What is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is all about using video to promote or market your brand, product or service. Video marketing incorporates video into the mix. customer testimonials, videos from live events, how-to videos, explainer videos, corporate training videos, viral and entertainment videos. Video marketing is one of the important part of digital marketing.
Why Video Marketing?
With videos increasing the likelihood of customers making a purchase by 144%, including this extremely effective communication tool in your marketing strategy is a no-brainer. While most marketers picture insanely high budgets and production teams when imagining themselves creating videos, the truth is that a great video isn’t guaranteed by these elements. In fact, it’s guaranteed by the content in the video and whether or not it resonates with your target audience. This step by step guide to video marketing should help you craft an effective plan.
Start by creating a production plan
A production plan typically consists of everything that you need to control while making your videos. So, this plan can be as simple as a script that you and your team are following, to as complex as a document that lays out rules for camera angles, lighting, and sound. While creating your production plan, you must start by identifying your overall goals for the video, and then focus on making a roadmap that gets you there. Storyboarding can be one of the most effective tools that you can use while creating a production plan.
Once you’ve outlined all the main elements of your plan, you must share the same with your team so that they can offer their inputs. This way, collaborating later while creating the video itself (and while editing) becomes much easier as everyone is on the same page with regards to the final output that is expected. If you create your production plan in a manner that identifies specific milestones for you and your team to hit while creating the video, you can even use it to track your progress and ensure that your team can adhere to the final deadline.
Show off your brand’s voice
As video marketing has become such a huge part of marketing itself, practically everyone is offering videos. So, the challenge here is to stand out from the clutter. One of the best ways to do so is by sticking to your brand’s voice. This not only helps your audience connect with your content, but also ensures that there is a certain level of brand authenticity in your work.
A great way to ensure that your content strikes the right chords with your audience is by getting them invested in your journey. Tell them why you’re here, what you offer, what makes you better, and why they should care -without sounding overtly promotional!
Explain your product or service coherently
While you may find certain aspects of your product or service to be quite obvious, you must take the time out to explain the same to your audience. One of the easiest ways to do this is by talking about pain points that your product aims to solve, rather than only explaining the features or benefits of the same. This way, you can ensure that members of your target audience actually relate to what you’re saying. This boosts your chances of product adoption significantly.
Be entertaining and informational
A video isn’t meant to be a snooze-fest. Make sure that it is as entertaining as possible, while also delivering the information that’s needed. This way, your consumers will not get bored and switch to a different webpage. They’ll be drawn in by your content and may just feel inspired to try your product or service. Of course, this balance is hard to strike. You don’t want to venture into slapstick territory just to make your video entertaining, and leave audiences confused about the whole point of the video itself!
Write a compelling narrative
Think of your video as a story that you’re telling the world. Why are you telling it? What’s the point? What’s the conflict in the middle of the story? You must define all of these aspects before you start actually creating the video itself. Write a script and flesh out your ideas, and then share the same with your team to see whether your ideas are coming through to them or not. As stated earlier, content should be a collaborative process so that each phase of development runs smoothly. Once your first video has been created, think beyond it to understand whether you can sustain constant video production. Then, rinse and repeat.
Video marketing is an extremely effective tool when it comes to getting the word out about your brand and ensuring that more people are open to trying your product or service. Make sure that you invest enough time to be able to come up with a long-term marketing plan for your videos, otherwise you’ll find that your efforts are sporadic and rarely hit home.
Do keep an eye out on what your competitors are doing – it’s imperative to be aware of competition but do not copy them (even if they are successful) because then your content will just be lost in a sea of their work.
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