by Micah Pinto & Judy Aquino
With over two billion people using smartphones in 2017, we can say that the digital world is integrated into our lifestyle. We consume more digital content than we did in the past 10 years. We have access to tons of information just at the tip of our fingers. And companies realize and understand this more and more. While more companies have realized the power of digital marketing, it is critical to understand how to effectively strategize and direct your target market to your desired outcomes.
More than any other form of digital marketing, video content has proven to be one of the most engaging tools to connect with an audience. And it is crucial to have a well thought out video strategy if you want to be successful at your video content.
Here are 5 Important Things To Focus On In Your Video Content Marketing Strategy:
1. What do you want to achieve with your video content marketing?
An effective video marketing strategy is tied to the overall vision of your company. Whether you are creating a single video or a series of videos, it is always important to start by asking, “What message do I want to tell my audience?”
To have the kind of messaging that is on-point, consider having a video content marketing mission as Joe Pulizzi advises to everyone who wants to deliver effective content. To build your mission statement, reflect on the following questions. Who is my core audience target? What is my message and my medium (i.e. demo videos, entertaining videos, educational videos)? And finally, where do I want to lead them? What is my desired outcome?
An example of a video content marketing mission could be, “Here in our travel company, we make inspiring, narrative videos for young professionals, so that they will be inspired to explore and take on travel adventures.
Defining your mission will definitely help you keep your video content consistent and aligned with your objectives.
2. What valuable topics can you provide your audience?
It is essential to really know who your core target audience is. Be keen in creating relevant content for your target market. What stories do they like? What do they pay attention to? What matters to them? What are the questions that they ask regarding current situations? What problems do they face and that which you can help them solve?
Identify gaps or opportunities in the market that you could take advantage of. Asking relevant questions eventually leads to relevant ideas. In this way, you will be able to produce engaging content. After you’ve narrowed down to a certain concept or an idea, explore different types of videos that may best relay your message.
A real estate company targeting young couples may find it relevant to produce narrative videos that show living in different cities or communities. Content about urban living, sharing about restaurants or other go-to places around the area could be something interesting for people who are thinking about settling down. Building engaging content for your target market is an effective strategy to maintain a relationship with them. Always provide something that is helpful and can provide them value. Educational content, How-To’s, and practical video content can go a long way.
3. Who will create your video content?
Producing video content may be done by an in-house video team. You may also choose to outsource and have an agency or an external creative team produce videos for your company. In assessing who will be in-charge of video production, you will need to determine the intended production quality and the over-all production budget.
Whether you are creating in-house content or outsourcing video production, clearly identify and communicate project timeline, systems, and roles & assignments. What are the deadlines? What production activities are needed to be done before the project advances? Who is taking on specific deliverables? In this way, it will be more efficient to monitor the process of video production.
4. Where will you put your content and how are you going to promote it?
Deciding where you want to put your content should be given some careful thought. And it definitely goes hand in hand with analytics (that’s next on our list!). But first and foremost, it’s a choice to make mainly because…
Your content should be where your target audience is.
If your audience is on Facebook, then upload your videos on Facebook. This will increase the reach of your videos given that Facebook’s algorithm favors serving native video content more than other types of content. We also recommend boosting your video post on its first month. You can choose the best days to boost your video, which most case studies say to be on a Friday or Saturday. With that, you can maximize your video reach while your video is still fresh.
With 1.5 billion logged-in users per month, you can’t go wrong with putting up your content on YouTube. Remember to put up a catchy but relevant title, a good description and relevant tags for your videos. This will help viewers who are looking for your kind of content find your videos. Keep in mind though that YouTube likes to keep its viewers inside the platform. You’ll need to be proactive in leading your viewers back to your own content or website. You can do this be putting up call-to-actions at the end of your video and by putting links to your website in the video description. Also encourage your viewers to subscribe to your YouTube channel so they get notified when a new video content is up.
On your website, you can decide to embed your videos using YouTube or Vimeo. However, the best option for business video embeds is Wistia. Not only can you effectively brand your video so that it sits beautifully on your website. You can also do video SEO easily through the Wistia platform and get access to an amazing set of tools for analytics (more on that on the next item!).
Remember that video marketing goes beyond putting up your videos on a platform. You have to promote it so it gets a wider reach. If you don’t have your own social media marketing team yet, you can hire social media experts or teams who can do this kind of thing for you. This way, you get a targeted exposure for your video content.
5. How will you monitor performance of your content?
A successful video goes beyond number of views.
Some important metrics to look at are the view rate, traffic sources and engagement.
The view rate tells you how long your video is watched. It’s an important metric because it gives you an idea how long people want to watch your video. Is it engaging enough to watch the whole way through? On YouTube, view rate is given as the average view duration (how long is the video watched) and the percentage viewed (how much of the video is watched). It’s also a big factor on what makes a video rank higher on this platform.
Looking at your video traffic sources is a big part of any analytics. This tells you about the search terms people use to get to your video, are your views native and organic, are they coming from Google search, or are you showing up on YouTube’s suggested video section. You can glean a handful of insights from your sources and use the information to tweak your present and future video content and also to adjust your video strategy.
Engagement of course plays an important role. Do people like, comment or share your videos? The more engagement you get the more organic views you are likely to have. This gives you a higher chance of having conversions out of your video content.
Facebook and YouTube Analytics provides you with relevant analytics. What deserves a special mention here though is Wistia. Wistia’s video analytics is awesome. You can’t go wrong with their video “heatmaps” to monitor your videos! The heatmap lets you know what part of the video is watched, what parts are skipped, and what parts get watched repeatedly. This certainly gives you a better insight on what action you can take for your video content. So there you have it! These are the 5 essential things you should take note of.
Remember that successful video content marketing starts with a great strategy.
Adopt a key strategy that effectively supports your marketing goals. But always be prepared to shift and innovate. The digital world is after all, a very dynamic space!