What is Video Marketing and How Does it Work?
Video marketing isn’t only a welcomed addition to an overall digital marketing strategy but is undoubtedly the future of engagement and content consumption, making it a modern marketer’s dream on all fronts.
Whether you’re the average Gen Z content creator that spends hours and hours on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, OR you’re a brand/organization in search of the next best way to successfully promote a product or service, video marketing is at play in a big way.
Emerging as an all-but-necessary and effective digital strategy, B2B and B2C video marketing is an incredible tool for engagement, reach, impressions, CTRs, and ultimately, conversions; What more could you ask for?!
With that said, in what follows, we’ll be diving into the world of video, detailing what video marketing is, how it works, and why it’s beneficial to businesses, brands, and creators alike.
What is Video Marketing?
Video has become a primary component of the majority of effective digital content strategies today, especially recently. In short, video marketing is a tool, tactic, and strategy implemented by brands, organizations, and creators alike to engage and attract a target audience via visual and oftentimes interactive content.
While video content, both short form and long form, has been around for some time now, only in recent years have businesses and brands begun to use it as a primary content strategy across marketing funnels, paid media, and organic social feeds to attract leads, boost awareness, improve identity, engage, and ultimately boost conversion rates.
So, you may be curious as to what the tangible benefits of video marketing are… Continue reading to learn more!
The Most Common Video Marketing Benefits
As discussed, whether short form, long form, or a duration in between, video content has made itself a household name in content marketing in recent years, and for obvious reasons.
Not only has it proven to attract, engage, and convert leads effectively, but it’s also been organically shown by consumers to have become the primarily desired medium of consuming content. Not to mention, it comes with an entire host of additional benefits that marketers can’t help but drool over!
Simply put and from a marketing standpoint, you want to put your energy where the majority of leads reside. As mentioned above, today, the majority of eyes are spent watching videos. In fact, 78% of online users report that they watch videos weekly. More than half of those individuals admit to consuming such content daily. Finally, with the average weekly watch-time topping 16-hours, it’s safe to assume that video marketing is here to stay…
As for its effectiveness from a business/marketing standpoint, of those who consume video, 95% absorb its messaging; a sheer feat considering the lack of attention span that today’s generations have.
Lastly, implementing a video into your content strategy, and more specifically, your landing page, has been shown to boost conversion rates by 80%! I mean, what more could you ask for?!
To summarize, video marketing has many benefits depending on your intent and execution. Below is a bulleted list of those benefits:
- Increases total ROI
- Improves brand awareness and identity
- Boosts engagement
- Increases conversion rates
- Ranks highly in SEO
Provides consumers what they want; Increases satisfaction - Grows the bottom line (i.e. Revenue)
Video Marketing Tips
Developing an effective video marketing strategy isn’t as simple as one might assume. In fact, it can be quite a tedious creative process. If executed effectively, however, the benefits and ROI that follow are incomparable.
What follows are some helpful and important video marketing tips for you to consider when seeking to develop an effective video marketing strategy…
Define Your Audience
What’s your buyer’s persona? In other words, what are their interests, behaviors, demographics, and so on? Clearly defining who your target audience is and where they spend most of their time (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.) will save you from future headaches and strategic mistakes.
Know Your Brand Goals
What’s the intent behind the video and video marketing strategy at large? In other words, what do you want to get out of it; what’s your overarching brand goal? Clearly defining your goals and aligning your video content with said goals is the fastest way to success; the more specific you are, the higher rate of success you will see.
Highlight Your Unique Selling Proposition
While defining your audience and setting goals are necessary steps for creating an effective marketing strategy, highlighting your USP will set your content apart from the rest.
Keep it Clear & Concise
If you don’t capture the audience’s attention within the first 5-10 seconds, you’ve lost the lead no matter how good the video is. In fact, the average adult’s attention span is 8 seconds!
Sparingly Add Music, Animations, & Effects
An engaging video involves captivating tactics that draw your audience in and retain them for the duration of the video. A few ways to do this are by adding relevant music, animations, and video effects. Do so sparingly though, for it may annoy the viewer and result in high bounce rates if you overdo it.
Harness SEO
A high-quality video is fine and dandy, however, without SEO, it’s not going to reach a significant enough audience size. That’s the power of SEO; more to come on this subject shortly!
Don’t Forget About a Call-to-Action!
The primary intention of a video in a promotional sense is to attract a customer to take some type of action. In order for them TO take action, you need to include a call to action! Provide them with instructions and the action will follow.
In Summary
Video Marketing is an incredibly useful strategy for businesses and brands, as portrayed throughout this article; that is if you implement and execute it effectively.
When sitting down to develop a cohesive video marketing strategy, be sure to begin by clarifying brand goals and identifying target audiences. Soon enough, you’ll have launched a successful video campaign, tracked its analytics and performance across time, and have begun to see major growth in your content and business at large.
If you want to explore new ways to use video as strategy to raise brand awareness and improve your sales, feel free to check our live shopping platform.
