Video Content Marketing: A Beginner's Guide

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There is incredible potential for success through implementing a video marketing strategy.

Video has the power to build connections and relationships with your audience and increase engagement.

Whether you've never used video marketing before, or have already implanted it, we've got a crash course that will walk you through all you need to know. Beginning with strategizing and planning your content, all the way through the production and data collection, we've got you covered.

For those companies whose target market is other businesses, B2B marketing through video is extremely useful. It can help increase reach, educate their audience as well as convert them to customers

What is Video Marketing?

Video marketing refers to utilizes video content strategically to reach potential clients, engage with them, and ultimately convert them into paying customers. You may have heard it called video content marketing, which means the same thing. More businesses are choosing to include video through all steps of their sales funnel and tailoring it to where their audience is on their journey.

Perks of Video Marketing

What's so great about video marketing, and why are businesses so obsessed with it? Well, the stats don't lie. Video content can help boost traffic, encourage engagement, and increase conversion rate. On top of that, it's a useful tool to communicate your message to your audience. There are a ton of additional benefits to video content, and we've included some of them below.

- Higher ranking in search results

- Get more people onto your website

- Speed up the growth of your revenue

- Higher conversion rate

- More shares on social platforms-Create influential content that helps potential customers make a choice

- Embed a video into email marketing to increase click-throughs

How to Craft Your Video Marketing Strategy

Now, how to do you come up with an effective video marketing strategy for your business? One way is to go ahead and do it. Start making videos and putting them out there. But ideally, you'll want to have some strategy behind it to achieve the best success.

To craft your strategy, answer some of these questions below, which will guide you to the best path to take.

1. Who will be creating the video content?

2. How much time can you dedicate to the production and promotion of your video content?

3. What are the goals for your campaign? What do you hope to achieve?

4. What type of people are you trying to target with your content? And what kinds of videos can you create that will attract them?

5. What are your other marketing streams, and how can video fit into that strategy?

6. What platforms and locations will you distribute your video content on?

7. How will you track the performance of your campaign?

No two businesses will have the same answers to these questions. But looking at your responses will help you choose which kind of videos that will be most effective in your strategy. A lot of it will be dependent on who you want to target and what platforms they spend the most time on.

To keep track of your success, set some goals for your video marketing strategy. It will allow you to identify how well it's impacting your overall marketing strategy and KPIs.

Storytelling Through Video Marketing

Visuals tell stories. And while images can evoke emotion and make an impact, video can elaborate on this story and build a connection to your audience. Video content also encourages viewers to want to see more and follow the story further.

Evoking emotion doesn't necessarily mean your viewers end up crying at the end of each video. It can represent anything from fear, rage, sadness, and of course, the best, happiness! Any emotional reaction will likely lead to the viewer taking some action. Here are some tips for storytelling in your video content.

-Be innovative! New ideas will excite your audience and get them motivated.

- Make them laugh. Laughter is the best medicine, and viewers are always seeking out content that will make them happy.-Make like a storybook, and include a beginning, middle, and end to your video.

- Don't rush it. Put the work in to ensure your story is well-thought-out.

- One at a time. Keep each video focused on one, complete story. Don't overwhelm your viewers with too much information.

- Short and sweet. Attention spans are short. Keep your videos short, so they retain the viewers' attention.

- Make it about them, not you.

Different Types of Videos

When you are choosing which type of video you're going to make, mix it up, and create a strategy that combines multiple styles. Here are a few examples of videos to get you started.

- Case studies

- Promotional videos

- How-to/Tutorials

- Explainer

- Demonstration videos

- Brand culture

- Webinars

- Thought leadership

- Personalized content

A sales funnel showing awareness interest decision action and faq videos

Within these types, you can create some unique video content using various styles such as:

- Live streams

- Animation

- Text overlays

- VR & 360

- Choose your own adventure

- One on one

Certain types of videos will work best in each stage of your sales funnels, depending on how far each person is through it.

Where Can You Distribute Your Video Content?

Video content can be shared and viewed almost everywhere online, but you'll want to choose specific channels based on your marketing strategy. The most effective and popular places to distribute videos are listed below.

- Social Media Channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, SnapChat, etc.)

- Website-Email Marketing

- Blogs (your own or on partner blogs)

- Press releases

- YouTube

The highest performers are YouTube, social media, and website video content.

