what video marketing is, and how it can benefit your business, let’s look at how you can craft a successful video marketing strategy:

5 Ways Businesses Can Streamline Their Video Marketing Strategy

According to Social Media Examiner, around two-thirds of marketers have started using videos for marketing; you can’t afford to be left out. Craft your video marketing strategy with these five simple steps:

1. Video Creation
2. Video Editing
3. Video Hosting and Branding
4. Lead Generation Through Videos
5. Video Performance Analytics

You don’t have to own a video production setup to start creating videos. Those days are long gone. Now anyone can hop onto their laptop and start crafting engaging videos while sitting at their desk.

1. Video Creation — Create Brand Narratives/Promotional Videos

Before you start creating videos, you should list out the needs that will be in your video and the goal of creating it. Also, make sure that your video and the publishing channel fit the purpose of the video to derive your desired results.

Video creation tools like Renderforest, which has 1000+ readymade video templates, can help you create professional videos with more ease.

Here are five types of videos that you can create to help navigate your leads through the marketing funnel.

Types of Videos You Can Create:

Explainers and How-tos: Sharing explainers and how-to videos with your audience can clearly explain what your product or service does. Explainer videos can cut through the noise easily, gain prospects attention, demonstrate why your product or service is the best choice for them.

Explainer videos can be in the form of video demos, marketing campaigns, sales pitch, training video, customer support activities, and others.

Personal 1–2–1: Sending personalized videos to your prospects or customers will keep your sales process engaged. Personalized videos are more potent in sales since people understand that they are in business with another human being. It creates a stronger bond between the sales team and the customer. Also, people are more likely to open an email sent with a personal video than a regular text email.

Video Testimonials: Using video testimonials on your website, emails or anywhere can instantly boost customer trust in your brand. It will help you to connect emotionally with your target audience or prospects. Watching and hearing someone speak, seeing their facial expressions, and visual communication will convey far more than plain-text.

Video Interviews: Interviewing SMEs or influencers and posting it as a video will break in the cloud and bring their thoughts to life. You can also re-use the audio and turn it into a podcast. Video interviews are a perfect combination of entertainment, knowledge with simplicity. And they work.

Video Reviews: Video reviews give an authentic feel and can help your customers make faster decisions. Video reviews also get a lot of engagement when compared to text-based reviews. Video reviews will build the credibility of your product and improve your brand image and sales.

2. Video Editing

Not all video projects will turn out to be the best in the first shot, so it’s always better to get your video edited before it goes live. You can trim the start and end screens of your videos, blur sensitive data present (if any), add some soothing background music, etc.

You don’t have to own an advanced version of Adobe to do the editing process. There are great online video editing tools available to support you with the editing process.

In case you are creating an animation video, you can add voice-over or music to the video with the help of editing tools.

3. Video Hosting and Branding

The next thing you have to consider in your video marketing strategy is where you will be hosting your videos. There are third-party video hosting platforms like Hippo Video, Brightcove etc where you can host your videos. These hosting platforms have a secure and straightforward workflows for uploading and publishing your video content.

Next, it’s the video players’ functionality. Branding plays an integral part in your video marketing strategy.

Branding is all about customizing the video player to resonate with your brand. By customizing the player, you can make a great first impression, reach a greater audience, and drive traffic. Make sure you customize your video player before your video goes live.

Types of Video Player Customizations

You could change the way your video player looks by customizing it. Here is a list of customization options that you should look out for inside a video hosting platform.

• Logo: Increase your brand’s reach by adding your brand logo to the video player.
• Call to Actions: You can add customized CTAs in the player, lead generation form or CRM forms to generate leads.
• Custom Domain: Adding custom domain will improve brand recognition and grow your marketing performance.
• Custom Thumbnail: Add custom thumbnail to your video to increase the number of clicks (CTR).
• Title and End Screen: Some videos demand a welcome title screen and a thank you end screen. Add custom screens to capture the viewer’s attention.
• Player Theme: Change the color of your video player to match your brand theme.

There you go! You have a branded video asset ready to be published.

4. Lead Generation Through Videos

One last but important step you should consider before you publish your videos is to add a call to action in your video.

Adding a call to action will get the customers over to your site, where they’ll encounter more of your strategic video marketing content and CTAs. This step is crucial in your strategy as it drives them through the buying process faster.

Types of Call to Actions:

• Annotations: Notify your viewers, without interrupting them, while watching your video.
• Call to actions: Persuade viewers to take immediate action.
• Lead Generation/CRM Forms: Acquire leads and convert them into customers.
• Polls/Quiz: Understand what your customers think by activating a quiz or a question poll within your videos.
• Promote Playlist: Promote other related videos, at the end of the current video.

5. Video Performance Analytics

After you publish your video in your desired channel, it’s essential that you track how your video is performing.

Video Marketing Metrics to Measure:

• Impressions
• Total Views
• Click Through Rates (CTR)
• Play Rate
• View Ratio
• Engagement Rate
• Device Type
• Geo Location
• Conversion Percentage

Metrics are extensive to measure, but each of these metrics has its purpose. Although the vital metric you should watch out for is conversions, the overall success of your video marketing efforts is defined by the number of paying customers you get.

If your video marketing strategy is effective, it should improve your business results and ROI. However, if you don’t see conversions, don’t ever think to cast away video marketing. Use the other metrics to improve your videos and tactically adjust your video marketing strategy.

Good things take time. With clear goals and consistent measurement and adjustment, video marketing will help to grow your business steadily.

I hope this blog has given you valuable insights on how you can streamline the video marketing strategy for your business.

Originally published as a guest blog at www.renderforest.com on January 15, 2019.

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