The rise and rise of video marketing – our five strategy pointers

You won’t have missed the fact that video is continuing to grow in both popularity and importance. It is a highly effective form of content; after all a picture does paint a 1000 words, and especially a moving image at that.

According to Smart Insights, people will spend 100 minutes a day watching online videos in 2021 (which is a 19% increase from 84 minutes in 2019).

While this shows that video needs to form part of your digital marketing strategy, it also means the field will be competitive! Therefore it’s vital, let’s even say business critical, that your business creates a strong digital video marketing strategy. But where do you start?

How to stand out from the crowd

First off, you need to understand the consumer expectations around video, as well as what the big video marketing trends are (e.g. 360 degree videos, the right balance of short and long form content and video personalisation).

Smart Insights report that 48% of consumers want video to reflect what they are interested in. So you need to meet their expectations and not yours.

How does this feed into your video marketing strategy?

Here are our five strategy pointers for you to consider as part of your video marketing plans.

1. Understand who your audience is and set your goal

Who are you targeting? What sort of content do they respond to? Where are they likely to consume this content? Then in parallel to this, what do you want your video to achieve? Drive awareness or traffic? Lead to a sale? The answers to these questions are critically important as ultimately they will feed into the creative production brief.

2. Agree your brand messaging

You want your audience to know who is speaking to them so don’t get distracted from your key brand messages when creating your video. This doesn’t mean you can’t be engaging, exciting or even fun, just remember who you are and what you stand for. And don’t forget, the message needs to be consistent across all your platforms. For instance, if a follow up ecomms or social media post differs widely from your video content you will confuse your audience.

3. Spend your budget well

Keep your audience and goal in mind to ensure you are spending your budget sensibly and will see a positive ROI. You may not even need to have a large video marketing budget if you are targeting young adults who are used to quick short format videos (even making the most of user generated content).

4. Target and optimise your videos per channel

Think about where your videos will appear and optimise accordingly. For instance, if your video is appearing on Facebook, make sure it is viewable on a mobile phone, includes both audio and captions and upload the video directly to the platform. You could even run a short form video on social media with a link to the longer form on your website.

5. Testing, testing, testing!

Once you have launched your video campaign, you need to look at how it performed so you know what to repeat or change for next time. Is your video too long or too short? What and when and how was it viewed? Was one platform more successful than another and if so, why? View counts differ per platform so you need to understand what these mean.

It may feel like a lot to consider – it is! – but it also ties into what the fundamentals of marketing is all about – your audience, your message and how you want them to behave.

If you want to chat more about this, or find out how Challenge can work with you on your personalised video marketing strategy, drop us a line.

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