Video marketing is quickly becoming an essential part of any brand’s marketing strategy due to its rapid rise as consumers’ favourite medium. In fact, according to Cisco – video will make up almost 80% of all internet content by 2020.
Why video?
Among all content types, visual content performs the best. And out of all visual types of content such as images and infographics, video is the most powerful.
Consumer attention spans are getting shorter and getting your brand out there in the current atmosphere can feel like a competition of who can shout the loudest. Video content retention rate outpaces text based content with 65% of video viewers watching over ¾ of a video. This means well optimised video content can help your brand cut through the noise and effectively grab the attention of your future customers.
In addition, YouTube (owned by Google) is the second biggest search engine in the world. It’s not hard to understand how uploading a video here, embedding it into your website and surrounding it with great content will create a unified package to help your Google ranking.
Video can be seen as an expensive medium to use and if you go down the agency route this may well be the case. Creating high quality video is a skilled job, production quality makes a huge difference to the final product and that has an up front cost. However, there are lots of brands creating engaging content on a smaller budget by bringing the production in house. You can still create viable video content with your phone camera, a cheap tripod and some solid research into video editing. There’s plenty of free video editing software out there if you are willing to learn how to use it, for example iMovie if you’re using a Mac. If you’re looking for animation there are also sites like Powtoon that offer simple free animations.
Where to start?
Your video marketing strategy is essentially an extension of your overall marketing strategy. The first step is having a clear idea of how you’ll align your video content with the goals of your company and who your content will be targeting.
Once you have an outline of who your video content is targeting and how that aligns to your business goals you can think about what you are going to create. Research and analyse what works, what doesn’t work, what your audience likes, and trends you can take advantage of.
If you are totally new to this medium a good starting point could be turning some of your current content into videos. If you have lots of customer reviews you could create a colourful, engaging animation to show them off or you could repurpose a blog post into a simple piece to camera. You probably have something that you can repurpose easily so take stock of your current content and look for some quick wins.
Video can give your brand an injection of personality and allow you to communicate effectively with thousands of customers however it’s important to remember that just creating a great video isn’t enough to get you noticed. You will need a solid promotion strategy to build links to your YouTube video and your own website content to increase the chances of you ranking well. One way to do this is to make sure you promote your video through social media.
Like anything worth doing, video content takes time and effort but the right strategy mixed with a little creativity can make your brand stand out in a big way