With 82% of people reporting that a video has persuaded them to purchase a product or service, the power of visual storytelling is undeniable. Furthermore, 88% of marketers acknowledge video’s critical role in their strategic planning, underscoring its significance in the competitive landscape.
However, the journey from creating to leveraging different video types such as instructional videos and 15-second videos to cater to the users’ attention span, is filled with challenges, especially for newcomers to the visual content scene.
For instance, merely producing explainer videos or short-form video content and releasing it on digital platforms does not guarantee good returns such as satisfied customers on your content investment.
That’s where video content marketing comes in.
Video content marketing ensures your visual content reaches the right audience on their preferred video hosting platforms leading to increased brand awareness and sales, ultimately boosting your revenue.
For brands venturing into or looking to refine their video content strategies, understanding the nuances of this marketing form is crucial. It’s about crafting content that resonates, distributing it effectively across various platforms, and measuring its impact on your audience and business goals.
In this article, let’s explore the multifaceted world of video content marketing, from its definition to the strategies that maximize its return on investment (ROI).
Understanding video content marketing
Video marketing strategy for brands involves the creation and distribution of video content to promote their products and services, educate potential customers, and enhance customer retention by making their marketing funnel effective.
This promotional approach leverages different types of videos such as product reviews to explain a business’ offerings, showcase benefits, and share customer success stories, thereby facilitating the buyer’s journey from awareness to decision-making.
The effectiveness of a video marketing strategy hinges on several parameters: the length of the video, which must be optimized for audience engagement without sacrificing content quality; the type of content, whether explainer videos, product demos, customer testimonials, or thought leadership pieces; and the distribution channels, which should align with where the target audience consumes content.
Additionally, the tone, style, and messaging in all types of videos must resonate with the brand’s identity and the audience’s preferences, ensuring that each piece of informative content with visual elements contributes to building a cohesive and compelling brand narrative.
The importance of a video marketing strategy
The strategic deployment of online video content marketing offers a plethora of advantages for brands aiming to solidify their presence in a crowded digital marketplace. Here are key benefits that underscore its importance:
- Enhanced Engagement: Organic posting of videos captivate viewers through compelling storytelling and visual appeal, making complex information more accessible and engaging.
- Increased Conversion Rates: As the stat mentioned in the introduction reflects, original video views improve the likelihood of a customer purchasing a product or soliciting a service, since these content pieces provide a clearer understanding of the benefits to the target demographic.
- Improved SEO Performance: Search engines favor content that engages users, and most common types of videos with informative content often lead to longer page visits, which can positively impact a website’s search engine ranking. Additionally, such forms of content with special visual effects increase the likelihood of backlinks and shares on social platforms, further enhancing SEO efforts.
- Stronger Emotional Connections: Lifestyle video content, for instance, has the unique ability to evoke emotions, build trust, and humanize a brand. Through visual and auditory storytelling with social content videos, brands can create a personal connection with their audience, particularly through social media marketing, fostering loyalty and trust.
- Greater Content Versatility: For instance, short-form video content can be shared with your audience and customers across various channels which maximizes the ROI of your social media video marketing efforts. This versatility ensures that brands can engage with their audience across different touchpoints, enhancing brand visibility and recognition with almost any style of video.
By leveraging a strong video content marketing plan, brands can enjoy a competitive edge, driving growth and fostering meaningful connections with their actual customers.
Further Reading: The 13 Powerful Benefits of Video Marketing That Demand Your Attention
7 ways to market video content
Video marketers can approach this in diverse ways, tailored to a brand’s specific goals, target audience, and available resources.
1. Utilize social media platforms
For SaaS brands, social media platforms present a great opportunity for promoting video content, thanks to their vast user bases and sophisticated recommendation algorithms, enabling them to enhance visibility, engage with their audience, and drive traffic to their website.
This method allows for a variety of promotional tactics, including:
- Organic posts to engage existing followers with valuable social videos. Depending on your audience preferences, you can create two-minute videos for busy prospects or publish narrative videos for those who need in-depth information.
- Live streaming events or demos to foster real-time engagement and provide immediate value. These videos fare better than other long-form content like blog posts due to their interactive nature.
- Social media stories to share behind-the-scenes content, short demos, quick concepts, or customer testimonials to grab the attention of your audience. For instance, a 15-second video story about the revenue management features of a fintech tool for enterprises is likely to be more impactful than an image post.
Brands can use digital marketing tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer to efficiently put their video strategy into action.
Further Reading: 8 Types of Social Media Videos Your Company Should Create Right Now
2. Share with your existing customers and leads
Video marketers can share visual content with existing customers and leads can contribute to deepening relationships, educating users, and driving upsells.
This approach leverages the established trust and communication channels to deliver value-added content such as social media videos directly to different audience demographics.
Brands can effectively market product video content with their customers through:
- Email Marketing: Incorporate their actual video content (not links) into newsletters or dedicated email campaigns to provide updates, tutorials, or customer stories. This can enhance open rates and engagement by offering compelling visual content that educates and entertains.
