Businesses are engaging in more and more and more video marketing strategies. With everybody online all the time, video has been more critical than ever for marketing and collaboration.
Video is used as a marketing tool by 60% of businesses. Most web traffic also consists of multimedia content than all-text content. It’s because videos are easily consumable for this on-the-go market.
And even if most were confined to their homes for most of 2020, the way people consume content did not change. In fact, video consumption on mobile and video devices even increases by 100% every year.
Video marketing is a perfect way to engage with your ideal customers and build closer partnerships with them. Videos have a unique ability to boost your marketing strategies and set you apart from the competition.
The proportion of millennial customers who make business-to-business (B2B) product or service transactions before viewing online videos is exceptionally high. Before making a purchase, nearly 29% of millennials consult online through videos, and 20% of B2B consumers use these solutions to resolve business problems.
Most consumers these days believe that video is the most convenient way to learn about a company or a product online, especially on social media. Brands get better results when incorporating video marketing in their digital marketing strategies, leading to better results for lead generation and customer interaction.
See this video below to know more about the state of video marketing:
Ways to Incorporate Video Marketing Strategies
1. Educate customers by using Storytelling Strategies
Videos are very effective in humanizing your brand. Before you can persuade audiences to support your product or service, you need to persuade them first to follow you as a brand.
To interact with your audiences better and make a good impression, you can create a video about your brand’s backstory and the people behind the brand. Using storytelling as a strategy makes your content relatable and more impressionable. Do not just be focused on the sale you can make out of your audiences, but genuinely aim to add value to their lives, and you can show that through video storytelling.
Make sure you understand that the same concepts apply to video marketing as to all other marketing methods: You must reflect on your customers’ intent and optimize the emotional impact of video to your advantage.
You also need to have a clear call-to-action (CTA), just as every story has a climax. Include an actionable recommendation along with a monitored URL that fits into your overall story.
2. Optimize Video Thumbnails
Do not underestimate the power of a video thumbnail. More often than not, people click through a video link just for its thumbnail. Thus, there is a slew of clickbait videos that entice people to click with a thumbnail. Often, the thumbnails are misleading, deceptive, or unrelated to their content.
Produce high-quality videos and match an eye-catching thumbnail to boot. Even with a thumbnail, you can provide information and pique interest for your video.
Human headshots with some captions are a great example. It quickly connects with the audience, especially if the person on the thumbnail is smiling or laughing. There is something about a smile that draws people in, and since you are competing with tons of other thumbnails out there, make sure yours is as pleasing and eye-catching as can be.
3. Create Videos for People, not Search Engines
Optimized videos can boost your rankings on search engines, especially if you incorporate keywords in your descriptions and tags. But in creating video marketing content, you need to create for people, not for rankings. If you create for your audience and serve their search queries or intent, you will rank eventually.
Don’t just make videos to go viral, either. Yes, viral videos can dramatically boost your brand’s traffic, but it is not always consistent. It is a more long-term strategy to consistently produce high-quality videos that are relevant to your audiences. Suppose some of your videos go viral, well, and good. But not all viral videos produce conversions. High traffic does not always equate to conversions.
Consistency in video production and meeting your audiences’ expectations and demands is a more secure way of getting leads and increasing your conversion rates.
So you need to learn what your audience wants, what they are searching for on the web, what kind of videos or content they want to see, and how they want to engage with your brand. Determine their interests and queries and the kinds of platforms they access all the time. Learn what they value and keep connecting and communicating with them, so you get constant feedback on your target market’s changing demands.
4. Optimize Branding Opportunities in Your Videos.
Branding consistency is essential, especially on your videos. In a few frames, you can tell so much about your brand to your audiences. Ensure that branding is optimized and consistent, so your video can support your brand, not add confusion to it.
When your branding is consistent, your audiences feel more at ease and even increase brand awareness and authority even on videos.
5. Engage with Your Brand’s Mobile Audience.
Almost 67% of the world’s population are now on mobile. About 93 million mobile users have been added between January 2020 and January 2021, raising mobile connectivity to 72 million at the start of this year. Discounting your mobile audience is a big no-no unless you want to miss out on that big chunk in your target market.