How to Implement SEO in Video Marketing

As you're probably aware, Google is the largest search engine on the internet. But did you know they also own the second largest search engine, YouTube? Google was thinking ahead when they purchased the video-sharing platform back in 2006 as they could predict the evolution of video content. By 2022, there's anticipation that video will make up 82% of traffic on the internet.

For that reason, besides just text links, Google includes video links in its search results. You don't need to be searching for video specifically, but they will still rank on the main page, as well as the dedicated "Videos" page. They also seem to feature the video content near the top of the results, so therefore, it may organically boost your rank.

When you're trying to work with SEO in your marketing strategy, it's important to include video content. They can help to strengthen the SEO of your website, but just make sure not to embed videos from third parties. That will only help the third party's site.

That said, we aren't suggesting boycotting YouTube. Actually, it's the opposite. YouTube is a fantastic platform that can generate brand awareness and engagement. You're best to use YouTube alongside self-hosting to get the highest success rate. If you are dual-posting content, make sure you changeup the title and description, or you could risk lowering your rank.

How to Achieve the Best SEO Result

It's all about the metadata. To ensure optimal SEO results on your video content include keyword usage in the following places:

Title

How to Use Video for Demand Generation

On top of being entertaining to watch, video content can help you create engagement and higher conversions. You should include videos in your strategy for demand generation.

You can do this by adding active-driving video content everywhere! From your website's main page, product information pages, and landing pages, catch your audience's attention with an engaging video. Use forms within your videos to build a bank of leads. Call-to-action buttons can direct viewers to sign up to newsletters or move them down your sales funnel. You can use helpful video content, like webinars or tutorials, as a way to capture your target audiences' emails. With this information, you can build a relationship with your leads through email marketing.

Beyond that, integrate video into your MAP and CRM systems to provide automatic video content to qualification programs, and lead scoring. It will allow you to see all the viewing data within your potential client profiles.

Account-based Marketing and Video

ABM programs work with personalizing and effectively targeting your audience. With the average office employee receiving around 121 emails per day, it's easy for your content to get lost. Combat this by using video content customized to each viewer. Personalized video messages will engage the viewer five times more than a standard written email.

How do you personalize the content? Base the video content on your audience's industry, location, or even their workplace. You can include this strategy in your email marketing. Run ads that focus on those within a specific account. When they click through your links, it will send them to a hub of content with tailored videos just for them.

A diagram of a traditional funnel and a flipped funnel

Get your sales team on board to coincide their strategies with your marketing strategies, so everything flows together. They can begin outreach with the leads you've generated. Your sales teams can then craft personalized videos to all those target accounts and start building a relationship. A way to save some time in the process is to produce videos for your sales team that use real-time personalization so that they can easily tweak them for each target account.

You'll receive some fantastic insights through ABM programs.
Activities can be prioritized based on the data collected. It will allow you to follow up on those who have shown interest in your brand straight away instead of losing effort on those that aren't interested.

How to Read Video Analytics

Almost all companies who have a form of video marketing use analytics. Beyond just tracking data, businesses realize the potential of leveraging this data to optimize their video marketing strategy. There is so much vital information in this data, and if you're not using it, your campaign efforts may suffer.

Without analytics, you have no idea who's viewed your content and whether they liked it or not. Even if someone watched your videos multiple times and were interested in your service, you wouldn't know it. Analytics will allow you to see precisely how long people watched your content before clicking off, and also those who watched it again.

The most essential and crucial data to keep track of is:

1. Total views

2. Click-through rate

3. Watch time (attention spam data)

4. Link click-throughs

A graph showing the growth of the global video analytics market.

Depending on the goals of each video, you may want to track some data more than others.

Beyond the video, analytics make sure to look at the bigger picture like the generation of heads, how far have viewers made it down your sales funnel, and how much revenue have you gained as a result?

Social media platforms and YouTube will show you a range of metrics from each video that you post. But to obtain more detailed information and gauge the overall impact, you'll have to have a dedicated platform.

There are video platforms made just for businesses that will offer a more in-depth analysis since they integrate into other platforms like your CRM and MAP systems. You'll be able to generate reports that summarize your entire marketing efforts as a result of your video content.

A man is sitting in front of a blue sign that says video marketing is our passion

When used correctly, there are so many benefits that video marketing can have on your business. Create a solid video marketing strategy based on the tips and information above. Then consider which type of video content will help you achieve your marketing goals. Once you've got a plan in place, choose the most straight-forward platform, allowing you to share, manage, and track the success of your content.

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