Brands need a video marketing strategy — this idea isn’t new. What has changed is how important video has become on every platform and channel. Simply posting old webinars to YouTube is no longer going to cut it.

If you want to stand out from the competition and truly attract, engage, and convert new customers, then you need a solid video marketing strategy.

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about creating a successful video marketing strategy for 2023.

Step One: Understand your audience and set goals

All successful marketing campaigns must start with research – who are you targeting? What type of content tends to resonate with them, and what channels are they most likely to be on?

To help answer these questions, take a minute to close your eyes and envision your ideal customer: the person who would visit your storefront, call your phone, or click to your website with no hassle or haggling. Have a mental picture of this person? Good. This is the beginning of building a buyer persona and is critical to developing the right content for your audience.

Whether your goal is to drive awareness, boost traffic, increase sales, or all of the above, everything you script, film, and upload should speak to your buyer persona(s). It’s also crucial to create a variety of videos that target your buyer persona at different stages of the buyer’s journey. If you’re not sure what kind of message is best at each stage, align your video content with the flywheel and make sure to answer their questions, resolve their pain points, and provide targeted calls to action that relate to them. By keeping this top of mind when designing your video marketing strategy, you’ll have the best shot at resonating with your audience and achieving your goals.

Step Two: Outline your video marketing content plan

The key to outlining the content in your video marketing strategy is to look at a calendar and determine your content schedule. How many videos do you plan to publish and at what frequency? Can you cover one video a week, or does two videos a month make more sense? Be honest with yourself – the key to creating a video marketing plan is consistency. Your audience will come to expect your videos at certain times of the week or month, and you want to be sure you can deliver.

A video marketing content plan should also incorporate different video styles for different video projects, depending on the objectives, the intended audience, your goals, and more. Some popular video styles include:

• Educational videos
• Practical or how-to videos
• Tips and tricks videos
• Interview videos
• Recorded webinar videos
• Product explainer videos
• Customer testimonial/case study videos

By testing out different style options for your videos, you can see what best suits your brand and its tone and discover what your audience responds to most.

Step Three: Promote your video content

Every major social media platform has its own form of video, so there is plenty of real estate to incorporate it into your strategy.

Studies show Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are the top platforms consumers and brands anticipate to use the most over the next year. Start by focusing on the ones where you already have audiences established, then build on your strategy to eventually incorporate all platforms.

Depending on the channels you choose to launch your strategy, you’ll need to make sure your videos are optimized to get as much engagement as possible. For example, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are more susceptive to short videos uploaded directly to the channel, whereas YouTube is better for long form videos shared through other platforms.

It’s also important to remember videos on social media aren’t just one-and-done. One fully produced video could be uploaded to several networks over a month-long period, depending on your social schedule, as well as used on alternative channels like paid ads, email marketing, on your website, and more. (For more ideas on how to get more out of your video content click here!)

Step Four: Monitor your video marketing metrics

Launching a new video doesn’t mean you’re done. The last step in any successful strategy is to analyze performance. You won’t know if a video is successful or not unless you look at the statistics associated with it.

Some common metrics to monitor include:

• Total views
• Average Watch Time
• Clickthrough rate (on email or social)
• Conversion (on landing pages or website)
• Social media engagement
  • Likes
  • Shares
  • Comments

Once you collect the data, spend time analyzing it to make informed decisions for your future videos.

For example, if your videos have a high number of views but a short average watch time, then you touched on the right topic, but maybe you droned on a little too long and lost your audience’s attention. Or, if your videos have a high level of social media engagement, your audience is telling you they enjoy your delivery and are interested in the topic of the video. But if your conversion rate is low, then maybe you need to bolster your call to action.

By monitoring your video performance, you’ll have data-driven insights that will help you continuously optimize your content and strategy and achieve your goals.

Start Planning Your Video Marketing Strategy

The growth of video marketing is presenting a unique opportunity for brands to capitalize on the tool and stand out to consumers. But you don’t have to do it alone.

