Complete Guide To Video Marketing For Beginners

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Video marketing is a crucial part of the business world, particularly online, and is used to promote everything from goods and services to charities and other good causes. Using a video format to tell your audience about what you can offer and how they can benefit from it is a fantastic way to deliver high impact messages in a visually engaging and information rich manner.

During the 20th century the only real way that businesses could advertise using video was on the television or in the movie theatres. Purchasing advertising time on the television was extremely expensive and as a result for most small to medium size businesses or startups it really wasn’t an option!

However, with the advent of the internet and the explosion of social media and other mixed media platforms, video marketing became an invaluable tool to get your message out and manage to be heard in the competitive world of online marketing.

What Can You Use Video Marketing For?

• New products and services that you, your company or organization is offering the public.

• Customer Testimonials. Using video marketing to promote positive customer testimonials builds up trust and loyalty with your audience.

• Live-stream events and functions to advertise a venue, events management services, a conference or a company.

• Create viral content that is designed to be entertaining but also carries the message you are trying to promote.

• Charity events and fundraisers.

• Promote your brand and build up public awareness.

• Art and festive events.

As well as the above examples, you can use video marketing to promote anything you can imagine! Video promotions thrive on social media because they are easy to share and can quickly deliver a message to your audience without drowning them in lists of facts and figures.

When you approach video marketing you will need to create an overall strategy. This will guide the way you create the videos and what types of techniques you will use. You want to quickly engage your audience and build up interest for what you are promoting.

How Long Should Your Videos Be?

Different platforms on the internet have different kinds of audiences who expect to see video marketing that fits their past experiences.

If you’re running a promotion on Instagram you should aim for video content that is short, high impact and entertaining, usually about 20-30 seconds in length. On Facebook however, you can produce content that is closer to 1 minute in length. YouTube, and other video platforms, usually have marketing videos that are about 2 minutes in length.

Staying within the boundaries of your potential audience’s expectations will allow you to deliver your message in the most impactful way.

What to consider when developing your own video marketing strategy.

• How are you going to allocate your resources? One of the most important things to decide on is a budget. You’ll need to purchase, or rent, the necessary equipment or else employ a freelancer to work with you. You’ll need access to video editing software and have the expertise to cut audio, footage and information together in an effective way.

• Storytelling and narrative structure of your video marketing: The medium of video provides the ideal platform for storytelling and so you should make use of this in your marketing. You can tell the story of your company, the product or the people behind it to draw in your audience and peak their interest.

• Create engaging content: As well as telling a gripping story you need to deliver it in an engaging way. People’s attention spans, particularly on platforms such as Instagram or Facebook, are extremely short and if you don’t ‘hook’ the viewer in the first few seconds of your video they may well have already scrolled on to the next post!

• Keep your videos short and punchy: Just as it is essential to engage your audience the last thing you want to do is bore them! Before you get started you’re going to need to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to say and then say it as concisely as possible. Although it’s not always the case, as a general rule the shorter your video marketing content is the better, not only terms of your own budget but also in terms of engagement and reach with your audiences. This means you’ll have to be ruthless during the post production process and cut everything that doesn’t need to be there.

• When you have finished your video you will need to publish it as widely as you can: Depending on your budget, you can make use of paid advertising to ensure that your video content appears on the news feeds of people with an interest in your products or services. This is one of the most effective ways to quickly gain a wide reach. You can also use direct email marketing, promote your work in groups and forums online or to organic traffic on your website. You’ll need to think very carefully about this part of your marketing strategy because the entire success of your work will depend on your video content getting in front of the right people’s eyeballs!

• Analyze the Metrics: Once your campaign is underway and your video is being seen by people then you need to analyze any available stats and metrics to determine how well it is actually doing. If you’re using your video to market your business for example, how many sales conversions are you actually getting for every 100 people who watch the video?

• Don’t be afraid to ask your customers for their feedback: Where possible, you can also request direct feedback from your customers. This will give you invaluable insights into the effectiveness of your video marketing because sometimes, if you’ve worked hard on a project it can be difficult to see the failings within it that other people may be able to point out.

What are the Benefits of Video Marketing?

Video marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to you and can be leveraged to great effect by everyone from huge multinationals to small independent creatives.

• Video marketing allows you to quickly and memorably connect with your audience and customers.

• You can build up trust and greater brand awareness using video marketing in the promotion of your products, services or talents.

• Video marketing is an important aspect of any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. You can use video marketing on social media and YouTube to build backlinks to your own website. If you can create viral videos then you can draw huge quantities of traffic to your website at a relatively low cost. To make the most of the algorithms online you must tag your videos effectively with keywords and phrases to bring organic traffic to your work as well as the audiences that you have targeted.

• Videos are one of the best ways to increase the information retention of your audience. People can often remember more of the information if it is presented in an interesting or amusing way compared to simply reading an advert. Your customers will not only remember more of what you present in a video format but they will also remember it for longer.

• Video content accounts for a huge proportion of all online traffic and there’s a good reason for this – people love video! Leverage the potential of this fact by using video marketing as a central part of your advertising strategy. According to some research, emails that contain the word ‘video’ in the title are 20% more likely to be opened than a title without! You’ll also get better click through and conversion rates by using video content in your advertising.

• People far prefer to watch a video presentation than to read about something. This is especially true when it comes to product or service descriptions so make sure you keep this in mind when planning your marketing strategy.

What are the difficulties in video marketing?

Despite the incredible potential of video marketing there are still difficulties that you will have to overcome to succeed in the fast moving online market.

• Reaching your audience: As obvious as this may sound it can be very challenging to reach the customers and people you need to. You’ll need to develop a good strategy to make video marketing work for you but with such huge rewards on offer it’s worth the risk. Incredibly, more than half of YouTube videos receive less than 1000 views and that includes large companies with huge marketing budgets!

• Collecting and Retaining Your Audience Data: To develop an effective strategy you need to be able to assess how well your content is being received. If you post a promotional video on YouTube and it gets 10,000 views then you still don’t know an awful lot about who watched, why they watched and what actions they took as a result. This can make it hard for you to gauge how successful your video marketing content has been. Social media, such as Facebook, does give you more useful data to work with but even then you’ll find big holes in what you can ascertain.

• Relatively high barriers to entry and production: The costs of producing a well made video can be quite high. If you want to create a video then you’ll need the equipment and the skill set to do so, all of which can be a significant barrier to entry. Production costs can be daunting and if you don’t receive the expected returns on your video then it could be a serious drain on your funds. However, given the huge potentials of video marketing you can still succeed where others have failed.

Video is the Future of Online Marketing.

The world of video marketing can be quite harsh and unforgiving but if you do master the art then the potential rewards are enormous. Video marketing is far more effective than photo only marketing, both in terms of audience engagement and information retention.

Video marketing is a great way to overcome the impersonal online environment and gives people the connection, trust and loyalty to your brand that can’t be achieved using the written word or still pictures. You can create meaningful new relationships with your customers and enjoy the benefits of a huge online reach by using video marketing with a wise strategy.

Video content has become such a central part of the online user experience and if you aren’t leveraging the power of it then you will be certain to miss out on a great deal of opportunities.

Have you marketed your product using videos?

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