Video marketing is perhaps one of the best ways to market pretty much anything. From products to brands to your own channel or blog – video marketing can do it all. Even though it might seem like an easy task, there are many aspects you should keep in mind when creating your videos, and using them in your marketing campaign. Here is your ultimate guide to video marketing.
Benefits of Video Marketing
As mentioned above, video marketing works for practically anything. Nowadays, people prefer video content to written one which means videos are always in demand. If your video contains useful information, there will always be someone who will want to watch it. Click To Tweet
Another advantage of videos is that you can use them in different places. In addition to such dedicated platforms as YouTube, you can also successfully market your videos on social media platforms, on websites and blogs, and even as ads in different corners of the world wide web.
Types of Videos
In order to fully understand the ins and outs of video marketing, you should have at least a vague idea of what types of videos there are:
- Brand Videos: They are usually created as a part of a larger campaign, and used on social media to generate brand awareness and increase traffic.
- Explainer Videos: These are meant to explain how your product works and how your customer can benefit from it.
- Event Videos: These videos are meant to highlight the best moments of an event you recently held.
- Live Videos: Live streams are usually used to improve engagement.
- Disappearing Videos: Stories are best for creating urgency for your followers to view the video. You can also get pretty creative with these and collect feedback.
- Educational or How-To Videos: These are used to teach your target audience something they want to know.
- Demo Videos: Demo videos are meant to showcase your product.
- Expert Interviews: These are amazing for building trust and establishing yourself as an authority and an expert in your niche.
- Personalized Messages: Instead of using the standard email responses, you can create personalized video messages that will help you establish better customer relationships.
- Case Study and Customer Testimonial Videos: These will help increase social proof and prompt your target market to move further down the sales funnel.
- Animated Videos: These are often eye-catching and are used to explain abstract concepts.
- Augmented Reality (AR) Videos: AR videos are perfect for allowing your customers to explore your product without actually touching it.
- Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree Videos: Just like AR videos, these can help submerge your customers into a different reality and fully understand your product.
Choosing Your Target Audience
The first thing to do is to choose your target audience. When you know who you will be making your video for, you will be able to properly write, format, and film your video. Click To Tweet Keep in mind the age, gender, occupation, interests, and habits of your target audience. Don’t forget about their level of knowledge about your subject.
Identifying Your Goals
This does not only concern your overall goals for your video marketing campaign but also the separate aims you set for your videos. Think of what you are working on: traffic, brand awareness, conversion rate, follower count, or something else. You can use such tools as Goalscape to help you organize your goals.
Planning Your Budget
Now think of the budget. How much money are you willing to spend on your videos? This will influence their quality and, in turn, their success. Of course, it is better to be able to hire a professional videographer, but if you don’t have such an opportunity, start small and focus on the quality of your content first. Afterward, you will be able to improve your video quality.
Coming Up With an Idea
A crucial step is to choose the type of videos you will be making and come up with ideas for them. After that, script out or storyboard your video to have a kind of an outline. You can hire a freelancer at Upwork or use such professional online writing services as GrabMyEssay if you don’t have the time to plan what you want to include in your video.
Selecting a Platform
The main choices you can consider are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Vimeo. Alternatively, you can publish them on your website or blog.
Solving Creative Challenges
Now that you know how your video will look like and what it will contain, think of what can be improved. While filming, some issues may come up that you will have to deal with, so it is important to identify them right now and think of possible solutions.
Measuring the Success
Remember your goals? This is the time to look them over again, and include details. You might want to have concrete numbers in terms of views, shares, and likes to measure the success of your videos. You may also want to make use of Mention which will notify you every time somebody mentions your brand or your video. This will signify that you have raised your brand’s awareness.
Making a Video
You can finally make your video! Remember to place light correctly. You may also want to stick to one or two angles only to make the editing process easier.
Editing Your Video
Once your video is filmed, you can now edit it. If you decided to do it yourself, you can use Vegas Pro or an equivalent to do this. Cut the unnecessary parts, add music and transitions, and then export it in the format that best suits the platform you chose for publishing your video.
Publishing Your Video
Your video is ready. You’ve made it as perfect as it can possibly be and now is the time to publish it. By making use of the best SEO practices (just like for written content), you can optimize it for search engines. Choose the best keywords for it by using the Keyword Tool. If you opted for publishing your video on social media platforms, don’t forget to add the relevant hashtags to make it discoverable.
Promoting Your Video
Last but not least, promote your video! If you published it on your website or YouTube channel, don’t hesitate to share the link on your social media accounts. The tags you included will do their job, but you will still have to give your video extra exposure to make people notice it.
Conclusion
To sum up, video marketing is definitely the way to go if you are looking for a new effective strategy in your marketing campaign. There are many things you can try with videos, so you will obviously find a format just for you. Keep experimenting, settle for what’s best, and see results.
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