Question

The use of videos as part of your marketing effort can be very effective. What are 3 key strategies you need to include to ensure the successful use of video in your overall marketing plan?

Answer 1

Video marketing is the talk of the town in digital marketing right now and rightly so. An effective video strategy has proven to drive higher engagement rates on social media, higher conversions rates in ecommerce and increased brand awareness online via YouTube video ads.

1: Establish your goals- Firstly, you need to establish the “why” of your video marketing effort. This will be the foundation from which you build your video strategy. Determine between 1-3 specific goals you want to achieve with your video campaigns. Perhaps you would like to improve the click through rate of your ads online? Or you are seeking to increase the amount of foot traffic to your physical store? Maybe you want to use video SEO to improve how you rank organically within the search results? It is important to set appropriate goals and KPIs so you can measure them later and gauge the success of your video campaigns.

2: Identify your content requirements

This steps requires some self-reflection. How much decent video content do you already have? And what gaps or opportunities do you have within video? Carefully consider your user journey during this step: are you meeting the needs of your consumer at each milestone along their journey with your brand? Take note, if you are not offering the content your buyers need at the right moment, chances are they will be on to the next competitor without a second thought for you. So what questions do they need answering, and do you currently have the content to support those micro-moments?

3: Explore all opportunities

Based on the data and information you gathered in Step 2, decipher which type of video will fulfill each gap to maintain that relationship with your consumer. Maybe it is a “How to” video, a video testimonial, webinar or product demo. Link each video in your funnel to the goals and KPIs discussed in Step 1 to ensure all the elements of your campaign tie together.

4: Understanding your channels

Each channel will deliver upon different goals, so understanding what each channel has to offer is vital to your success. For example, Facebook video will help to increase brand awareness and engagement on the social platform; however, YouTube acts as a huge signal to Google in terms of video SEO.

• YouTube YouTube offers several different types of video ads. For the purpose of this article, we are going to look at YouTube Trueview ads and Google Preferred.
• Trueview Trueview ads are built on the premise that an advertiser will only pay for an ad if the user chooses to watch the video. So you know you are getting a more qualified audience, because they haven’t skipped the ad. These are especially good ads to run to capture the mid-to-low funnel customer who is trying to make final decisions about your brand. Imagine you are a travel brand and a consumer has been considering your destination over your competitors. You video highlighting how epic the surf is in your destination could be the push the consumer needed to book in your location.
• Google Preferred Brands that select Google Preferred can choose from 12 packages of categories, such as fashion or beauty, and share their message alongside some of the most engaging content on YouTube. In this program, brands get access to the top 5% of content on YouTube.
• Facebook As the title of this article suggests, Facebook is blowing up right now with video and mainly due to their CPM based model of video advertising.
• CPM CPM video advertising on Facebook is based on impressions, meaning your video starts to play as soon as the users scrolls to it in their newsfeed. Presuming you have a compelling first 5 seconds of your video, this is a huge opportunity to capture the interest of new customers
• CPC The CPC video advertising model on Facebook means you pay if a user actually clicks on your video to play the content. This will serve a different type of user, who is much more qualified, and is more likely to meet your conversion goals.

4: Targeting- Both YouTube and Facebook offer sophisticated targeting. YouTube has everything that the mighty Google has to offer in terms of data on customers, and Facebook brags an enormous amount of interest-based information.

5. Viewing behavior- You can learn a lot about your audience by their viewing behavior, and luckily for marketers, video comes with an enormous amount of data. You can track how much video a viewer watches, where they skip the video and what they re-watch. You can understand which topics they enjoy the most and which videos are flops. This data can become apart of your measurements for success.