Video Marketing

10 Tips for Video Marketing Success

JannelleChemko
ByJannelleChemko

Predictions estimate that, by 2021, 82 percent of all internet traffic will be video. That’s only a few years away, so if you haven’t already incorporated video in your your marketing strategy – now is the time.

Between YouTube, Facebook Live, Instagram Stories or Snapchat, publishing video content online has never been easier, cheaper or more accessible for businesses. But there are some best practices that are important to take note of and keep in mind.

1. Define Your Goals

Before you start any new marketing campaign, you need to define your goals, and what you ultimately hope to get out of it. Do you want to increase traffic? Grow your leads? Drive conversions? Improve brand awareness?

Whatever your goal, defining and documenting it before moving forward with a new strategy or campaign will help you stay on track and stay accountable.

2. Tell a Story

All business should make use of the emotive power of video by telling a story. Stories are key to captivate an audience and appeal to their wants and needs. Don’t just sell your product or service, tell a story about what your product or service does, and why or how it will help the customer solve their problems.

Storytelling is key to connecting with your audience and increasing positive brand awareness.

3. Grab Attention

One-fifth of all viewers will click away from a video in 10 seconds or less. That means you have only about 5 seconds to grab their attention and keep it. The introduction of your video is therefore vitally important in its overall success, and you’ll need to bring your story to life quickly to hook the viewer to keep watching.

In the opening seconds of your video, you should clarify what the video is about and just enough information for the viewer to decide if it’s worth their time or not. Your thumbnail should also be clear and relevant, suggesting to the viewer that your video is also high-quality and worth the click.

4. Maintain Brand Consistency

This is especially important if one of your goals is to increase brand awareness. Brand consistency should be kept in mind for all aspects of your video content: logos, font, use of color, background music, graphics, and even tone, all roll up into your brand image.

If even one or two of your elements are off of your regular branding, it will confuse audiences and might cause them to think the video or its content is inauthentic.

5. Educate Your Audience

When creating video content, don’t just focus on promoting the product or service you are selling: focus instead on the value you are providing and educate your audience on that value. For example, you can film a demo video that teaches your customers how to use your product, or useful tips or tricks in using it. Or you can showcase your industry expertise with a recorded webinar discussing the industry or recent relevant news.

6. Be Creative

Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s Founder and CTO, gave an interview a few years ago where he was asked about lessons learned in video marketing:

“The worst thing to do is make a completely boring video. Videos that are pure marketing puff pieces don’t spread.”

He goes on to say that their team focuses on being creative and incorporating humour into their video content. He also stresses that video production doesn’t need to be “Oscar-worthy” as long as the content is useful and the overall message of the video is valuable.

Relying on buyer personas will help you to decide which creative direction makes the most sense for your target audience, but don’t feel like you can’t use humour or a little creativity, even in the most ‘professional’ of industries.

7. Optimize Your Videos

Optimizing your YouTube videos is as important as search engine optimization for your website. Over 300 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, so you need to make sure your own content is found easily, and by the right audience, every time. Optimizing your YouTube videos will not only improve your search ranking results within YouTube itself, but also across search engines like Google as well.

We just published a whole blog post about optimizing your YouTube videos last month, so check it out for all the details.

8. Share Your Content

Video content should be shared across all available channels, including your blog, resource pages, and social media accounts. You can publish videos to your Facebook, YouTube and Instagram accounts, and post links to Twitter, allowing your videos to be easily shared and distributed.

9. Include a Call To Action

You can build viewership with end screens on your videos, which are basically a call to action for the user to take a suggested next step. End screens are a part of the video that show during the last 5-20 seconds of a video. Your video has to be at least 25 seconds long to have an end screen, and you can add up to four elements to promote your content, channel, and websites.

Some examples of how you can use end screens at the end of your YouTube video are:

  • Point viewers to other videos, playlists, or channels on YouTube
  • Call for subscriptions to your channel
  • Promote your website, merchandise, or crowdfunding campaigns

10. Rely on Video Analytics

Once a video has gone live, rely on your data and analytics to track its success. What are the views like? How is your watchtime? Are people commenting? What’s the feedback? And most importantly: has your website traffic or conversions increased?

Using your real-time results can help you understand what you did right with your video, and what you may have done wrong — both of which can point you in the right direction for your next production or campaign.

Thanks for checking out this post. I hope you find our video marketing tips useful in your next video marketing campaign.

About the Author

JannelleChemko

JannelleChemko

Numbers Ninja & Digital Dynamo
Jannelle Chemko has been working in Operations and Accounting since 2007. After earning a Bachelor’s Degree in English, she is now in the midst of her CGA designation.

As strange as it sounds, Jannelle is a numbers and a letters guru: in addition to extensive full-cycle accounting experience in the technology and retail industries, Jannelle is also passionate about writing. In between crunching numbers and building excel reports, she researches, creates content, and keeps up to date with digital trends.

When she’s not working to meet school and month-end deadlines, you can find Jannelle outside walking her dog, and enjoying the beautiful Vancouver air.
Follow Me On: Facebook

You may also like...

By continuing to browse or by clicking “Accept” you agree to the storing of first- and third-party cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.
Cookie policy | Privacy Policy

Privacy Preference Center

Close

Your Privacy

Umami Marketing Inc. appreciates your interest in its products and your visit to this website and respects the privacy and the integrity of any information that you provide us as a user of this Site. The protection of your privacy in the processing of your personal data is an important concern to which we pay special attention during our business processes.

Privacy Policy

Required
Personal data collected during visits to our websites are processed by us according to the legal provisions valid for the countries in which the websites are maintained. Our data protection policy is also based on the data protection policy applicable to Umami Marketing Inc. Read more

Cookie Policy

Required
Umami Marketing uses cookies and similar technologies, such as HTML5 web storage and local shared objects (all referred to as ‘cookies’ below), to record the preferences of users and optimize the design of its websites. They make navigation easier and increase the user-friendliness of a website. Read more

Essential cookies

These cookies are essential for websites and their features to work properly. Without these cookies, services such as the vehicle configurator may be disabled.

Cookies used

  • WordPress Required

Performance Cookies

These cookies collect information about how you use websites. Performance cookies help us, for example, to identify especially popular areas of our website. In this way, we can adapt the content of our websites more specifically to your needs and thereby improve what we offer you. These cookies do not collect personal data. Further details on how the information is collected and analyzed can be found in the section ‘Analysis of usage data’.

Cookies used

Third-party cookies

These cookies are installed by third parties, e.g. social networks. Their main purpose is to integrate social media content on our site, such as social plugins.

Third-party cookies