Troubleshooting — I Don’t Know Where to Start with Video Marketing

Running a business and standing out from the crowd is tough. Chances are you’ve hit a few roadblocks along the way when it comes to showcasing your brand in a positive light and increasing awareness. With this in mind, our all-new Contentworks Medium series is all about troubleshooting issues.

Today’s topic: Help! I don’t know where to start with video marketing!

Video Marketing Stats

Firstly, let’s kick off with why video marketing is absolutely essential. The stats speak for themselves and so there’s really no excuse for putting video on the back burner.

· Video will count for 80% of all internet traffic by 2021

· 55% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support

· 87% of marketing professionals use video marketing — don’t get left behind

· Video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year

· The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video — great for SEO

· 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service

The market is there. And so is the evidence that video marketing leads to results. But how can you do it?

#1 Know Your Target Audience

Before you even pick up a camera or think about a video script, you’ve got to cover the basics. You wouldn’t speak to your Grandma like you do friends down the bar, right? So, you must know your video marketing audience. This will heavily shape what you have to say. Analysing data and understanding company demographics is an essential part of video production. If you’re targeting millennials, for instance, you can delve deeper knowing that they are impatient and therefore need bite size material.

#2 Know Your Goals

Once you know who you’re talking to you must work out why you want to create video content — aside from that’s it’s awesome and necessary in today’s competitive market. What are your main goals? Do you want to improve click-through rates to your website? Do you want to promote a product launch or revamped service? Perhaps you want to improve the authenticity of your company by introducing key team members? Video has a whole load of advantages and once you know what you want to achieve you can incorporate that much needed call to action (CTA) in your content.

Why are CTAs so important? Well, they make it absolutely clear what you want consumers to do. They can also drive your campaign getting those much-needed click-throughs which can increase ROI. Incredibly, CTAs with a strong personalised message can increase your conversion rates by over 202%. So, this is something to take into account regarding email segmentation which allows you to address consumers at different parts of the sales funnel in a unique way.

#3 Choose a Video Style

There are three types of video content that tends to be highly effective. And each play a different role. You can pair your video style with your chosen goals (see how it’s good to break this down in stages?)

The three main types are:

Awareness videos: These are highly entertaining and have a broad appeal. They attract as many people as possible increasing brand awareness. Awareness videos can include roundups such as ‘top ten XXX’. They can also be ‘meet the team’ videos. Meet MailChimp: Joanna is one example which showcases a MailChimp front-end developer explaining what she does and how she approaches work.

Top tip: Creativity is key. Think about what you can do to entertain your audience in a fun and interesting way. Remember, introducing team members also adds to the credibility of your company as it humanises your brand and makes it more relatable.

Engagement videos: Videos focused on consumer engagement are designed to spark a physical reaction be it a like, comment or share. Videos in this category are funny and play on people’s emotions. They should spark conversation and interest across multiple social media channels. Think viral.

Melbourne Metro’s Dumb Ways to Die video is a great example. Promoting rail safety, the original YouTube video has been viewed a whopping 178 million times.

Warburton’s #GoodBagels advert featuring bagel mobster Robert De Niro has also caused quite a stir recently with the YouTube video alone racking up an impressive 332,000 views in just two weeks. It’s also caused a positive stir across social media platforms like Twitter.

Educational videos: Educational videos teach your audience. These can be in the form of how-to video/explainers, product reviews or a Q&A session. Don’t also be afraid to go live to increase interaction.

#4 Think About Video Creation

Once you’ve thought about the basics, it’s now time to produce your video. Agencies like Contentworks can help with both the video script and shoot but there’s a few things you should thing about! These include:

· Where to shoot the video

· If you’ll feature team members

· If you’ll feature influencers

· Key messages

· Your CTA

· Tone of voice

Top tip: Don’t leave the planning stage until the last minute especially if you’re meeting with creatives as they’ll want to hear at least some of your input to ensure you’re all on the same page. Similarly, if you’ve lines to learn — learn them, well. It’s a colossal waste of time and money to have to reshoot over and over again!

#5 Think about Video Placement

Making a video is one thing, but where are you going to show it off? Your website? Social media? Television? Not sure where to start? Well again it all depends on what you want to achieve. If brand awareness is your main goal, then an attention-grabbing video distributed across social media channels will help drive people to your site. If you’re looking to entertain existing consumers and get them to share your message, then you need to hang out where they do — and that requires research. What’s more, if you want to educate a niche audience, popping a longer explainer video on professional sites like LinkedIn or your homepage may be more effective due to the targeted content.

Contact the Contentworks team today for content marketing including high quality videos and scripts.