- Customer Portals: Embed beautiful, well-crafted videos within your customer service portal or in the product dashboard itself. This can help in onboarding new users, providing advanced tips for power users, or announcing new features to drive adoption, getting you the best results for your distribution efforts.
- Personalized Messages: This method can work well for high-value leads and customers to thank them, answer their questions, or introduce them to your new offerings. Such videos can significantly increase brand affinity and loyalty, leading to happy customers.
3. Collaborate with influencers
Collaborating with influencers offers SaaS companies a unique avenue to amplify their social media videos through trusted voices within their industry. This strategy can help achieve video goals, tapping into the influencer’s established audience and leveraging their credibility to endorse the brand’s solutions.
Methods for effective influencer collaboration include:
- Sponsored Content: Hire influencers to create social videos that showcase your offerings’ features, benefits, and real-world applications. The original video can live on the influencer’s platforms, inspiring their audience to become your active users.
- Co-creation of Content: Work alongside influencers to co-create content. This could involve interviews, how-to videos, or collaborative webinars. Such partnerships offer authentic interactions with the product and provide valuable insights and social proof from a trusted source.
- Influencer Takeovers: Give control to influencers on your brand’s social media accounts for a day or a specific event. They can share hours of video content, such as live Q&A sessions, educational content, or behind-the-scenes looks at your product in action, injecting their personality and following into your brand’s channels.
Further Reading: YouTube Influencer Marketing: The Definitive Guide of 9 Campaign Types [with case studies]
4. Embed videos on your website
Embedding videos on your company’s website is a powerful way to enhance user engagement, improve SEO, and effectively communicate the value proposition of your solutions. This method leverages your own digital real estate to provide immediate, valuable visual content to visitors, aiding in both conversion and customer education.
Video content can be embedded effectively in websites in a variety of ways:
- Homepage: An introductory animated video, for instance, on the homepage to immediately engage visitors with a comprehensive overview of your offerings, highlighting key features and benefits.
- Product/Service Pages: Embed detailed interactive videos or feature-specific tutorials on relevant landing pages. This helps in providing a deeper understanding of your software and addressing potential questions and concerns.
- Customer Testimonial Section: Showcase testimonial videos from satisfied customers to build trust and credibility. Real stories from real users can significantly influence potential customers’ decision-making processes.
- FAQs and Support Pages: Incorporate educational videos and other types of content into FAQs and support sections to offer visual step-by-step guides, making complex tasks or concepts easier to understand and follow.
5. Promote it in communities and forums
Promoting video content in communities and forums is a strategic approach for businesses and enterprises to engage directly with niche audiences interested in their industry or product. This method allows for targeted distribution of high-quality videos, fostering discussions, and building brand authority in relevant spaces.
There are various ways brands can promote their video content in communities and forums:
- Participate in Relevant Discussions: Share your video content as a resource in ongoing discussions within industry-specific forums or communities like Reddit, Quora, or Stack Overflow. Ensure the content adds value to the conversation and is not just promotional.
- Engage with User-Generated Content: Respond to user-generated questions or content requests with your product-related educational videos when they are relevant. This can help in building a community around your brand and increasing customer engagement.
- Host AMA (Ask Me Anything) Sessions: Conduct AMA sessions in these forums where you can use video responses to address common questions or concerns about your product or industry. This interactive approach can significantly boost engagement and brand visibility.
6. Optimize your content for search engines
Ensuring that video content is primed for search engine discovery is pivotal for effective marketing. This optimization not only elevates the brand’s digital footprint but also aligns with the information-seeking behaviors of potential customers.
Effective search engine optimization (SEO) practices for video content can lead to enhanced organic reach, bolstered brand visibility, and improved positioning on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Video marketers can do that through:
- Keyword Integration: Embed strategic keywords into video titles, descriptions, and metadata to align with the search queries of your target audience, boosting the likelihood of your content being discovered.
- Compelling Thumbnails: Craft thumbnails that capture attention and accurately reflect the video content. A well-designed thumbnail acts as a visual prompt, increasing the click-through rate from search results.
- Video Transcriptions: Offer text transcriptions of your videos. This not only caters to a wider audience, including those who prefer reading over watching, but also enriches your content with searchable text, making it more indexable by search engines.
- Embedding on Your Own Site: Prioritize hosting videos on your own domain to direct search-driven traffic straight to your platform, thereby enhancing user engagement metrics that are favorable for SEO.
- Use Video Sitemaps: These provide the search engines with additional details about the videos hosted, facilitating more effective crawling which can lead to a higher organic reach.
Further Reading: Video Marketing SEO: 11 Ways to Optimize Your Video for Search
7. Leverage paid advertising
Utilizing paid advertising channels to promote video content on social media channels like YouTube stands out for its ability to deliver targeted exposure, generate immediate impact, and provide clear metrics for performance analysis.
