Video Marketing 101: Basics And Best Practices

August 4, 2021 - 13 minutes read - Contributed Posts, Video Marketing

The purpose of video marketing is to leverage video content to reach a target audience. When creating a video marketing campaign, you set an objective you want to achieve—such as increasing sales, creating brand awareness, or building social media engagement. You can also use video marketing to improve customer service or grow traffic to a website. 

Video marketing is a trend no marketer can ignore. According to Social Media Today, 81% of businesses use video as part of their marketing strategies, and 72% of consumers prefer to learn about products and services by watching videos. In this article, I’ll provide a few examples of videos you can use to boost your marketing efforts, and present a few essential best practices that can make your video marketing efforts a success.

9 Types of Marketing Videos

There are many types of video content you can use for your marketing campaigns. Here are several popular options:

1. Demo videos

The purpose of a demo video is to show how your product or service works. Some demo videos are screencasts showing how a software product works, but there are also videos showing physical products being unpacked and used. 

2. Brand videos

Typically, you create a brand video as part of a larger advertising campaign. A brand video helps you show the vision and mission of your company, products, or services. It is usually created for the purpose of increasing visibility and engaging the target audience.

3. Event videos

An event video showcases events held in or by or for the organization. Fundraising events, conferences, and roundtable events, for example. You can create a video that showcases highlights from the event, an interesting interview, or a speech.

4. Expert interviews

You can interview experts and leaders in your field to demonstrate authority and build credibility and trust with your audience. You can conduct discussions in front of an audience, in the form of a panel discussion, or film a simple interview.

5. Educational or how-to videos

You can create instructional videos that help teach something new or build foundational knowledge your audience needs to better understand your products and services. Sales and customer service teams can also leverage these videos when assisting prospective and existing customers.

6. Explainer videos

The purpose of an explainer video is to convince your audience why they need your service or product. You can use an explainer video to create a fictional journey that showcases the problem your audience is struggling with and how your product helps them overcome this issue.

7. Case study and customer testimonial videos

A case study video can help you demonstrate to prospective audiences how your product is already solving this problem for similar audiences. You can also create testimonial videos showcasing loyal and satisfied customers advocating for your. 

8. Live videos

A live video can help your audience get a real-time look at your business. Studies indicate that people prefer live videos—spending as much as 8X longer viewing live videos compared to on-demand videos. You can leverage this option to stream presentations, events, and interviews, and promote engagement by encouraging viewers to ask questions.

9. Augmented reality (AR) videos

You can use AR technology to engage your audience, enabling them to immerse themselves inside a digital world where they can try out your product.  

Essential Video Marketing Best Practices

Here are a few best practices that will help you make the most of your marketing videos.

Create Content People are Interested In

There is no need to guess what people are looking for. There are many tools that can help you learn what problems your audience is trying to solve. You can use Google Trends to check what keywords are trending, for example. There are many other online tools that can help you discover keywords and topics widely used by your audience.  

In addition to using basic search tools, you should also conduct in-depth research to ensure there is a market for your video. Ideally, your video should solve a problem for the audience. There is a massive amount of content on the Internet—make sure your video provides added value.

Pick a Data Platform

Like all your marketing efforts, video marketing campaigns should be analyzed to ensure they are achieving the desired results. You can assess your marketing campaign by collecting data. In some cases, the platform you use to run the campaign also provides data. In other cases, you might need to integrate with additional tools. 

Here are several tools you can use to collect data and measure the effectiveness of your video campaigns:

• Video hosting—you can leverage data functionality offered by the platform hosting your video. Hosting platforms typically provide a wide range of metrics, including impressions, basic viewer demographics, video views, and view-through rates. You can also learn about the behavior of viewers after watching your video. Be sure to choose a host that lets you embed your video in a variety of locations.
• Social media platforms—you can leverage insights provided by your social media platform of choice. The majority of platforms come with native video players that let you upload videos directly to your account. Once you publish your video, the platform collects data and provides insights into its internal analytics interface.
• Analytics tools—you can integrate video platforms with big data analytics tools that collect and analyze data. These platforms can centralize your marketing efforts—including ads, social media posts, referral sources—and information about your audiences. You can leverage analytics tools to get a unified view of all marketing campaigns from one platform.
• Video APIs—application programming interfaces (APIs) like the YouTube API, Facebook Live API, and Cloudinary video API can help you automate video delivery and processing and gain programmatic access to video performance data. 

Optimize for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can help make your video discoverable to audiences looking for relevant products and services. 

Here are several SEO techniques you can apply to your video content:

• Create a compelling title that includes a keyword and clearly explains what users can expect from the video.
• Include a complete description that includes keywords and explains what content is included in your video.
• Attach a clickable table of contents that shows an outline of the topics covered in your video.
• Add subtitles to the video for accessibility purposes. You can also include subtitles in other languages to appeal to different audiences.
• Include a series of relevant tags to help viewers find your video when searching for content.
• Engage with comments on your videos, for example by responding to comments, answering the questions of viewers, and providing additional resources.

Create Mobile-Friendly Content

A substantial amount of traffic comes from mobile devices. To ensure a positive experience for all users, you need to create mobile-friendly video content. Here are some techniques you can use:

• Plan for sound off—many users prefer viewing without sound and social media platforms picked up on this preference. In Facebook, for example, videos are displayed without sound and users need to actively turn it on. To ensure your video content delivers a message without sound, add text to your video.
• Plan for the small screen—mobile devices are not ideal for complex video with many intricate details. To ensure your message comes through, you should create a story that can be clearly seen on a small screen. For example, if you add text, use a big font that displays clearly and is big enough to be read on mobile devices.
• Preview on a mobile device—test your videos before launching a marketing campaign. View the video on your device (and ideally other devices as well) to ensure it comes through well. 

Repurpose Your Content

You can repurpose your video to create additional value for your audience. Here are several options:

• Create a text transcript—you can post transcripts to web pages containing your video. This can help add content and keywords that help with search engine optimization. You can also use transcripts to ensure all users can take advantage of the content. Additionally, you can take quotes from transcripts and use them in other marketing materials like press releases.
• Create a podcast from your video’s audio—you can distribute the audio as a podcast through various platforms, including Apple Podcasts. You can use this marketing channel as a way to reach additional audiences.
• Create still images from the videos—you can post images from your video on several social media platforms, including Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. Be sure to add a link back to your website or the original video.

Conclusion

In this article, I presented the basics of video marketing and showed five simple best practices that can make it more effective:

1. Create content people are interested in – by researching topics and keywords favored by your target audience 
2. Pick a data platform – choose how to monitor your video activity, using analytics from video hosting platforms, social media, or your own marketing analytics software.
3. Optimize for search engines – add titles and relevant keywords to ensure your video is picked up and preferred by search engines.
4. Create mobile-friendly content – remember that a majority of consumers view a video on mobile, and ensure video content is easily consumable on small screens.
5. Repurpose your content – leverage your investment in video content to create textual content and distribute video content across multiple platforms.

I hope this will be of help as you leverage the power of video in your future marketing efforts.

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Tags: marketing tips, Video Marketing, video marketing content, video marketing ideas, video marketing strategy