According to Google, 53% of mobile users favor companies with websites or in-depth video training. Promoting on mobile devices would increase consumer trust and revenue, so make sure your video content is mobile-friendly as well.
6. Create Demo Videos with Webinars
Webinars are an excellent way to use the content for marketing your product or service, whether it is brand new or being reintroduced or reiterated to your audience.
A good example is CK12, an open and free training website that holds several webinars each year to teach potential participants and stay updated with the latest developments.
It offers viewers the opportunity to have a face-to-to-face engagement with you through video conferencing. As a result of this, you will be able to respond to everyone’s questions comfortably. The best thing about webinars is that they can be uploaded on your website, shared on social media, and even delivered by email to improve exposure and expand the life of your video content.
You can host a webinar using software such as Zoom, ClickMeeting, and others.
You can use Zoom to host webinars that concentrate on the presenters more than visual aids or slides. It enables presenters to keep track of the event and eliminate crowd interruptions while maintaining a more casual or personal interaction with their audience.
You can scale Zoom webinars to accommodate up to 50,000 people at a time. You’ll also hit a broader audience if you livestream on YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and other customized streaming channels.
With ClickMeeting, you can manage the live and automated webinars you produce. Furthermore, brands can rapidly implement product presentations at scale. You can also use the automated webinar timeline editor to adjust webinar settings and create more engaging and conversion-focused product demo presentations.
7. Provide Social Proof
Social Media Marketing is a growing trend, especially in the new normal economy. Social proof is essential to help users decide on following your brand or converting to customers. Product ratings and testimonials are an example of social proof and recommendations by other users and peers. Include options for users to like, share, give feedback, and strengthen your growth strategy through video marketing.
People are consuming more videos than ever. Statistics show that 70% of customers post a brand’s video. Video content brings a 72% increase in conversion rates.
Native Facebook videos receive a much higher share of impression and engagement than shared YouTube videos. You can also use video thumbnails to optimize email marketing campaigns, using the keyword “video” in the subject header. It increases your email campaign’s open rates by 19%
8. Optimize Influencer Marketing
It would be difficult for any brand to expand its audience. However, using strategies such as influencer marketing, you can rapidly expand your audience. You would combine influencer ads and video to get the best of both worlds.
TikTok, for instance, is a well-known video platform you can optimize to strategically increase brand awareness. You can collaborate with relevant influencers in your niche to produce behind-the-scenes videos of your company, produce video ad campaigns, or provide short reviews of your product. It can also be done through YouTube, which is the premier go-to of influencers.
Podcasts are also great for brand-building, which most influencers use and stream on their YouTube or other social media accounts. Utilize unique strategies like this to widen your audience reach.
However, for your campaign to be successful, you must work with the right influencers. You should think about doing hashtag studies with tools like Hashtagify for this. It allows you to find the top influencers in each hashtag.
Similarly, social listening tools such as HubSpot can help you identify people who are talking about your brand. Some of them may be influential.
You can also use NinjaOutreach to find and connect with the best and most appropriate influencers to increase your marketing campaign’s success. Through NinjaOutreach, you can connect with trustworthy influencers on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok. You will also be provided with metrics on each influencer, like the number of followers, engagement rate, and the like.
Conclusion: Video Marketing is a Must
Text-based content simply cannot compete with how compelling video content is. It becomes more apparent when selling goods and services online.
There are many ways to boost engagement, and video marketing is one of them. If your website includes video, it can increase your site’s chances of driving organic search results 50 times more than text content. Google also pushes pages that have video content to higher rankings.
Use professional tools to produce high-quality imagery on your videos, like Adobe Photoshop or CorelDraw Graphics Suite. If you are on a tight budget, you can access many free editing platforms on the web as well, so there is no excuse why you cannot produce professional-looking videos, especially since audiences have a high expectation for it.
Video is also incredibly relevant in digital media because it empowers more significant personal connections and relationships with both the consumer and the business customer. Video marketing emulates real-life experiences better than other modes of marketing.
AUTHOR: MAYLEEN MEÑEZ
Mayleen Meñez used to work in media before finding her true passion in NGO work, traveling the Philippines and Asia doing so. She homeschools 3 kids and loves reinventing Filipino dishes. She is a resident SEO writer for Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand.
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