What is video marketing?
Video marketing is the strategy that uses video content to attract, engage and inform your audience about your brand’s products or services. It’s a highly valuable approach, with reports showing that video marketing can increase conversion rates by 80%, and it’s also what audiences want to see! 50% of consumers want to see video content from brands over any other type of content. When you consider that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (only after its owner – Google), brands ignoring the value of video marketing are missing out on capitalising on an audience hungry for their content.
Adam Britton, MD shares five crucial tips on how to get the best ROI for your video marketing spend.
1. Considering ‘why?’
The most important part of any strategy is the planning phase – having a good understanding of why you’re choosing to invest in a particular video marketing campaign and what you want to achieve. Whether your aims are to drive traffic to your website, gain new subscribers, or to sell a specific product, its essential that you set out SMART objectives early on.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
This will help keep what success looks like in terms of ROI and how your marketing activity is fulfilling your wider business goals at the forefront of your campaign. This informs your video marketing roadmap. Typically, there are various people involved brand-side on a video campaign. So it’s important everyone is aligned with why you’re doing this and what you’re aiming to achieve.
A brand manager might want to do a video campaign solely for brand awareness, whereas a sales director wants a bucket of warm leads landing in their inbox. Will one video do both? Maybe, but more often than not, you might want to create two different cuts or campaigns that achieve these desired results. This helps when it comes to analysing the performance, as we can always look back at “the why” to quantify whether the campaign has been a success.
2. Think long term
Stop thinking about your next project and think about the next 6-12 months. How can you get the most out of your budget to stretch over the longest period of time? You most likely know your budget for the year, so work with your agency to map that budget out, rather than going to them with a dedicated pot for each project. This helps you produce more content, more cost effectively. Some content may be able to be reused over different projects, and it means the dedicated shoot days can be maximised, capturing as much footage as possible with the long term plan in mind at all times.
3. Make a decision on your headline before picking the camera up
David Ogilvey said, “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar“.
This still stands today, for example – this article could be called “Video marketing must-do’s”, but because we’ve added in a hook which is probably the use of, “ROI” we’ve got you this far. There’s two sides to this (this also depends on your objectives). But if you’re looking to gain organic traffic and build an audience on YouTube, then you’re going to need to consider SEO, find out what users are searching for and create a title that meets that criteria as well as matches your content.
Creating compelling and attention grabbing headlines is also important for obvious reasons, however, I cannot stress this enough, if your content doesn’t match your headline – you’re just going to be a click-bait fiend, and we know that’s an excellent way to irritate your audience and waste budget. Start with the reason you want the viewer to watch, work through the value you are offering and have the headline grab the attention your video deserves. Simple.
4. Channel consideration is key
This is a hotly contested debate, with some experts saying you should post everything on all of your social channels as someone might not follow you on one channel but they might on another. The other argument is that each video should be shot and cut specific for each channel. Your audience follows you on each of those channels for different reasons, they want to see different types of content on each, if they see the same videos spread across all platforms, they might as well only follow you on one.
Also, resist posting your TV ads on social! This content has been carefully crafted and designed for TV for a reason. That’s not to say that content can’t be adapted for digital, and this might be a good way to get more from your budget, but the key is knowing your channels as well as you know your audience and then delivering content that means something or benefits them in some way.
5. The art of storytelling
Yes, of course, throughout your full campaign you’ll have direct short sales message videos. But your engagement is going to come from the videos that create value for the viewer. This could be informative, emotive, nostalgic, funny, or even a mix of a few. Selling in your videos decreases engagement massively and will totally turn your audience off.
Take for example the Legends series we produced for 32Red that went on to win the European Content Award for ‘Best use of Video’. This series spanned a total of seven episodes, each being around three minutes in length. If we followed some social gurus’ advice these episodes would be no longer than 15 seconds and have no sound; it’s very difficult to complete a full narrative with those constraints and it kills creativity.
There are various theories on what the optimum length is for videos on social, but here’s Facebook’s stance on it,
So, always have that in mind when you’re next producing a video series – story over selling, every time.
Is your brand making the most out of video marketing?
Creating great video content can cause headaches for even the most experienced marketers. Video production, editing and marketing takes specialist resource and professional equipment. That’s why ambitious brands come to us for help. We are TrunkBBI, an award-winning integrated marketing agency with a team of experienced strategists, creatives, digital and video marketing specialists. We understand the complexities of video content, how to best leverage it with existing marketing tactics and activity and how to get the best ROI for your budget.
Contact us today to discuss how to achieve your goals with video marketing, or take a look at some of our work.