Marketing your product today takes on many different forms, with video marketing being one of the marketing strategies that is predicted to be a major trend by 2019. Video marketing is employed in almost everything, to build consumer rapport, promote brands, products and services and to be a platform to show viral and entertaining content, live-stream company and brand events and to promote testimonials from customers.
Normally, video marketing is a simple method. You create a video to promote your product and your company in order to raise awareness, engage your customers and drive sales.
But if you look at video marketing closely, it is similar to other types of marketing efforts. The strategy is data-driven and requires constant metrics monitoring and tracking engagement with customers.
Developing a video marketing strategy
Launching a successful marketing campaign involves a fully laid out plan covering all the details. It is backed up by various researches, consumer metrics, consumer data tracking and careful analyses of trends in marketing, competitor behavior and activities and full knowledge of customer needs and preferences.
Video marketing will no longer be a ‘standby plan.’ Since it is projected to be the trend next year, here are a few tips to help you create a sound video marketing strategy.
1. Carefully allocate your budget
If you are producing the video yourself, you need good video equipment, excellent editing software, a video marketing expert and time to produce it. You can hire a team that will not only produce the video for you but provide localization experts to present it in different languages (subbed or dubbed) for your global audience as well. You can also learn video editing, especially now that online tools are available. For instance, platforms like VEED allow you to transform your text into engaging video content easily. Moreover, if you’re looking to expand your global outreach, adding subtitles is practical and helpful move. You can conveniently use tools such as VEED’s subtitle tool to ensure that your message is understood by a diverse audience. These resources can significantly enhance your video marketing campaigns while maintaining its natural and appealing context. Even tranquil ocean stock videos are now available online that can enhance your video content by adding a peaceful and calming atmosphere to your visuals.
2. Share your stories
You’ve seen ‘stories’ featured on many social media platforms. Storytelling is essential in a company or product video. An effective strategy can be incorporating employee success stories. Hearing from the very people within your company firsthand not only offers authenticity but also gives you a wealth of experiences to choose from. Brainstorm with your marketing, sales and creative teams to determine the stories you want to share and how you will share them with your intended audiences.
3. Engage your customers
Even if you have stories to tell, the vital factor is engaging your audience. You need to decide how to provide interesting stories. You need to find a hook to keep your audience’s interest.
4. Limit its length
Since you are likely to upload the videos on your website, it is critical to keep the length of your videos at a minimum. Remember that online audiences have a very short attention span, so careful editing is needed. You have to present only the core message.
4. Publish your video on many channels
You should not only think of publishing your videos on your website. It is vital for your business to be where your consumers are, so think of all the social media channels you can utilize. Moreover, you should support your videos with constant promotion.
5. Analyze data and stats
For your video marketing to be successful, you should track stats and metrics and carefully analyze them, for they will tell you why and how you fare. You’ll find strategic pointers that can help you when producing your next batch of videos
For sure you have seen some video marketing efforts in your favorite sites like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram through the years. You say you can’t recall any? Some of them include:
- Reebok: 25,915 Days
- org: What Most Schools Don’t Teach
- Coca-Cola: The Last Customer
- American Greetings: World’s Toughest Job
Video marketing – the benefits
Video marketing provides a company with a host of benefits. We are not going to recommend video marketing if you are not going to benefit from it, right? But we have to make it clear that your video should be creatively produced. It should speak well about your company or your product, provide inspiration, focus on the solutions to consumer needs and give them the urge to purchase your product.
1. Videos connect you with your target audience
Building trust is a vital part of the marketing efforts of many companies today. Employing video as part of your marketing plan helps you build a bridge supporting what you say and who you are in reality. Your video allows your customers to look behind the curtain and view the real you.
2. Videos are a goldmine for SEO
They can help you establish backlinks to your website. They can help increase shares and likes and boost search rankings which in turn send more traffic to your website. Improve your ranking by posting your video in Google-owned YouTube and do not forget to tag with key phrases and keywords.
3. Videos help consumers retain information longer
Do you know why young children remember things better? It’s because they sing most of their early lessons! The same rule applies here. When your customers hear sounds together with imagery relevant to the audio, they are likely to remarkably remember more than half of the video for a few days.
4. 80% of total consumer online traffic will be from consumer Internet video traffic in 2019
This is according to SmallBizTrends. This means that if you have good video marketing in place, you are likely to have additional visitors.
