An Entrepreneur’s Guide To Video Marketing

Video first came to the limelight in 2005 with the birth of the video-sharing platform, Youtube. Back then, the cost was one of the major setbacks associated with video marketing. Fast forward to 2022, the popularity of video is skyrocketing through the roof.

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With impressive camera-friendly mobiles, an abundance of resources, and convenient editing software, video marketing has now become accessible to everyone. 

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As social media platforms began cropping up one by one, an amazing discovery came to light. As it turned out, consumers preferred video content over the plain Jane image and text-based posts.  72% of consumers say that they’d rather watch a video about a product than read a product description 

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Today, video marketing has become a must-have aspect, and neglecting it is no longer an option for brands.

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In this blog post, we’ll help you break down the ins and outs of video marketing, help you understand the different ways to deploy them as well as guide you on your strategy.

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What is Video Marketing?

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Video marketing is the process of ideating, creating, and distributing videos in order to promote a brand, product, or service. It’s a broad umbrella under which many types of videos reside.

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Educational Videos

These are videos that help customers gain valuable information. They serve as foundational knowledge in the awareness phase of the buying journey when consumers are desperate for answers to their burning questions. You can also use such videos to raise awareness about an existing problem that they didn’t know they had and therefore encourage them to find out more. The most common educational videos are how-to videos, tutorials, webinars, masterclasses, etc.

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Case Study and Customer Testimonial Videos

Prospects today are inundated with a ton of options. And so before they buy they need to make sure that your product can solve their specific problem.  

In fact, 92% of customers read online reviews before buying.

One of the best ways to showcase proof is by requesting your advocates a.k.a your loyal customers to share their wins and success stories. A typical customer testimonial video outlines the problems that they faced, the other solutions that they tried and failed, the experience using your product, and the specific results that they obtained. The more specific the details, the more impact they carry. 

Not only do they act as social proof but they also help prospects visualize and believe that the same transformation is possible for them too. These videos are great additions to the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey to boost the nudge in your favor. It can be a simple testimonial video, a Q&A-style video, or even a user-generated video.

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Product Videos

As the name suggests, product videos are demo videos that showcase how a product works. It gives your audience a glimpse of your top-selling products and services in action — whether that includes a walkthrough of your SaaS service, a product unboxing, or a video breakdown of a course.

These types of videos do a phenomenal job of hooking the attention of new customers as well as gaining the vote of customers who are in the product research phase. Product videos are a standout choice to share on websites, social media platforms, or even paid ads. 

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Brand Videos

Brand videos are created with the intention of sharing business ethos with the world and are generally the result of an awareness marketing campaign. While these videos have no sales intent behind them, they help brands showcase their values, vision, mission, products, or even the team behind them. This helps to increase trust in your brand, cement a relationship with consumers and rally a group of loyal followers.

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Entertainment Videos

Created solely to engage and entertain these videos can include a range — from story-based videos to blooper reels. It could be anything that is relevant to your brand, industry, or niche. These videos present a wonderful opportunity for you to provide a virtual peek, share behind-the-scenes of your brand, and humanize the brand.

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Why should you get started with video marketing?

1. Encourages social shares

Video is having a limelight moment on almost all social media platforms today. The reason being — people enjoy watching videos. They're easy to consume, accessible, and entertaining. The engagement stats and shares on social media videos stand at an all-time high. This means for little to no extra effort you can now reach more people and increase your visibility through video.

2. Improves SEO 

Video marketing is much more than an engagement booster. With industry leader, YouTube, being the second-largest of the search engines, video plays a versatile role in improving organic rankings.

It’s not just Youtube, Google also prioritizes its front page results for videos that are optimized with relevant keywords. This ensures organic traffic and also gives your search ranking a boost because of the extended time visitors spend engaging on the page.

3. Boosts conversions

Video marketing plays a crucial role when it comes to conversion and sales. The combination of our dominant sense of vision and audio has the power to ignite emotions and influence buying decisions. In fact, studies have shown that incorporating videos into your website, product pages, and landing pages can increase conversions by 144%. 

4. Mobile Friendly

Mobile users form an overwhelming majority of internet users today. The combination of the widespread use of mobile phones and accessible videos is actively driving the growth of video consumption. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that you now have the opportunity to reach a wider, global audience at any time and day.

