Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage your customers and prospects.
Reportedly, 91% of customers like to see video content from brands they like or discover.
Reason—it helps them connect more with the brand and qualify their products and services sooner.
More importantly, the visual form of storytelling paints a clearer picture of the topic and helps them relate to it more.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of video marketing and to use it effectively to engage and captivate your audience.
What Is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is a content marketing technique that uses videos to promote and market a business.
It involves creating and distributing videos across multiple digital platforms to engage your audience and convert them down the line.
Video marketing uses visual storytelling to convey a message, showcase products and services, educate viewers and create a memorable brand presence.
Its popularity has surged in recent years due to the widespread availability of the Internet and the increasing consumption of content on social media platforms.
How Video Marketing Benefits A Business
Video marketing offers several benefits over traditional marketing tactics:
- Videos have the ability to captivate and engage viewers more effectively than plain text or static images. They can evoke emotions, tell compelling stories, and provide an immersive experience.
- Videos can be shared and distributed across multiple platforms, including social media, websites, and video-sharing platforms like YouTube. This widens the potential reach and allows for increased visibility and exposure.
- By showcasing products or services in action or demonstrating their benefits, videos can persuade viewers to take the desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service. This has a positive impact on your conversion rates.
- Memorable and well-crafted videos have the potential to go viral, leading to widespread recognition and exposure.
- Videos can significantly boost search engine optimization (SEO). Websites and pages with embedded videos tend to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Even search engines like Google are starting to prioritize video content and showcasing them in the SERP.
- Video content is highly accessible and easily consumed on the go on mobile phones, which is mostly preferred by audiences these days.
Best Practices For Video Marketing
Define Your Goals
When embarking on a video marketing campaign, it’s crucial to have clear and well-defined goals.
These goals serve as a roadmap, guiding your video creation process and determining the overall direction of your campaign.
Examples of specific goals in video marketing might include:
- Increase brand awareness by reaching a specific number of views or shares on social media.
- Drive website traffic by including a call-to-action to visit your website in the video.
- Generate leads by capturing viewer information through a lead capture form embedded in the video or a clickable link in the video description.
Boost sales by showcasing product features and benefits and including purchase incentives or limited-time offers in the video.
Try To Grab The Attention Early On
Short and snappy videos usually win the game. But if you can’t make them short, add a really interesting introduction, so your audience won’t scroll past it.
Mostly, all social media platforms have the functionality to auto-play a video on the feed. Leverage this to create an intriguing introduction in your video.
Here are some tips:
- Talk about something relatable that they can’t miss
- Share an astonishing fact that amazes them
- Open with a dramatic entry—something funny, strange, and quirky—that grabs their attention
- Ask a question they would like to know the answer for
Translate Your Videos Into Different Languages
Always take your audience’s convenience into consideration, and video language is a crucial element of a video.
Sure, you can add subtitles to help your audience, but why not take it up a notch when you can?
Thankfully there are many solutions that exist to help you do the translation seamlessly.
Translate videos to English or any other language for that matter—the focus should be to get your content across to your audience in their preferred language.
Ideally, these software solutions convert the original audio to text and then work on the text to generate the audio of your selected language.
Incorporate Branding Elements
Consistently incorporate your brand elements, such as logo, colors, and tagline, throughout your videos.
This helps reinforce brand recognition and association, ensuring that viewers remember your brand even after watching the video.
Plan In Advance
The best-performing videos are planned and scripted in advance. It not only gives you the confidence to do your best but also helps you avoid any surprises or slips of the tongue.
Here are some tips you can follow:
- Look for inspiration on your competitor’s profile and any brand you find inspiring—notice what kind of content gets the most engagement and try to emulate their style.
- Work on the setup—how the direction will be, what the backdrop will be, what kind of music will be played in the background, and so on.
- Make sure the shoot days are only reserved for shooting. Multitasking can affect the quality of your videos.
Keep Editing To A Minimum
Most video editing softwares comes with a plethora of editing options, but that doesn’t mean you have to use them all. Use only the features that fit your production requirements.
Keep the following in mind:
- Do not overload your video with tons of transition effects.
- Keep the text overlay to a minimum—do not make it text-heavy.
- Make sure the text or the subtitles are clearly visible on the video.
- Add a soothing background sound that doesn’t supersede the voiceover in the video.
Types Of Videos You Can Create For Your Brand
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as it mainly depends on your brand’s requirements and, most importantly, your customer’s preferences.
However, you should know the options that are available and keep emerging in your industry to make the right choice.
Here are some popular options:
1. Explainer Videos
These are the kinds of videos that brands use to explain a concept, product, or service using narration, graphics, and animation.
As an example, this brand called “Nas.io” a sister company from NasDaily, creates engaging and informative video content that tell a story in a concise manner.
Since their product is about making money from chat groups (mainly in WhatsApp), telling a story about how WhatsApp came into the picture would only intrigue their prospects.
2. Product Demos
Talking about a product is one thing, and taking your prospects through the ins and outs of the product is another.
The latter helps clear a lot of doubts and objections your audience might have about your product and take action faster.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate how beautifully this founder has embedded a Loom product tour in his LinkedIn post.
It doesn’t always have to be a high-budget video production—a simple Loom video does the job pretty well, especially for SaaS products.
3. Behind-the-scenes Videos
Brands that share their daily personal stories with their audience are often adored by them.
The reason is simple—people love to connect with things that they can see and relate to.
Here are some ideas for you:
- Walk your audience through the team fun—the lunches, launches, events, and birthdays. Make them a part of your virtual family.
- Share a sneak peek into something you’re working on and planning to launch in the coming months or years. It not only generates curiosity among the audience but also makes them feel exclusive.
- Show them bloopers from your video shoots (yes, that can be content, too!), and you’d be surprised to see how people love to see the raw stuff.
4. Webinars And Live Videos
Have a skill you want to share with your audience? What’s a better way to do that than conducting webinars or going live?
This is not only good for your audience but also great for your brand image. The audience will see the real person behind the brand, which adds credibility.
Moreover, they’ll learn from your first-hand experience, which will help them appreciate you and your brand even more!
Salesforce often does these kinds of lives on their LinkedIn. They recently did a discussion on the topic “The future of trusted enterprise AI,” which is a hot interest these days.
You can also bring in an expert to have a discussion with you on a trending topic. This opens up the scope for brand collaboration for you and helps your audience gain knowledge on the topic from two experts.
Leverage Videos To Create More ROI-generating Content
Visual storytelling is an important tool in the content marketing space today.
It allows you to convey your stories and promote your business in a more impactful and effective way.
Make sure you understand your target audience’s tastes and likes before you jump into video production. Always have a strategy and a roadmap you can follow for creating impactful videos.
Additionally, keep measuring the impact of your videos by checking the analytics—opens, clicks, engagement, etc.
Keep these best practices in mind, and soon you’ll see a great difference in engagement from your audience.