Effective strategies for harnessing it within your advertising budget include:
- Targeted Social Media Campaigns: Deploy video ads on social channels like LinkedIn for B2B audiences or Instagram social media posts for B2C, using their robust targeting tools to reach viewers based on job functions, interests, or online behaviors, ensuring your content is seen by those most likely to engage.
- PPC Campaigns on Search Engines: Capitalize on the intent-driven nature of search ads by placing videos in search engine results, targeting keywords that potential customers might use when looking for your SaaS solutions, thereby capturing high-intent traffic while advertising online.
- Direct Programmatic Buys: Automate the placement of your video content across a network of sites frequented by your target demographic, leveraging data to optimize ad spend and placement for maximum visibility and engagement.
- Focused Retargeting Efforts: Re-engage visitors who’ve interacted with your site or shown interest in your content but haven’t converted. By serving them tailored video ads, you can keep your brand in their consideration set and encourage deeper engagement.
Further Reading: 12 Instagram Video Ads Tips for 2024
Best practices to maximize video content marketing ROI
These best practices not only enhance the effectiveness of the video marketing team’s efforts but also ensure resources are utilized efficiently.
- Set Tangible Marketing Goals: Whether it is increasing brand reach or generating leads, define clear video metrics you want to see improve. This will guide your content creation and video marketing campaign.
- Learn About Your Audience: Spend time researching your real customer’s pain points and desires. With that knowledge, you can create videos that are valuable to them, and ultimately your revenue.
- Optimize for Each Platform: Customize your video format, length, and messaging for the marketing channels on which it will be shared. Different platforms cater to different viewing habits and preferences.
- Focus on Storytelling: Emphasize storytelling in your videos to create a more compelling and memorable message, particularly on social channels. Stories can humanize your brand and lead to stronger customer engagement.
- Include a Call-to-Action (CTA): Always conclude with a clear CTA, particularly with demo videos, guiding viewers on what to do next, whether it’s visiting your website, signing up for an app, or another desired action.
- Leverage SEO Best Practices During Video Production: Incorporate relevant keywords in your video titles, descriptions, and tags to improve visibility in search engine results, enhancing organic reach.
By adhering to these best practices, B2B marketers can significantly improve the ROI of their visual content marketing efforts, driving meaningful video goals for their businesses.
Measuring success in video content marketing
Accurately measuring the video goals involves selecting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and developing a robust marketing reporting framework. This not only sheds light on the performance of individual video types like instructional videos but also informs broader marketing strategies, ensuring resources are directed toward the most effective tactics.
You can get started with these key metrics:
- Viewer Retention Rates: This metric tells how long viewers stay engaged with an entire video, highlighting areas for improvement to increase the minutes per day watching.
- Lead Generation Metrics: Tracks the effectiveness of videos in generating new leads, crucial for evaluating the ROI of content marketing efforts.
- Bounce Rate on Video Pages: Analyzes viewer behavior on pages hosting the video, helping to assess the popular type and website integration effectiveness.
- Audience Growth: Measures the increase in subscribers or followers as a direct result of video marketing campaigns, indicating long-term engagement potential.
- Feedback and Comments: Qualitative insights from viewer comments can provide valuable feedback on content reception and areas for improvement.
To effectively track these metrics, video marketers can utilize a combination of specialized tools:
- Wistia: Regarded as one of the best video hosting platforms, offers detailed analytics such as video view count, completion rates, etc., focusing on engagement and viewer behavior, ideal for content hosted on company websites.
- Vidyard: Provides comprehensive analytics for video platforms and lead generation tools, catering to businesses looking to directly tie video content to sales outcomes.
- Social Media Insights: Native analytics on video hosting platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram deliver granular data on video performance within their ecosystems.
- BuzzSumo: Useful for understanding what makes viral videos and social sharing metrics, helping marketers gauge content’s broader appeal among internet users.
Adopting these tools to focus on strategic metrics allows brands to refine their video content marketing strategies, ensuring efforts are aligned with business objectives and audience needs.
Wrapping up
Video content marketing is a crucial component in a brand promotion strategy, with videos increasingly preferred by audiences and current customers for their engaging and informative nature. This approach not only enhances brand visibility with the help of search algorithms but also strengthens connections with potential customers through compelling storytelling.
For content marketers, effective video marketing is more than mere content creation; it involves strategic distribution across various video platforms and accurate measurement of video metrics to ensure maximum reach and engagement.
Key video marketing tactics include leveraging social posts, engaging existing customers, collaborating with influencers, embedding videos on websites, promoting in niche communities, optimizing for search engines with video transcripts, and utilizing paid advertising.
Any type of video can give maximum ROI if you have clear objectives, audience understanding, platform-specific content optimization, storytelling, clear CTAs, and SEO best practices. Success measurement of video goals hinges on tracking engagement metrics, with tools like Wistia and Vidyard providing essential analytics.
Hero photo by Voyage Pro on Unsplash
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