Definition of Video Marketing
If a photo’s worth a thousand words, then how much more valuable is video? That’s the basis of video marketing, a forward-facing marketing strategy that integrates engaging video into your marketing campaigns.
Video marketing can be used for everything from building customer rapport, to promoting your brand, services or products. Additionally, video marketing can serve as a medium to present how-to’s, promote customer testimonials, live-stream events and deliver viral (entertaining) content.
How Video Marketing Works
On the surface, the how of video marketing is pretty simple: Your brand creates videos that, in some way or another, promote your company, drive sales, raise awareness of your products or services, or engage your customers. In practice, it’s a little more complicated. Like many of your marketing efforts, video marketing is data-driven, so you’ll want to monitor various metrics and track customer engagement.
To develop your video marketing strategy, you’ll want to:
- Allocate resources. You’re going to need to designate some budget for video – at the least, decent equipment, good editing software, and a video marketing guru (or, better, team) – as well as time to create it.
- Tell your stories. Storytelling has never been as important as it is in the video, so get brainstorming: What stories do you want to tell? How will you tell them?
- Engage. It’s not enough to simply tell your stories; you must engage your audience while you do so. How will you make your stories interesting? What will hook your audience?
- Keep it short. There’s no set length for marketing videos, but the general rule is that shorter is better. Be ruthless with your editing. Cut, cut, cut out everything extraneous. Attention spans are short, so make the best of what you get.
- Publish. Publish your videos far and wide – embedded in your website, uploaded to Google-owned YouTube, and on all your social media channels. Then, promote, promote, promote.
- Analyze. Track metrics and stats, to determine which videos do the best – and why.
Benefits of Video Marketing
The benefits of video marketing are many. Let’s begin with the easily quantifiable:
- Video helps you connect with your audience. Today, so much of a company’s marketing efforts are designed to help build trust. Video is the bridge that links what you say to who you really are, allowing customers to peer behind the curtain and get to know your brand.
- Video is an SEO gold mine, helping build backlinks to your site, boosting likes and shares (which can effect search rankings), and driving traffic to your site. And let’s not forget that YouTube is owned by Google, so be sure to post your videos to YT and tag, tag, tag with keywords/key phrases!
- Videos boost information retention. If your customers hear something only, they’re likely to retain about 10% of that information three days later; by contrast, if what they hear is accompanied by relevant imagery, they’ll retain an average 65% of that information three days later.
- In 2017, video content will account for an estimated 74% of all online traffic. Your customers love video. Would-be customers also love video, which means good video marketing can attract new visitors.
- Email subject lines that include the word “video” see a 19% increase in open rates, and a 65% boost in click-throughs.
- Four times as many customers would prefer to watch a product video, than read a product description.
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