Video Marketing: How to Create the Right Videos for your Audience

Video marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness, drive leads and sales, and increase engagement on social media. But where do you start? And how do you make sure that your videos are effective?

This guide will help you understand the importance of video marketing, learn how it works, and see what types of videos are possible with different budgets. We'll also show you how to create compelling content in order to reach your target audience and scale your growth.

What is video marketing?

Video marketing is a powerful way to reach your target audience and persuade them to take action. Video marketing is the use of online videos to promote and market your product or service. It provides a much more engaging way to connect with your customers and catch the attention of your audience.

You can use online videos in many effective ways including driving traffic, building brand awareness, and generating leads for your business. There are many types of videos you can make including social media videos, educational videos, influencer videos, and user-generated videos.

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What are the benefits of video marketing?

Online video content provides the best way to reach your audience, build trust and credibility, generate leads and sales, improve SEO and boost social media engagement. Just look at these stats.

• Studies show that the pandemic boosted online media consumption by 215% in the US.
• It's expected that 82% of all online media consumption involves videos.
• As of 2020, 83% of internet users in the US consumed online video content
• In 2019, internet users watched an average of 6 hours and 48 minutes of online video per week.
• There are 250 million hours of watch time on YouTube globally every single day

Video marketing increases brand awareness

Video marketing has become an essential way for brands to generate awareness in a crowded marketplace. The best way to catch user attention is to tell a good story. Stories elicit an emotional response from the audience and help brands target specific audience segments.

Great brands don't sell, they make people feel - Richard Branson

Here’s an example of a viral video from Dell where they created a video about a touching story of a boy that made braille printers for the blind out of legos. The videos got 1.5M views on YouTube alone.

Video marketing builds trust and credibility

Video content is essential for building trust and credibility. According to Wyzowl, 77% of people that watched a brand’s testimonial video have reported that it played an important role in convincing them to purchase that brand’s product or service.

Having your customers create video reviews of your product is an amazing marketing tool for your business. Studies show that 79% of people watched a video testimonial to find out more about a company, product, or service, and 9 out of 10 people trust what a customer says about a business more than what the business says about itself.

Here’s an example of a video we did with Mike Allton, a well-known author, and social media influencer.

Video marketing generates leads and sales

Videos are the best way to sell a product or service. Studies show that 88% of consumers say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service after watching a brand’s video. And when asked how they would best like to learn about a product or service, 73% said they would prefer a short video.

Social media posts in video form are extremely powerful to grab the attention of mobile users. Video ad spending on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is expected to grow by 20.1% in 2022, to a whopping $24.35 billion.

Video marketing improves SEO

Studies show that 31% of marketers use video to help with their search engine optimization efforts. Videos get indexed by Google, especially if they are on YouTube. And that helps rank pages higher on search results. Videos also help visitors stay on a page longer, improving the user experiencing and signaling to search engines that the page has value.

Videos often get shared on social platforms which helps more people learn about a brand and go and Google them. We recently did a collaboration with Adam Erhart, the famous marketing YouTuber and got a bunch of people Googling “Mayple” after he published his video. Granted, that’s a branded keyword but if we posted this video on our blog post about digital marketing strategy it would improve its ranking.

Pro tip: invest in YouTube ads to promote a video and/or power up some search ads to get more traction for a specific blog post + video combination you’re trying to rank for.

Video marketing boosts social media engagement

Video marketing is an effective way to connect with your audience and boost impressions and engagement on social platforms. The ability to tell a story through visuals is a huge advantage for brands that want to stand out on social channels.

Online video content helps you connect with customers on an emotional level that other mediums cannot provide. It can also help you build your brand and establish trust among potential customers by showcasing the quality of your products or services. As a rule of thumb, videos get higher click-through rates than any other types of content on social. So use them often.

Social videos can include product videos, unboxing videos, giveaways, explainer videos, and really anything that can engage with your audience and tell your story. Here’s one of the most creative unboxing videos we’ve ever seen.

Types of marketing videos

Marketing videos can be broken down into four main categories:

• Product videos
• Tutorial or explainer videos
• How-to and customer testimonial videos
• Brand videos like your logo or brand voice video

Product videos

Product videos are a great way to show off your products. They can be used to demonstrate how a product works, how it's used, and why people would want to buy it. These types of videos can feature the product in different settings and situations as well as feature customers who have purchased the product in action.

Product videos are usually short so they can be easily shared online, making them ideal for social media marketing campaigns where short attention spans rule supreme.

Tutorial or explainer videos

Explainer videos are a great way to explain your product or service in a visual and engaging way. They're quick and easy to digest, which makes them perfect for landing pages, blog posts, or social media.

Explainer videos can also be used to help build trust with your audience. If you're selling a product or service that's new or unfamiliar, an explainer video can help people understand how it works.

You can do a short how-to video or a full-length tutorial. Repurpose them on your help pages, blog posts, podcasts, and social media channels.

How-to videos

How-to videos are a great way to educate your audience and help them solve a specific issue. You can use them to explain a specific product feature to your active users, show how to solve a specific problem, or showcase a product use case.

Customer testimonial videos

Customer testimonial videos (or video reviews) are a powerful tool for building trust, credibility, and brand recognition. They can also be used to build your sales funnel and improve SEO.

Your brand is much more believable when you have a customer testimonial video that tells the story of how a satisfied client or customer used your product or service and achieved great results.

