Where can you use video marketing?

 A vital part of running a modern business, assembling a solid video marketing game plan is an effective strategy when implemented correctly. But with so many variables to consider, finding the time, resource, and expertise to craft one can be extremely challenging.

So, where can you use video marketing and what should you consider before formulating your strategy?

What is video marketing?

Put simply, video marketing is the deployment of visuals and memorable imagery to achieve a key goal for your brand. This can be as straightforward as improving sales, pivoting the direction of your brand, highlighting key products, and anything in between.

These can be carried out in a range of formats from full-length videos, artistic shorts, short-snippets, or viral content – all approaches are valid and have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Deploying a dedicated, targeted video marketing campaign can have significant long and short term benefits – with many successful companies producing entertaining, challenging, or informative content that can be enjoyed long after the awareness of the original campaign has been viewed. And with the internet acting as a constant repository of information, this can quickly allow you to create a compelling back-catalogue of visual content that educates, engages, and drives viewers toward your product or service.

However, video marketing should never be undertaken lightly. Failing to properly think through your approach to content production, release, and follow-up can result in wasted resource and a critical misfire when it comes to putting your product or service out there.

This makes considering a dedicated marketing strategy essential – allowing you to take a multi-path approach to releasing your content in the most effective way while setting, measuring, and achieving key goals that you set for your material well in advance.

How do you roll out your video marketing strategy?

As much of an art as a science, correctly planning out your strategy is a complex process. While this will differ from case-to-case, some essential elements to consider include-

Ringfencing your Budget: First and foremost, it is important to decide the amount of resource you can afford to spend on the project. Setting your budget in advance can prevent overruns but also allow greater flexibility in your approach, letting you produce materials that are not only creatively engaging but fit the nature of your brief. 

Understanding your narrative: Think about the story that you want to tell. While contacting a professional team can let them do the most of the heavy lifting for you, your internal teams understand the product and the audience reaction to them. Carrying out brainstorming and interviews can help capture that vital insight. 

Selecting your platform: While visual mediums are highly flexible, it is important that you tailor the project to fit the digital platform that it will be viewed on. If you’re approaching social accounts like twitter, short punchy content is ideal – with longform adverts more suitable for terrestrial marketing or PPC advertising.

Embedding your analytics: Potentially the most important element to consider, being able to assess how successful your campaign is allows you to understand your effectiveness and ROI. This should capture views, drop off rates, and viewer duration. Tracking this information can give you better information about your audience and help shape future campaigns. 

Where can they get the most exposure?

Of course, this is contextual and should always be considered carefully. While it may be tempting to push your material out everywhere, taking a blanket approach can often result in producing a product that isn’t fit for its audience. Some common avenues include, but are not limited to-

Social Media: When it comes to content, it’s important to be respectful of the viewer’s time, attention span, and engagement approach. While producing a shorter piece of material may seem like an easier task, condensing your product’s identity into a ten or fifteen second segment is an incredibly difficult task. 

Choosing to upload your content to social media should involve a steady campaign of supporting tweets and retweets to amplify your message – combining scheduled messaging through platforms such as Hootsuite alongside dedicated live responses to individuals interacting with the material. 

YouTube: Another fantastic option for many businesses, YouTube is a fantastic place to store your visual materials and allows them to be circulated on our accounts or platforms through backlinking. With an extensive suite of metrics, YouTube can quickly streamline the uploading and engagement process – empowering you to make the most of your engagement practice.

This also allows you to take advantage of advertising opportunities within the system, letting you geofence your engagement or cherry-pick the users that engage with your content. However, it is important that this is balanced correctly as repeated views of the same material or failing to produce quality material can quickly sour an audience on your brand and produce negative feedback. 

Reddit: Offering two-way engagement, uploading your materials, and video marketing to Reddit can help create a conversation around your product or service. This allows for the creation of a narrative around your brand, particularly if there is an interesting or unique story at the heart of your business.

However, it is vitally important to respond in an open and honest manner and judge your engagement appropriately. Many Reddit threads have gone viral in the past when businesses misjudge their approach, resulting in a thread derailing and garnering negative publicity. Taking the time to plan and validate your approach can create dividends and massively increase the appeal or awareness of your product or service. 

What should I ask?

When it comes to approaching a team to produce your content, it is vitally important to carry out internal research and planning to present a concrete goal. While any quality team will step through this to cover points you may have missed, starting early can get the ball rolling and allow for the delivery of quality results when it matters most.

At a minimum, this should include asking-

What is my brand identity? Firstly, what is your current brand identity and who are your audience? Looking at your own internal stats and figures can allow you to understand the image you project and better engage with your specific clients. Having a sense of the ‘tone’ you’re keen to set can help and reviewing previous projects can help you understand where you succeeded and fell short of the mark in the past.

What is my message? Arguably the hardest part of the process, crystallising the message for your content is extremely difficult. Ideally, this should be simple to digest, intuitive, memorable, and capture the unique aspect of the product or service you are trying to sell. While ‘buy product x’ may seem like a solid starting point, looking at your position in the market, your audience’s needs, and your history can help leverage a powerful message that can last the lifetime of your business.

Who do I want to reach? Put simply, who needs to see this? Depending on the video marketing strategy you choose, you will be able to target specific segments in your client base or tap into potential audiences who could potentially benefit from your product or service over an extended period. While it’s important to crunch metrics and data – taking the time to calculate your ideal audience can help your engagement team better understand how to tailor their approach. 

What is my end goal? At the end of the day, what are you attempting to accomplish with your visual campaign. Is it increased sales, improved brand awareness, or highlighting a unique product and service to new or lapsed users? No matter your specific needs, your engagement campaign can be tailored to accomplish your end goals – resulting in a plan that is fit for purpose and ensures your work is presented to the right audience, at the right time, through the correct medium to ensure that your concrete aims are accomplished. 

Find out more

If you want to learn more about effective video marketing, our team at Eight Engines are here to help. With many years’ experience providing professional creative support to clients across a range of sectors, we are the ones that can put together a unique video marketing strategy that works for your brand.