At Video Parachute, we provide stress-free video production, editing, and virtual event services so you can easily create a winning video strategy. Whether you know what you want your final product to look like or need some assistance with the creative direction, well will help you stay on brand, meet your goals, and inspire your audience. Give us a call today to learn more.

Continuing to publish a steady stream of content to keep your core audience engaged is vital but producing new content to invigorate a video marketing strategy can sometimes be challenging.

Video shoots are an investment of time and money, so it’s important to ensure you’re getting as much out of the production process and final product as possible.

In this post, we’re breaking down a few of the ways you can maximize your video shoot and content, without breaking the budget.

Incorporate Video and Photography in One Session

Studies show that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands they support. And in an age focused on online marketing, photos are equally as important for businesses to put a face to the name, establish a trusted brand, and tastefully show off products/services to customers.

So, if you’ve finally convinced your boss to invest in video marketing, consider tacking on a photography session at the same time.

Videos and photos go hand in hand in your marketing strategy. While used in different formats, both are working towards the same goal, to generate brand awareness and interest from consumers. So, it’s important your assets look uniform across the board, which is much easier to manage when you only have one company in the mix.

In addition, video and photography shoots are time consuming. From the pre-shoot planning to the actual day of the shoot, it requires a lot of effort and resources from multiple teammates. By incorporating both video and photography into one session, you’re able to do more at once, saving you time and money in the long run.

Transcribe Videos for Written Content

It’s old news that video content has taken over consumers. But that doesn’t mean written content is dead. In fact, if done properly, your video content strategy can support your written content strategy. Here’s how:

• Create written marketing materials: Content marketing has become a scary place. We’re creating all this content to educate and engage our audiences, but behind the scenes, it’s duct-taped together and the high-volume workload is hard to manage. By turning video content into written content, you can focus on putting your expert’s conversations at the center of your content strategy and amplifying those voices through blog posts, e-books, flyers, really any content that your audience wants to consume.
• Help rank for SEO: Search engines can’t watch videos, but transcripts on the other hand, allow search engines to crawl the full text of your video content so that it can be properly indexed and discoverable. When Google crawls content, it searches for indicators to identify that content is beneficial for searchers and increases your rank in search results, so you have a better chance at getting in front of your audience.
• Highlight important messages: Trying to write great social media posts with different messaging can take a lot of time and feel draining. But when you can pull quotes, messages, testimonials, etc. directly from video content, you can easily put together a series of social posts and ads with compelling messages that get right to the point for your customers and saves you time and effort. It’s a win, win!

Wringing out your video content across various formats and channels allows you to get it into the hands and heads of sales, customer success, the C-Suite, and more, maximizing your reach and providing greater ROI on your video investment.

Turn Long Form Videos into Multiple Short Form Videos

With platforms like Instagram and TikTok, short-form content has become all the rage. And repurposing long-form content to be short-form is a fantastic way to maximize your efforts. However, you still must make sure the content you’re working with meshes well with a short format. When chopping up your long-form content into multiple short-form pieces, each video should focus on one, complete idea. The last thing you want is to post content that doesn’t hit home because half of it is missing.

For example, maybe you recently launched a new product and created a video discussing the backstory, product how-to, and a few quick tips all in the same video. With multiple topics at play, you can easily make each segment its own piece of short-form content that is perfectly adapted for the shorter attention spans of today’s media consumers. This bitesize format is a great way to slowly bake yourself into your audience’s minds through a series of videos that generate greater engagement.

Once you’ve successfully created multiple shorter videos, you’re now ready to take your marketing to a wider range of social platforms and even begin incorporating video into your ad campaign strategy.

Get Started

Maximizing your video shoot and producing “new” video creative using your finished assets can be incredibly affordable, simple, and quick (when done right). And the flexibility of how and where you use your content post-production offers you virtually limitless opportunities to delight your audience and keep your brand relevant.

At Video Parachute, we understand the investment of video marketing and the importance of maximizing your efforts. That’s why we make sure we understand your goals and vision and offer the equipment and expertise you need to create video content that will continue to generate ROI for months to come.

If you’re ready to start planning your next marketing video, give us a call today.