Integrating your social media platforms with the rest of your brand-building strategy is becoming increasingly vital in today’s marketplace. Use the guide below to plan your social media video content to help develop brand awareness, promote audience engagement, extend your reach and – of course – drive up sales!
Make A Plan
This step can be tempting to skip, but it’s vital for the success of your video marketing strategy and can help to ensure consistency of message across all the produced content. To begin, get really clear on your goal.
What’s the aim of your social media video content? Do you primarily want to increase your brand’s visibility? Is the aim to promote a new range of products or services? Or is your aim to extend your business’ reach to an entirely new audience? Knowing the desired outcome means you can hone your message effectively and ensure it reaches the people you want it to.
Next, identify your target audience. This is important as it will play into the type and style of the video content you create, as well as where and how you distribute it. This leads us onto….
Match Your Video To The Platform
Your strategy will need to take into account the different styles of content that may be required for the various social media platforms that your business uses.
For example, what works on Facebook may not be as successful on TikTok or LinkedIn. Think, too, about the platform that your audience – or intended new audience – is most likely to use when planning your content.
A perfect example of tailoring your video content to a specific social platform is length. Shorter videos that run for between fifteen and ninety seconds perform best on Facebook, while anything over sixty seconds does less well on TikTok. Longer videos are more likely to be successful on YouTube than on any other social channel.
Using platform-specific data like this can help you to fine-tune and precision-target your video content for effective results.
Ensure Consistency Of Objectives
A social media video marketing strategy needs to be consistent with the goals of the business’ wider social media presence to have the best chance of success.
Keeping the overall objectives in line will help strengthen your message: if you use your social media platform to, for example, drive up visitors to your website by creating how-to guides that link to special product pages, then promote this in your video strategy.
To this end, you could use your videos as content to sit alongside the text guides and have them feature the same call-to-action links throughout or incorporate links to more guides on your Facebook site.
Determine Video Type
Next, it’s time to think about the type of video content that you want to create that will tie in with the goals you’ve set above. Consider whether an educational or informative video will support your goals most effectively, or if you’ll do better opting for content that’s designed primarily to be entertaining.
You may also decide to incorporate some ‘behind the scenes’ type footage, content that features interviews with guest speakers, or a range of all of these things.
When it comes to consumer decision-making, recent research found that 48% of viewers would be positively influenced by video content that reflects the specific services or products they already own or are interested in.
At the same time, 43% are most engaged by interactive content that allows them to choose the information that’s presented to them. For 33% of viewers, content that suggests what their next action should or could be is most likely to affect their decision-making.
Create Effective Content
When planning out your social media video strategy, there are a few crucial points to remember when designing each piece of content. Telling an engaging story that addresses your target audience’s ‘pain points’ is vital to grab their attention and pull them into the narrative.
A strong call to action should be included in each video, too – this could be to click through to the website or to follow your brand on social media. As mentioned above, making sure that this ties in with the overall goal of your social media strategy will boost overall effectiveness and promote the cohesiveness of your brand message.
Edit To Perfection
It’s important to keep things short and sweet, too: aim for your video to be no more than two minutes long to prevent viewers from clicking away. When making a brand video, editing is crucial, so ensuring you use a quality editing package is vital to ensure your content is as professional as possible.
Audio overlay, additional graphics, and subtitles can also be added during the editing process. Some editing apps will also allow you to incorporate animation and other special effects.
Scheduling And Promotion
And finally, now that you’ve made your social media video marketing strategy and have produced the content you need, it’s time to think about scheduling and promoting your videos!
Again, how you plan this will depend on the social platforms you’re using. For example, you could use the same video across several different platforms over a month or so. Some social platforms feature scheduling tools that can help with this.
Think creatively when it comes to promotion: you could use different clips of a few seconds each from a video to create a new hook every week or use teasers to drive up engagement.
Once your campaign is in full swing, it’s vital to use the analytic tools provided by each platform to assess how well the videos are performing and to get an idea of how successfully they are promoting the goals you set in the planning stage. Are you seeing an increase in conversion rates, for example, or reaching a new audience, in terms of demographic?
Use these metrics to tweak your strategy – just a few little changes could make your next marketing drive even more powerful.
