The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing

Videos aren’t new to brands. We’ve seen big brands like Apple, Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn using videos in their marketing strategies. And the interesting fact is that you don’t need fancy equipment or expensive editing software to make videos for your brand.

But while videos are an inevitable part of marketing, they’re also one of the most effective ones. Consumers today are watching videos on every platform. It’s become an essential part of their daily routine that it almost seems natural to see brand videos somewhere or the other.

According to research, 8 out of 20 people buy a product or book a service after watching a brand’s video. That’s how powerful video marketing is for brands and the reason behind its growing popularity in the world.

In this article, we’re going to dive into the details of video marketing, its types, and how you can create a video marketing strategy for your brand to pave your way towards endless opportunities.

Let’s get right into it!

Table of content

1. What is Video Marketing
2. Types of marketing videos
3. How to create a video marketing strategy?

What is Video Marketing?

Video marketing is the act of making and sharing videos that promote your product, service, campaign, or ideas on digital platforms. This can be on your website, social media, or emails. 

It can be as simple as making a 4K video with your smartphone or an advanced video like a TV commercial with a production team and professional equipment. More than shooting the videos, video marketing is about coming up with ideas that appeal to your target audience and marketing that video the right way, so it reaches them.

The best part about video marketing is that it’s cost-effective, and you no longer need to invest heavily in hiring digital advertising agencies to make quality videos. It’s the idea and the distribution strategy apart from the video content itself that makes an impact.

Being one of the widespread ways to consume content, video marketing is a must for B2B companies to establish a deeper connection with their audience, communicate their messaging and simplify complex concepts. 

Almost 93% of brands say they got new customers due to the videos posted on their social media accounts.

Building a presence where your audience is most active is essential for effective marketing. Videos ensure your brand gets positioned in front of them since you can target videos in a much better way than other content formats.

Types of Marketing Videos

Understanding video marketing is one thing, but coming up with ideas that communicate your intended message is another thing altogether. 

So, let’s understand the different types of videos you can make for your brand and how they can help you.

1. Explainer videos

One of the most common types of marketing videos, explainer videos, tells the audience about the brand and the product or service they offer. More than the brand, it focuses on the functionality and benefits of their product or service. It uses an instructional model of conversation and tells the user about the ins and outs of what they offer, highlighting its benefits, features, and working model.

In the B2B segment, explainer videos are widely used by companies to explain their software and services, which does an excellent job at breaking down complex concepts for the audience in simple terms. They’re not just educating but also quite fun and reflect the brand personality in its truest sense.

See how MailChimp uses explainer videos to tell the audience about their creative assistant:

2. How-to videos

Mostly explaining step-by-step tutorials to do a particular thing, how-to videos are great for helping the audience do something with actionable tips to start implementing right away. 

Targeting common pain points in your how-to videos can establish you as an authority on the topic and strengthen your audience’s relationship by solving their problems. These how-to videos improve brand loyalty and build trust with your audience. 

Understandably, there’s a lot of competition with these videos; however, if you have a unique perspective to offer and take care of SEO aspects, you can use it to your advantage.

See how DocuSign shows its users how to navigate their account with a how-to video:

3. Brand videos

Brand videos go beyond products and services and positively show the brand the ideals they stand for, some testimonials, or achievement statistics. These videos maintain the brand reputation by reflecting its personality and managing customer perceptions.

B2B businesses can use brand videos to engage with their customers on a level beyond buying and selling. Since it highlights the brand’s ideals and values, it can do a great job at incentivizing businesses to work with you. 

This video by Slack is a great example of showing how the brand built trust with its users:

4. Live streams and webinars

Live streams and webinars are videos recorded and presented to the viewers in real-time. Your customers can comment on these live streams, engage with other viewers in the audience, and simultaneously talk to the brand. 

Through this, you can host talk shows, interviews, expert webinars, lectures, etc. 

2020 saw many live streams and webinars given the virtual situation, and the audience benefited quite a lot from the knowledge and intensive value given on video. Since it happens in real-time, these videos give the audience a sense of participation.

These videos are one of the best ways for community building and engagement- an essential part of brand building.

InVideo frequently goes live with experts to talk about specific topics, and here’s a great example:

5. Case studies and customer testimonials

Most B2B companies deal with intangible products and services, so it’s relatively difficult for the consumers to know their effective working and functionality. Case studies that portray the successful use of your product or service by customers and its results are a great way to explain and persuade your potential customers.

