Video has turned into a tool that businesses, from small to large, need in order to thrive in the digital space.
Lots of statistics back this up and have put to bed the assumption that it could be a passing trend.
Does your business have it in its marketing strategy? If yes, that’s commendable. But if your answer is no, that means your business has probably been deprived of brand awareness, improved sales, better conversion rates, better SEO performance, among other things.
It may feel bad realizing that, but at the same time, it should be a relief knowing that you can turn everything around and leverage the super abilities video has.
Now, without a proper video marketing strategy, it will be difficult to achieve success in your video campaigns, not to mention the losses you may incur as a result. In other words, it’s like building a great building on a weak foundation.
It takes knowing these following four components for you to set a solid foundation for the success of your video strategy as well as the accompanying campaigns. They include:
1. Goals/Objectives
Top amongst the things you should do is set the right goal(s). With goals in place, it becomes possible to drive your video in a clear direction and also have an easier time evaluating its performance in future.
Unfortunately, many make the mistake of coming up with unrealistic goals or fail to adhere to them, which eventually leads to failed campaigns.
If you are wondering what an appropriate goal looks like, it’s really simple. Make it adhere to the SMART rule, i.e.:
● Specific
● Measurable
● Attainable
● Relevant
● Time-bound.
Usually, the simplest way to define your goal will be something like gathering leads, increasing traffic to a website, raising brand awareness, increasing sales, boosting engagement level on a website, explaining a product, and so on.
But it shouldn’t stop there. All the aspects of the SMART rule will have to be factored in. For instance:
The video campaign aims to gather 200,000 views and lead to 10,000 new sign-ups over the next 100 days. This will make it possible for the company to collect qualified leads, increase its sales, and develop its brand.
2. Content Strategy
A content plan ensures that what you come up with in the video meets the goals you have in place and engages your audience. Actually, take note of the fact that great content strategies always specify the role that video content will play in the video strategy.
As for the content itself, it would be great if you made it unique to the needs, interests, and preferences of your target audience.
This will, of course, vary from brand to brand, but the bottom line is the content should be able to grab the attention of your audience, pique their interest, and encourage them to care about it.
All these can be achieved by making it either entertaining, inspiring, or educative. Other things to remember include:
● Picking the most appropriate type of video to pass your message.
● Understanding the problem the video is trying to solve.
● Knowing the target audience and your competition.
3. Audience Selection
Taking a wild shot in the dark is not something you will want to try in marketing. Yet going ahead to create content without knowing who your target audience represents a similar situation. More often, such a move achieves little to nothing.
Defining your target audience is what will help you develop the right content, connect with your audience, raise the conversion rate, and make your campaign a success.
To identify and understand who your target audience is, you will have to start by finding answers to the challenges/problems your product/service seeks to solve and also studying your current customers as well as the competition.
The answers you find will give you a basis for knowing who your proper audience is and what works for them. Such an audience should also be able to connect to what you offer plus your content’s mission.
There are other ways to define your audience; these include using demographics (age, education, sex, income level, etc.), psychographics (their personality traits, lifestyle, beliefs, titles, etc.), and geographic location.
You can use a combination of ways to narrow down your audience selection to the most appropriate.
The details you’ll have gathered, like psychographics, can also be used later in the process, mostly in retargeting and in creating powerful personalized videos.
4. Distribution Strategy
After you’ve spent money, energy, and time creating your video, you will want those you’ve created it for to view it and respond accordingly. And for this to happen, there are a couple of tasks that you have to plan for well in advance.
First, choose a platform you intend to use ahead of time. Uploading the video to channels such as YouTube may be a bit easier but in the event, you want to upload the video on your website, say a landing page, it would be better to have a customized video host, and this takes time and money to set up.
Your choice of platform should also align with other aspects of your strategy, like the target audience.
Other ways you may share your video are through your website, social media, email, SlideShare, and Press Releases (to name a few). You can reach out to industry leaders or partner blogs as well and ask them to share, but keep in mind that this often comes at a cost.
Don’t forget to optimize your video for search engines (if you intend to upload it to video platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo).
Other platforms, like Facebook, also provide an opportunity to optimize your video for search. Lastly, make it easily shareable by adding share buttons and a call-to-action.
Final Word
There’s no doubt that a practical, complete, and effective video marketing strategy is crucial to the success of your video marketing campaigns. And by incorporating these four components into your strategy and implementing them properly, you will be maximizing the chances of making your campaigns successful.
Pay attention to every detail we’ve mentioned and, in the event you get stuck along the way, don’t hesitate to seek professional help.
