Your Video Marketing Strategy Guide
A video marketing strategy is an action plan adopted by brands and organizations that guides their approach to video content production and publishing. With the continuing rise in the popularity of digital content, particularly video content, it has become increasingly necessary to utilize video as part of a marketing strategy.
A video marketing strategy is likely to include information such as:
- Your target audience
- Preferred video styles, such as testimonial videos vs. how-to videos
- Long-term and short-term goals
- Timelines and expectations
- Branding and style expectations such as standard colors, graphics, etc
A corporate video strategy is a necessary element of your overall strategy, as it regulates everything from topic selection, to audience targeting and overall video marketing goals. When setting up your video production strategy, it’s important to make sure that you have a clear plan that includes your goals, your target audience, and best practices. Establishing a corporate video strategy is one of the best ways to ensure all content consistently meets these requirements.
Get Started with this Guide to Video Marketing Strategy
Developing a video marketing strategy may feel like an unnecessary task to add to an always-endless to-do list, but it really is necessary to take the success of your video marketing to the next level.
Regardless of the size of your business, your target demographic, or the product/service you have to offer, including video in your marketing strategy will prove to be beneficial. Sharing videos on social media and your website will increase your organic reach, decrease bounce rates, and help your audience to better understand your products/services as well as your corporate mission statement and priorities.
As you start to think about how you can begin to incorporate video into your marketing solutions, it’s important to set up a plan rather than jumping in headfirst and hoping for the best. Establishing a video production marketing plan comes with distinct benefits, such as establishing a clear set of expectations and guidelines, keeping your content cohesive and ensuring all key players are on the same page, even while working separately. Additionally, it will allow you to set clear video marketing objectives and track the progress you’re making toward those goals.
By tracking all this information, you can better analyze the results to determine where your strategy is working — and where it’s not — and adjust future content accordingly.
8 Easy Steps to Creating a Video Marketing Strategy
By establishing a video strategy, you’ll be better positioned to balance several smaller strategies, such as a YouTube marketing plan and an Instagram reels strategy in a way that will help you track the successes of each video towards your overall video marketing objectives.
Your video marketing strategy should include clear goals, a varied content mix, and consistent guidelines. While this may feel overwhelming, there are a few simple steps you can take to make video marketing work for your business needs.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Start by defining what you want to achieve with video marketing. Your marketing goals may include increased sales, higher organic reach, increased subscribers/followers, lead generation, increased brand awareness, and more.
While it’s important to produce creative marketing videos, it’s just as important to make sure you have a clear set of goals and that they are SMART — that is, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Specific: Make sure you’re clear in the parameters of your goals so you know when you have hit them.
Measurable: When setting those specific goals, it’s important to make sure they’re measurable. Just because a goal is specific, doesn’t mean it is necessarily measurable.
Achievable: While it can be exciting to set lofty goals, it’s important to make sure they’re achievable. Unachievable goals are more likely to lead to disappointment, which may deter you from following through with your long-term video marketing plan.
Realistic: Keeping those goals realistic will help you to recognize when your strategy is working.
Time-bound: By establishing a timeline, you’ll be able to determine if you’re hitting your goals and your strategy is working at the predicted pace.
Step 2: Choose 2 to 3 Platforms
One place some businesses go wrong is that they spread their video marketing content too thin. While it’s great to repurpose content for multiple platforms, there’s a point where you can try to push your content too far.
If you’re trying to perfect everything on every platform, then you’re likely not doing anything well. Instead of focusing on publishing across a wide plethora of platforms, pick just a few to focus your efforts on.
When deciding which platform/s to focus on as part of your video-first marketing strategy, it’s important to consider the following…
- Your brand identity
- Where your current customers already are
- The platforms you feel proficient in
- Who you’re trying to reach
- What types of video content you prefer to create
- Which platforms will help you get the most traffic
Oftentimes, your target demographic will have a few preferred platforms that you can prioritize together. Examples of common platform groupings include:
- LinkedIn, Google, Twitter
- Facebook, Instagram, Google
- TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram
Step 3: Identify Types of Videos That Mesh With Your Brand
Like platforms, you’re going to want to narrow down the types of video content that you’ll focus on. When getting started with your marketing video production, there are several different styles of videos you can create. While some consumers prefer to see the specifics of your products in the forms of how-to, FAQs, and product videos, other demographics may prefer to see how they can incorporate your product into their daily life in the form of social or lifestyle videos. Other types of videos include explainer videos, testimonials, and live-streaming.
It’s important to note that not every brand needs to make EVERY type of video all the time. While it’s good to mix it up every once and a while, keeping a “core” set of types that you use can help create authenticity, relatability, and authority with your audience.