A brand can talk about their offering, but customers becoming brand ambassadors and talking about their experience and results are much more convincing for someone looking to buy from you.

So, case studies and customer testimonial videos are a great way to build trust with your audience. You can use them on your social media, website, or emails.

Apart from these, you can make many other types of videos for your brand like social media videos, commercial videos, product videos, vlogs, and more.

Here’s how Hubspot frequently publishes customer success stories:

How to create a video marketing strategy?

Now that you’re aware of the types of video you can use in your video marketing strategy; let’s explore how you can create one for your brand.

Let’s dive right into the specifics.

1. Understand your target audience

No marketing strategy is complete without understanding the target audience. If you’re going to create videos, then you need to know who you’re creating them for, and what type of videos or platforms you can use to ensure it reaches them and is well-liked.

Imagine spending all that time creating, producing, and distributing videos only to find out you had been creating the wrong videos and showing them on platforms, your audience doesn’t even visit. To ensure you don’t waste your resources, time, and efforts- researching and understanding your audience is paramount.

Consider finding the answers to these questions:

• Who are you targeting?- Try to be as specific as possible.
• What kind of content do they consume?- This can be educational, motivational, or promotional.
• Which channels do they consume content on?- Specific social media channels, YouTube, emails, websites, or commercials.
• How do they respond to these videos?- Find out if they are more of a passive or engaging audience.

You can add or edit these questions based on your brand and target audience. 

Once you have a fair idea about who you’re targeting and what your audience looks like, it’s time to frame a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Framing this will help you craft and target your videos much better, ensuring it’s made for your audience and shows results. 

Here’s an example of a buyer persona.

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You can use this buyer persona to guide your video marketing strategy because these are the people who will buy from you. Hence they should be the ones targeted with the video.

2. Define your video goals

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If you don’t have pre-defined goals for your video marketing efforts, then even the best videos won’t bring you results. Before you begin creating videos, you need to figure out why you’re creating them in the first place.

A video marketing strategy can serve many purposes- sales, brand awareness, website traffic, brand loyalty, and more. For each one of these purposes, a different video route will be followed, which is best suited to achieve that particular goal. Hence, deciding on your goals is paramount for a successful video marketing strategy.

The idea, messaging, tone, distribution channel, and targeting depends on the purpose you’re aiming to fulfill with the video. So, if your goals are not sorted, then the strategy will fall out of place.

For goal setting, spend time with your team and discuss the following points:

• What’s your purpose for a video marketing strategy?
• What results do you expect?
• How will it help your brand?
• To achieve a particular goal, how will you set milestones?
• By when do you want to achieve these goals?
• Which goal holds the maximum priority, and why?
• How will this goal help your audience?

These points will help you formulate your goals, break them up into milestones and attach a timeline with them. Goal setting is essential to lead a video marketing strategy that brings results.

Skipping this stage can be detrimental because otherwise, you would base your videos on assumptions that will do more harm than good. It won’t reach your audience or help your brand. Moreover, it will waste a lot of your resources and time, which could have been invested in something better.

So, make it a priority to frame out your goals and map out your journey. 

In 2020, the number of people watching digital videos in the US reached 244.4 million — hitting year-over-year growth levels that far exceed what experts had predicted (Business Insider, 2020).

3. Draft a video budget 

While it’s true that video marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, you still need to analyze the resources you presently have and what more will you require to produce video content.

Drafting a budget for your video marketing strategies is essential to determine the resources and equipment you will require. This will lay out the scope of expenditure, and depending on your budget allocations; you can choose to invest in basic or advanced gear.

You can hire a video marketing agency or create an in-house video team to carry this out. Include it in your budget to estimate the costs and expected returns, which is essential for every business department.

Mostly, try to figure out these things:

• What kind of equipment do you need?- This should cover cameras, tripods, smartphones, recording devices, green screens, editing software, etc.
• Do you need to hire people for this? This could be cinematographers, scriptwriters, actors, content marketers, and creative directors.
• Can you outsource your video content creation to an agency?
• If you’re low on budget, decide the minimum resources you require to start implementing your video strategy. Even a slide show can become a video presentation.

This budget will help you formulate your action plan because staying within the budget is essential. As you move forward, you can choose to expand this budget if you start getting good results and returns.