Brand videos

Brand videos are a great way to promote your brand and help build a personal connection with your customers. They can be used in many different ways, from explaining the business mascot to showing off your office and employees. They are used by HR to showcase the brand and help build the team but they can also be used by video marketers for a brand awareness campaign or to help retain current customers.

Now that you know the type of content you can produce let’s walk through a step-by-step process of creating your video marketing strategy.

How to create a winning video marketing strategy

There are six steps to creating the perfect video strategy for your brand. They are as follows:

• Define your goals
• Understand your target audience
• Identify where video can strengthen your sales funnel
• Create compelling video content
• Distribute and promote your video
• Track your results

Step 1 - Define your goals

Before you get started, it's important to write down the goals you want to achieve by creating video content. Your goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

Specific - What exactly is your goal? Is it to increase traffic to your website? Increase email signups? Build a brand identity? This can be as broad or narrow as necessary depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

Measurable - How will you know when you've achieved this goal? How do you intend on measuring success? If possible, tie it back to concrete numbers (i.e., 100 more visitors per month).

Achievable - Is this something that's actually achievable through making videos and putting them out there in the world—or is it just wishful thinking? Make sure there's a path from where things are now to where they need to end up.

Realistic - Do not set yourself up for failure by setting super lofty ambitions. Keep it realistic by setting reasonable expectations. And if you don’t know what to expect, ask someone that’s done it before.

Time-bound - Set a deadline for every goal and for every action. When are things due? When should each team member finish their part of the video production to execute the entire project properly?

Step 2 - Understand your target audience

Now that you’ve set your video goals, you need to understand your audience on a deeper level. It's not enough to just know your audience demographics (who they are and what they do), you need to know the motivation or the why behind their behavior and shopping preferences.

When you create videos for your target audience, it's important that you are able to give them something that will benefit them in some way. This could be information or entertainment, but either way, the goal is always to help them solve a problem or meet an unmet need.

To do this successfully, you need to understand how your customers think and act—

• their pain points (what causes them pain?)
• their motivations (why do they behave in certain ways?)
• their needs (what are their most urgent needs?)
• demographics (age range, gender, income level)
• buying cycle (how long does it take between seeing an ad and making a purchase)
• social media habits (which social media platforms do they use the most?)
• online habits (what sites do they visit most frequently?)

Step 3 - Identify where video can strengthen your sales funnel

Video can be used in many ways to strengthen your sales funnel.

• Video can increase conversion rates on landing pages and entire websites
• Video content can decrease bounce rates by engaging your users longer
• Videos boosts customer engagement, which is a major factor in determining how long customers stay with a brand, their lifetime value and the likelihood they will refer others to the company.
• Finally, video is one of the most effective tools for increasing sales—especially if you have a strong brand or product that people trust.

A typical marketing funnel splits up into three parts and each one

Step 4 - Create compelling video content

Now that you have your goals and a better idea of who your audience is, it will be easier to create videos that are relevant and engaging.

Your video production checklist should include:

• Finalize your script
• Plan out your visual elements
• Shoot or create the content (if it’s an animated video)
• Add visual effects
• Review and edit

Video production has a lot of steps to it and you have to make sure you have the right talent on your marketing team. Some video marketers are better at shooting the videos, others are better at the editing process and post-production aspects. While others are best at the marketing efforts such as distributing and promoting the video.

Step 5 - Distribute and promote your video

Once you’ve created your video, it’s time to distribute and promote it. While the distribution options are many, not every single channel is going to be the right one for your business. Sometimes you need to test out different platforms to see what sticks.

Here are some of the most popular ways to promote your video content:

Social media

Posting your videos on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is a great way to get eyeballs. Social media platforms allow you to engage with your audience on a more personal level. Sometimes you have to repurpose your videos, change the format, or add visual effects specific to that platform to optimize the performance. You should also host your videos on YouTube or Vimeo to embed them on your site and blog content.

Pro tip: maximize your reach on each social media platform by using all the various video posts available. For example, test out reels on Instagram, short two-minute videos on YouTube, and Facebook Live.

Paid advertising

You shouldn’t rely on organic posting as your sole use for your videos. Algorithms change and organic reach is mediocre at best. You have to create a really viral video to see any traction on some of these platforms.

You should definitely use paid advertising to monetize your traffic. Use your video content in your social media ads on multiple platforms. You can use them for native advertising, for retargeting campaigns, or brand awareness campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

Step 6 - Track your results

After you've created your video content, the next step is to track its performance. This can be done using free tools like Google Analytics or YouTube analytics. Analyze how many people are watching your videos, where they're coming from (e.g., YouTube or Facebook), and what they're doing when they get there (e.g., signing up for an email list).

Track various metrics like:

• Bounce rates (how often do users leave the video and go back to the search results)
• View-through rates (number of completed views of a skippable ad over the number of initial impressions)
• Completion rate (how many users watch your video from start to finish)

Use this information to optimize future videos based on what's worked before and what hasn't worked as well as you'd hoped. Continue to A/B test different messaging, calls to action (CTAs), different styles of videos, types of video content, and multiple video creators.

Recap

Video is one of the most engaging forms of content. It can help you build trust with your audience, increase engagement on social media channels, boost your SEO, and generate leads and sales. The key to successful video content is knowing what type of video will work best for your message, audience, and brand.

Want to supercharge your video marketing efforts but don’t have the right talent on the team? Need help creating high-quality videos for your business? We can help! Find the perfect video marketer for your project today!