There are a lot of creative, interesting and compelling ways to use video marketing as part of your larger content marketing strategy. For example, whiteboard animations help you take large concepts and break them into smaller parts so they’re easily understood by an audience. Along with the use of whiteboard animations, you can use 2D and 3D animations, live action videos, and short-form video content to be shared on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
While the options and opportunities with video marketing are nearly limitless, video production does take resources. You want to be strategic in where you’re putting those resources and you want to have a specific plan for how you fit all of the pieces of your bigger content approach together with one another, for something that’s effective and cohesive.
Below are six things to keep in mind when it comes to creating a video marketing strategy.
1. Know Your Goals
Any marketing campaign, whether it’s video-based or otherwise, needs to start with a strong understanding of your audience and then your subsequent goals.
If you create great video content, but you’re putting in on platforms your targeted audience doesn’t visit, as an example, it becomes a problem.
Along with knowing your goals and audience, think about what you want to achieve with each particular type of video content. For example, do you want to drive awareness, traffic or sales? Maybe you want to do all three.
When you have an idea of who you want to reach and what you want to achieve, then you can get your tone correct, and your messaging.
Your goals can shift over time, but you have to put something in place to begin building out your strategy.
2. Choose a Video Type
There are a lot of different types of videos, and the ones you choose to integrate into your strategy should align with your larger goals.
Options include:
- Educational: These informative videos create brand awareness, and they’re more formal and polished. When you’re creating an education video, the goal is to come off as an expert and authority.
- Explainer: These videos are also educational, but they can be a way to solve a very specific problem. They might be more concise than an educational video.
- Behind-the-scenes: This type of video format is perfect to give people a view of what your brand and your people are all about.
- Interviews: You can interview leadership in your company, employees or customers. Interview-based video marketing lends to a sense of authenticity for your brand.
- Narrative: These are story-based videos that tend to evoke strong emotions from your audience. They can be documentary-style and you would typically want to highlight how your product or service solved a larger problem for someone.
- Product: If you want to show the features and benefits of a product or service, you can make a video where you’re putting it into action.
- Testimonials: These are similar to interview-based videos, but they’re a good way to drive someone to make a purchase.
3. Plan Your Production
You’ll want to have a content production plan in place, because this is going to save time and money.
If you’re going to outsource your video production, the company you work with can help you here. If not, you’ll have a lot to think about including the script, the equipment you’ll need, storyboarding, and planning the shoot. You’ll have to hire talent, get a location, figure out editing, and also identify the music that you can use.
4. Decide Where You’ll Post Content
Once you create a video, you’ll have to decide where it’s going to be hosted. It’s best to maximize your reach and engagement as much as possible meaning that you upload your video to all the platforms where it makes sense.
You can put it on your own website, you can use it in your email marketing campaigns, and of course, you’re going to want to include it on social media channels including YouTube.
While you want to expand your reach as much as you can, you have to choose locations for distribution that are going to make sense for you and your audience.
Since it’s likely you are going to post your videos on at least a few social media sites, you want to think about not only where your audience is most likely to be spending their time, but where your videos are going to best fit in.
For example, an educational or tutorial style video might be best on your website and in your email marketing, while a brand identity video or something shorter could work well on Instagram or Facebook. A whiteboard video could be something that goes on your site, but also on YouTube.
5. Promotion
Once you’ve reached this point, you should have produced a video and you should have some specific goals in mind for it. You should also have a good idea of where you’re going to be posting it and how you’re going to reach your audience, but your strategy still needs to spell out a concrete plan for promotion.
You can promote it originally, but you might also want to pay to promote your video.
6. Analyzing Metrics
Early on as you’re setting goals for your video marketing, you should have a general idea of the metrics you want to assess.
You don’t know how your video performs unless you know what to analyze as far as metrics, and how these are relevant to you.
Every platform where you share your video should have its own native analytics, and the metrics you assess have to be in line with your goals. For example, if you made a video with the goal of awareness for your brand, the biggest metric you might look at is impressions or views.
Finally, from there, you can integrate this data and information into your strategy going forward, and you’ll see how your strategy compounds on itself and grows over time, with the more information you can gather.
