How to Plan Your Video Marketing Strategy

Video marketing is flourishing every day. As you can notice, every social media channel is encouraging video content over any other type of content. Recently, Facebook and YouTube have significantly prioritized “Live Videos”, making them visible to hundreds and thousands of people (per each Live).

According to several impressing statistics published by HubSpot at the beginning of 2018,

• Around 81% of businesses leverage video content as a digital marketing tool.
• 99% of the professionals who leverage video content state that they’re going to continue to do so in the next year and the next years to come.
• 97% of digital marketers reported that video content helped their users gain a better understanding of their brand culture, products, and services.
• 76% of digital marketers suggest that video content improved their sales& traffic.
• 72% of consumers prefer learning from videos rather than any other type of media content.

Simply by acknowledging these statistics, you can surely understand the importance of video content for your business. It doesn’t matter what type of business it is because video content is everywhere.

Obviously, planning a video marketing strategy doesn’t mean abandoning your present efforts to develop high-quality text content.

Video marketing is basically a systematic plan that aims to improve your business. It’s meant to improve its reputation, awareness, trust, sales, and performance.

To help you achieve exactly that, we have developed this extremely simple guide that shall help you start developing an effective video marketing campaign. Again, it doesn’t matter what type of campaign it is, what niche it is, or what audience you have because every business is unique.

Take these tips and develop your own mechanism that’s based on uniqueness, originality, and brilliance. Pay attention and apply!

1. Fully Understand Your Target Audience

In order to develop any type of marketing or advertising campaign online, you need to fully understand your audience. Simply put, you must do some research and establish the characteristics of your future customers.

Here are some of the aspects you should consider when establishing your target audience. To simplify the process, you should define the “target persona”, which is the ideal target audience member, the member who is most likely to love your brand and purchase your products.

• What’s the age, nationality, and gender of your target persona?
• How much money does your ideal customer have to spend on the type of offers you’re promoting?
• What are your target persona’s needs, problems, craves, and true desires?
• What job(s) does your target persona have?
• Is your ideal customer married? With kids? Divorced?

Make a very clear picture and start using what you got in the next stages of the process.

1. Develop a Strategic Video Content Plan

To reach success easily and as quickly as possible, you need a roadmap. Without it, you’ll be missing many “turns” which means that you’ll get distracted along the way.

First off, you need to establish what type of video content your target audience prefers and come up with creative business video ideas. Secondly, you’ll need to determine the frequency of your video postings. Use a calendar for this process and determine the rate of your new uploads. Try to be as realistic as you can and estimate how much time, attention, energy, and resources you have available for your video campaign.

Ideally, you should diversify your video types into different categories. Again, this depends on your target audience, your marketing strategy, and your abilities to create results:

• Practical, instructional, HOW-TO videos
• Educational videos
• Videos that are meant to entertain
• Inspirational videos
• Interviews
• Tips & tricks
• Product explainers
• Case study videos
• Customer testimonials
• Behind-the-scenes moments

Start with one or two types and focus on them. Once you are able to master those, you should move on to the next and diversify your strategy. Mark everything on your calendar and there it goes – your initial video development calendar.

Once you establish the types of video content you send each day/week/month, you’ll need to outline your topics and content, so you can get a much better picture of how your video marketing campaign is going to look in the future. Once you establish the types of video content you send each day/week/month, you’ll need to outline your topics and content, so you can get a much better picture of how your video marketing campaign is going to look in the future.

1. Make It Rock

Before you create your content outlines (the titles, the content, the keywords), you should understand the following: the more professional your video campaign looks the more results you will get in the long-term future. Pay attention to the following tips and try to implement them each time you plan a broader, longer-term video marketing campaign.

Make a Proper Introduction

The first impression counts most of the time. In the video world, it counts the most because there are millions of videos out there. Differentiating yours from the rest may be a challenge, however, if you know how to properly introduce your brand to others, your problems may become reduced.

Your videos must have an impact, especially the ones that are aimed to introduce your brand to others. Your educational videos must not contain mistakes and should be truly relevant. Your videos purpose must be aligned with your brand’s purpose.

Lastly, proofreading services may be used to ensure a stable quality of the content that you distribute. Grammar & spelling mistakes may heavily hurt your campaigns, so you shouldn’t risk it!

Show What, Why, and How

When you develop instructional videos, always show what, why, and how. For example, if you create a video on “how to clean your room in 5 minutes” and you name it so, the “what” is covered. Then, you’ll need to tell why it is important, and finally, how it can be achieved.

Give Value, Gain Trust

Great businesses have become great because they’ve provided value and gained trust in different ways. If you want to gather loyal customers that will also share your brand with others, you should offer only quality and value. If you can’t do it, it’s better for you to abstain from developing a new video. Only do it when you consider that it’ll help!

Takeaways

If you’re still considering whether video marketing is truly worth it or not, then it means this is really not for you. Every business owner, entrepreneur, marketer, or small businessman can easily see the opportunity (if that’s the case).

Therefore, all that remains is that you start taking actual action. Start planning your video marketing strategy according to the tips received and enjoy the enormous benefits that every successful brand keeps praising. You can use tools like Instagram and Facebook video templates to streamline your creation process.

Chris Richardson has been working as an editor at a publishing agency in London, UK for 5 years. He is also a professional content writing expert in such topics as career growth, self-improvement, blogging, and technology innovations. Feel free to connect with him on Google+.