5. Builds trust

Trust is the foundation of all business and marketing endeavors. Most consumers today, are still dubious of buying products online because of the fear of deceit and fraud. Effective marketing videos scripted in a conversational tone can help to ease those fears, foster trust in the brand, and give them more confidence to take the final action.

6 Steps To Build A Video Marketing Strategy

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1. Set your video marketing goals.

As in any marketing venture, setting goals is a must. Clearly determining what your goals are will help inform and successfully execute the following steps of the strategy. Reflect on what transformation you hope to bring about with video marketing.

What is the intent and purpose of your goals?

Is it brand awareness? Product promotion? Or sales?

Since video marketing entails a dozen different video formats, a strategic approach would be to create videos that intentionally target each step of the marketing funnel.

Suppose your goal is to attract new customers, you’ll need to create an awareness video that educates the audience. 

If you want to nurture your prospects you’ll want to create a video for the consideration phase. For example, A video that highlights your product benefits and its unique selling proposition. 

If you want to ramp up your promotion, you’ll need to round up a decision-influencing video with a compelling case study.

If you want to delight and acknowledge your loyal customers, you can include a thoughtful video message from the founder. 

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2. Understand your target audience  

Devising a video without a specific audience in mind is like taking a shot in the dark. If you don't cater the video to a distinct audience, it won’t reach the intended people, and those who do watch will ignore it because of the lack of relatability.

In order to create videos that click with your audience, you need to understand what triggers their engagement. One of the simple ways of bringing this into action is by relating to their challenges.

This is where a customer persona can help. This is a report that clearly maps out a customer profile from the target audience. It lays out the demographics and psychographics information of the buyer. With this mapped out, you’ll know precisely who your ideal audience is and what makes them tick. 

3. Content Brainstorming

This next phase of the strategy involves the ideation and outlining of video content. This is where you utilize the customer persona data to inform your content ideas. Delve into the challenges that your prospects face and then attempt to solve them through your videos and product eventually. Explore different types of videos and figure out which would speak to your audience. 

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4. Shooting and Editing 

Once the ideas are locked in, it's time to bring them to vision. You could either shoot the video yourself or hire a videographer to create it. 

Unfortunately, human attention spans run terribly low. No matter how good the camera or talent is, if your video doesn’t have a strong engagement factor, it will flop. That’s why you need a strong enough hook that can jar the reader from a state of monotony to wired attention. No matter what don’t indulge in clickbait.

Once you’ve drawn their attention, make it worth their while. Get your point across quickly, and ensure to leave them more educated, engaged, or entertained than before.

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5. Distributing

Next, it's time to share the videos and amplify their reach. There are a plethora of options to promote your videos when it comes to video marketing. From websites, social media, emails, and paid ads, the options are endless. 

In order to get the right video exposure, you need to carefully choose the right platforms based on your target audience. Depending on your persona, you might have to choose a specific platform while ignoring the others.

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Pro Tip: Deploy your video marketing strategy starting from your owned media and then expand into earned and paid media channels.

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6. Measure and Optimize  

In order to determine if your marketing efforts are paying off, you need to measure and optimize your strategy.

Video analytics have a ton of different metrics where each number denotes a piece of very definite information about your video's performance. Ideally, your metrics for the definition of success should depend on the relevance of the goals that you’ve set in the first place. Some of the most common video metrics are play rates, click-through rates, engagement rates, and conversions.    

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Conclusion

Video is the content of the future and is an incredibly powerful channel that continues to flourish. Not only has it transformed how businesses market but it has also revolutionized how consumers make buying decisions. Plus the most anticipated roll-out of 5G is further setting the stage for a larger revolution, opening up an entire universe of opportunity for businesses that are looking to uplevel their marketing. 

If you’re looking to start or improve your video marketing strategy but don’t have the bandwidth to do it all by yourself, then reach out to Growthhub.

At Growthhub, we’re obsessed with helping businesses like yours get the growth it deserves. 

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Get in touch with us and we can match you with videographers, marketers, content creators, and influencers in as little as 24 hrs. We screen and pre-vet the marketers on our platform, so you don’t have to. Book a call with us today!

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