5. Videos are very accessible
Technology helps to ensure that videos are easier to access especially for people who use smartphones and tablets for work. It is a cost-effective method to reach your consumers wherever they are.
6. Videos are preferred over lengthy descriptions
Company CEOs even say that they are likely to view a product video rather than read a lengthy and inanimate description of a product. Customers are more likely to make a purchase after watching your video.
7. Creating Videos is now Scalable
Tips for video marketing success
Because video marketing is deemed to rule over other marketing strategies by 2019, here are a few things to remember to ensure that you will have video marketing success. By now, it is assumed that you are planning and putting together a team to formulate your video marketing strategy and implement your plan. Do not forget to include a linguist expert on your particular industry to help you localize your video content to your target consumers in other parts of the world.
1. Think about your design carefully
Planning a marketing campaign is a long process, as this involves sales, marketing and promotions. It takes careful planning. Just like you used to deliberate over printed marketing materials, you apply the same principles when creating a video marketing plan. You have to fully understand your target audience, both the core and the secondary audiences.
However, before you proceed you have to answer some critical questions, one of which is the purpose of the video. Don’t just say that it’s for brand awareness or engage your audience, because either one is not the fundamental purpose. Utilize videos to develop other segments of your business, such as getting more conversions, increasing traffic, outrank your competition for a vital keyword, increase the quality of the leads your generate and shorten the process of nurturing your customers.
Explore psychographics to understand how your target audience views your company, service, product and content. Ensure that you narrow down your perspective to correlate the views of your audience to what it is your company offers.
Changing the behavior or attitude of your consumers to patronize your business should be your goal. If you see the changes, this means that your video marketing is a success. But you will only know this if you have the right answer to the question of what the video is for.
2. Perform a video content gap analysis
It is better to do a video content gap analysis early so you can determine which videos you should publish. It will help you to connect with your audience deeper. Do an analysis of what specific video content your target customers watch. Keep up with the trends by checking videos published on popular social media platforms. The process will provide you with ideas on what videos to produce and how to position them to stand out among the rest but appeal and relate with your target audience at a closer level.
3. Employ the right context
Once the videos are produced, you have to decide where to upload them so they can have the highest impact. First is on your website, then YouTube (it is best to create your own channel). Of course your other option is to select the right social media platforms where most of your target audience congregates. But the most vital thing you have to consider is the context of your videos. If you know their purpose, it will be easier to find the right options
4. Support your videos with a coordinated campaign
Once you have the videos and you have determined where you should publish them, think of how you will support the videos. Do you know the purpose of movie trailers? They are needed to announce the film and get the viewers excited enough to wait for its release and see the movie (maybe line up for tickets if it’s a blockbuster). The same method applies to video marketing. You also need promotional elements that link to the core message of the video.
Perhaps you can support your video with a microsite that tells the full story behind the video content, write white paper and develop an infographic or social content that will provide more information in relation to the video’s core content. Videos are created for emotional appeal and your other promotional materials are for people who are interested in knowing more about a company, product or service.
5. Optimize the video’s performance
One other way to make your video marketing a success is to treat your videos like the landing pages of websites, which should be regularly monitored and optimized. But you have to go further to understand how your audience reacts to the videos and if there are parts in the videos that cause viewers to disengage. For business users, you can use the analytics of other paid video hosting sites like Wistia, Vidyard and Brightcove.
There you have it – some of the most doable ways to ensure video marketing success. We don’t claim that these are the only solutions possible. You have many options. All you need to do is spend time on research to find the most fitting video marketing solutions for your specific needs.
Allow your customers to know more about your company, products and services with video marketing. If you need to localize your videos, Day Translations, Inc. can help. We have experts in the fields you are ready to translate your videos into your target languages. They are all native speakers and work with more than 100 language pairs. They are located in-country, so you are assured that the nuances of the local language will be properly incorporated in the localization. We also offer subtitling and voiceover services if you prefer. Allow us to help you gain video marketing success. Give us call at 1-800-969-6853 or send us an email at Contact us for a quick quote. With Day Translations, every day is a business day as we are open 24/7 throughout the year. Give us a call today and let us know how we can be of help with your linguistic needs.
Image Copyright: Rabia Elif Aksoy / 123RF Stock Photo