Your Video Marketing FAQ: Top 5 Questions Answered
Good marketing relies on solid strategy. And solid marketing strategy always includes video. Over the past 5 years, video marketing has skyrocketed in popularity- 92% of marketers called video a key component of their marketing strategy for 2020, compared to 78% in 2015. This is partially driven by demand – video consumption is increasing exponentially, with viewers watching over a billion hours of video per day on YouTube alone.
Not only has video popularity ballooned, but it’s being recognized as a highly effective way to market. Video marketing gets impressive results: 66% more leads a year, while generating a 54% uptick in brand awareness.
Whether you’re new to the world of video marketing, well-versed in what it takes to craft a strong marketing strategy that includes video, or anywhere in between, we’ve got the answers to 5 commonly asked questions – answers that will help guide you along your video journey.
Video Marketing FAQ’s
The definition of video marketing can be super simple or beautifully multifaceted. At its core, video marketing is your message, delivered via video, to a select audience.
Taking that definition slightly further, video marketing is a way to promote your brand, showcase your product, or do a deep dive into your service, core values, or experience. Looking at video marketing from an experiential perspective, video helps you engage with your clients or customers, educate on what you offer or what you stand for, and essentially inspire your audience to want to know more about you or what you do.
“Video marketing” is differentiated ever-so-slightly from its twin sibling “video content marketing” as it tends to be more overtly promotional.
Today, video marketing is a $135 billion industry. Though this might sound a bit daunting, have no fear! One of the primary benefits of leveraging video marketing is its versatility- and there’s a fairly low bar to entry.
You can start as high- or low-budget you want. Hire a full-service agency with all of the bells and whistles to transform your creative vision into the video of your dreams- or grab your smartphone, hit record, and post a video ad on an Instagram story for less than ten cents a click.
Video marketing is flexible. B2B marketing videos can be optimized for sites like LinkedIn or sent directly to key decision-makers. B2C marketing videos can be hyper-targeted to show viewers video that appeals specifically to their preferences, appealing to B2C and B2B audiences alike. It’s familiar – successful videos tell a story, appeal to emotions, entertain, or teach something.
SEO loves video. Websites featuring video content are 53% more likely to have a front-page result in a Google search.
Perhaps the most important video marketing benefit is its effectiveness from start to finish. The mere mention of the word “video” in an email subject line increases the click-through rate by 13%. From there, video increases retention of information by up to 85%, and then helps drive website traffic – 87% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website.
Finally, the personal and interactive element of video helps to build trust between you and potential clients or customers, while some of the more creative and unique videos can help your brand get trending. With 91% of video marketers satisfied with the ROI of their social media video marketing, it’s safe to say that when done well, video can be a powerful cornerstone of any marketing campaign.
There’s no one correct path to video marketing success, but most who have seen success with video marketing agree on one crucial starting point: come up with a plan, and stick to it. This plan should be comprehensive, and cover more than just “let’s do one video per week!”
Start with identifying your goals.
Where in the marketing funnel will you be adding video/s? Are you trying to hit a sales target, or simply generate awareness? Map out topics, and define what specific types of video will help you achieve your predetermined goals. Are you going to produce a straightforward commercial? Or are you looking to do something a little different – perhaps a customer testimonial, a product demo, or a hand-drawn explainer video?
Define your audience, too.
Who do you want to reach with each video? Research who you’re targeting – Hubspot has a great buyer persona template for this – and come up with topics that will resonate with each target audience.
Finally, figure out your metrics.
No matter the platform, there’s quite a bit of data associated with most video hosts. What do you want to measure – what does success look like to you? Keep track of your metrics and don’t be afraid to shift your strategy when something isn’t performing as expected. The metrics can give you a lot of insight. They can tell you when you need to make a simple fix like moving a video from Facebook to Twitter. Or you may need to refocus – trim a video from 1 minute to 30 seconds if people are clicking away, or add subtitles if most folks are watching with the sound off.
Speaking of target audiences, you’re probably wondering who’s paying attention to video marketing. The answer is: pretty much everyone.
According to Google, YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds in an average week than all cable TV networks combined. And more than 55% of shoppers said they’ve used online videos while they actually shopped in a store. Hubspot found that all age categories from 18 to 54 showed a consistent preference for video over things like emails, blogs, and downloadable content.
Plus when it comes to social video marketing, Twitter says that adding video to a tweet makes it 6 times more likely to be retweeted than photos. And users now spend three times longer on live video than standard uploaded content on Facebook.
So now that you know some of the stellar benefits to video marketing, let’s get back to basics – video is at its best when it evokes emotion, educates, or encourages a viewer to act. And some videos do that better than others.
For further exploration and inspiration, here are several roundups of exemplary video marketing:
– Hubspot covers the “all the feels” category.
– BigCommerce has a list of great ecommerce product videos.
– Sprout Social takes a look at engaging videos found on social media.
– And finally, Hearst Media kicks it all the way back to 1984 in its list of the top 20 marketing videos of all time.
Once you get started with video marketing, you will see that the possibilities are endless. What will you create next?