If you want to know more about how you can create a video marketing budget, you can read it here.

4. Create a distribution plan

Creating videos is only a tiny part of a video marketing strategy. The effort lies in knowing where to publish them. Understandably, you would want to share these videos on the platform your audience is likely to see them; however, doing that is not enough.

Your video’s duration matters quite a lot for distribution because every platform, be it social media, websites, or email has a duration limit. What might look good on Instagram might not bode well on LinkedIn. However, it’s essential to know where you should share your video and how.

If you plan to publish a video on multiple platforms, you need to optimize it for every channel. For Instagram, you may have to shorten the length and add captions, while on YouTube, you can upload a full-sized video and take care of YouTube SEO to see results.

It’s not just the ‘where’ but also the ‘how’ that determines your video distribution plan’s success.

Here are some points to keep in mind while preparing a distribution strategy:

• Find out your audience’s active channels.
• Create a content calendar on Trello or Google sheet that mentions topic, format, channel, posting timing, publishing status, and analytics.
• Assign tasks to different people and maintain transparency in roles and responsibilities.
• Optimize your messaging, captions, and hashtags for each channel.
• Find out the ad potential of a platform and consider running ad campaigns for greater reach.
• Leverage different content formats on social media and tweak your videos to fit them. For example, if Instagram is one of your target channels, then consider posting a full-sized video on your feed and a 15-second trailer on Instagram reels for better exposure.
• Don’t post the same videos on all channels; repurpose your content.
• Assess the sales funnel and determine where your customer lies. You would also want to base your distribution plan along your customer’s position in the conversion funnel.

Here’s an idea of how you can plan your distribution strategy.

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5. Implement and start measuring results

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Now that you have a strategy and budget in place, it’s time to start implementing.

For this, create an action plan which mentions everything from brainstorming ideas and shooting the videos to implementing the distribution plan. It should have timelines and clear responsibilities for the team for smooth working.

Once you start implementing your strategy, you’ll notice certain gaps to improve or ways to tweak your strategy for better results. For this, it’s crucial to analyze video marketing metrics and assess results.

Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in the text.

Here are some essential metrics you would want to track:

• View count

View count refers to the number of times your audience has viewed your video. Using in-built platform analytics or third-party tools, you can calculate the view count. However, the calculation of view count varies from platform to platform.

Assessing this metric can help you understand how much of your audience is active on the platform you’re publishing video content on and if it’s getting you the reach you expected. Based on this, you’ll get to know which platform or type of video is performing best for your brand.

• Engagement rate

The engagement rate tells you how people are engaging with your video.

Are they commenting or liking your posts? 

What kind of comments are they making?

Are they also sharing your posts or tagging other people in the comments?

This will tell you the kind of value your videos provide, how the audience is benefiting from them, and if your message is being communicated the way you intended. 

• Click-through rate (CTR)

The CTR tells you how many people navigated to the call-to-action you attached with your video. This can be a link to your website, a landing page, product page, lead magnet, blog link, or another video. 

This metric will tell you how compelling your CTA is and if people are responding to it. If you include your CTA as a verbal indicator at the end of your video, you can also see how many people watched your video till the end and what percentage bounced off.

• Conversion rate

Conversion rate tells you the number of leads you get from a piece of video content. If the CTA on your video was a form, a meeting link, or a link to your website, then you can measure your conversion rate based on that. 

Some people might have subscribed or followed your page; others may have made a purchase or fill in a form. This contributes to your conversion rate and a rise in your list of potential customers.

A higher conversion rate indicates that your videos are packed with high-value content, which helps the audience take the desired action.

These are some essential metrics for assessing the effectiveness of your video marketing strategies. However, these aren’t the only ones. Based on your goals, you can choose to analyze different metrics using tools.

Conclusion

Video marketing is a growing marketing channel, and brands have been using it to drive business and revenue. Since customers prefer videos over other types of content, it has massive potential for brands. 

Given that 71% of B2B marketers use videos as part of their marketing strategies, it shows that videos have gained popularity in the B2B segment and show results. There’s no doubt that they can be widely used to interact, engage, and convert your customers. 

So, it’s time to focus on your creative side and create a video marketing strategy for your brand that can bring you results and offer massive opportunities.

Good luck!

Sources

• Explain Ninja: Video Marketing Statistics
• Business Insider 2020: Digital Video Viewership
• Invideo: Video Marketing Statistics