While you may need to play around with a wider variety to determine which types are most effective, it’s a good idea to stick to that style once you have determined what works best.
Step 4: Begin Video Content Production
Video content production may be the most daunting part of this entire process. For smaller marketing teams, video production can be time-consuming. Fortunately, there are easy ways to outsource this part of the process if you need to free up time internally. Regardless of whether you are looking for video production for social media, your website, email marketing or another use, Charter & Co can help you achieve your goals.
If you do decide to produce video in house, it’s important to establish a plan and find a good setting for filming. What makes a good setting for video production is the lighting, noise level, and general atmosphere.
Lighting
No one wants to watch a video where they can’t quite make out the subject. Finding a location that is well-lit is necessary to create successful video content. Look for spaces with natural light or invest in lighting to set yourself up for success.
Noise
Poor audio quality is one of the fastest ways to turn a viewer off of your content. By investing in high-quality audio equipment and finding a quiet setting, you’re ensuring you’re creating the best content possible.
Atmosphere
It wouldn’t make sense to shoot an advertisement for sunglasses in a dark room. Your videos need to make sense for your product and your company as a whole. Consider when and where your products/services may be used and go from there. If it’s not possible to shoot in the most appropriate setting (for example, you are marketing skiing equipment mid-summer), consider creating a studio where you can record in front of a neutral background.
Step 5: Master the Post-Production Process
Making video content is just half of the battle. The other half of the magic is in the post-production editing process. While it may feel tedious, post-production editing can make a huge difference in the quality and success of a video.
Picking the Right Shot
Oftentimes, you will find yourself with far more footage than you need to create your video. When sorting through all this content, it’s important to pick the shots that feature your offering in the most desirable light.
Voice Overs
Sometimes it makes more sense to record audio after the fact rather than on-site. If you had to record in a busier setting, you may prefer to add narration later, which can be recorded in a more controlled environment.
Color Correction
Don’t underestimate the power of color grading/correction. When the color temperature or exposure is off, people may find themselves to be too distracted to focus on your message.
Adding Images and Graphics
Different types of video marketing content have different needs. Showcasing b-roll and interviews isn’t always enough, and some videos need something extra to really top them off. Adding graphs, product close-ups, and titles can elevate your video content to the next level.
Step 6: Schedule, Publish, & Boost Videos
Now that you’ve created and polished your content, the next step is to determine a schedule for publishing and boosting your video content.
Posting at consistent intervals helps your audience determine how frequently they’ll see your content. While it doesn’t need to be every day, you should be consistent. Consider when your target audience spends the most time online, determine how frequently you can realistically create and share content, and establish a schedule you can stick to.
Once you have shared your content, you may want to consider boosting your post to increase the views it receives. An important stage in social media video advertising, you should create boosting audiences that match your target demographic so you can ensure your content is viewed by the audience you wish to target.
Step 7: Keep an Eye on the Insights
There’s no point in releasing video content if you just post it and then don’t monitor its performance. Tracking your video content performance is an easy way to find out what’s working — or what’s not. From there, you can make changes to improve or keep doing what you’re already doing well.
When looking at your insights, be sure to consider the following:
- Are the performance metrics meeting your goals? Exceeding them?
- Is it reaching your ideal audience?
- Are you getting the shares you wanted?
- What is the click-through rate?
- What isn’t working? How can you learn from these metrics?
This is a necessary stage in your corporate video strategy that will help you make the most out of your time. Once you begin to understand what is working in your strategy, you can continue expanding on that content rather than spending hours, days, and weeks on content that may or may not succeed.
Step 8: Modify to Get the Best Results
When establishing a social media video advertising strategy, it’s important to maintain a level of flexibility. The highest performing video content isn’t static. It constantly evolves over time to maximize its performance. Just because one style of content was successful in 2022, doesn’t mean it will still be consistent in 2023.
Pay attention to your insights to see if certain styles of videos are consistently high-performing or if their success rates are dropping and it may be time to experiment with different solutions. To do this, you can perform A/B testing, where you show two random groups a different style of video and see which performs better. Whichever performs better is the video style you should invest your time, energy, and resources into.
You should also be continuously reviewing your target audience to see if the types of videos you’re using mesh well. People’s interests and priorities change over time, so your marketing approach should, too. Your insights give you the tools you need to make the most out of your content.
Maximize Your Video Marketing Strategy with High-Quality Video Content
Regardless of your industry, business-size, and target audience, including videos in your marketing strategy is one of the best ways to ensure you’re getting your content in front of your target audience.
If you’re ready to give video marketing a shot, but you need a little support, reach out to Charter & Co. We have you covered from concept to implementation and every step along the way, making sure you are set up for the best marketing strategy for your unique needs.
