How To Improve Your Video Marketing Strategy

It’s clear that a significant portion of web users prefer to consume their content via videos. More and more businesses are investing in a video marketing strategy. Video is now so popular that video accounts for around 80% of internet traffic, and mobile video consumption grows massively every year.

With these trends, it’s clear to see that video marketing is a great opportunity to connect with your clients and more effectively build strong relationships with them. People respond well to video, as it can create a more human feeling for your brand, and let your clients get to know you a bit better.

If you’re like a lot of business leaders, you might feel a little hesitant about creating and sharing your own videos, or even hiring a video production company to do it for you if it means being on camera. However, the benefits of creating video for your business are well worth it.

In fact, for the purposes of lead generation, businesses often find that they get much better results when they include themselves in the video. A video of yourself can make you feel awkward or even a bit vulnerable, but it also gives the video a level of authenticity that can be lacking in high-quality marketing videos. Those slick, over-edited marketing videos look great, but they are more likely to be ignored.

Emails that include a video actually can see a much stronger click-through rate compared to emails without video. It’s also important to keep in mind that video is one of the best ways to establish yourself as an authority on your topic and in your niche.

Here are some of the best ways to improve your video marketing strategy, and increase engagement with your ideal clients.

Know Your Audience

If you try to market to everyone, you will end up marketing to no one.

This is true for video marketing too. While having a viral video that everyone has seen might be nice and is great social proof, your actual video marketing strategy, and the videos that you create for your business, should be aimed at helping you to achieve one or more of your business or marketing goals, such as sales, website traffic, or driving awareness of your brand.

You can make your video content more effective is to start with the ideal clients for your business in mind. You need to do a lot of research into your target audience and get a clear understanding of what their preferences and needs are.

To do this effectively, you need to determine:

• What channels they are using to watch videos.
• The type of language that use, and which will best get your message across.
• What challenges or needs they have, that you are able to provide a solution for.

If you have a good understanding of what the motivations of your audience are, and you speak their language, you will be successfully able to connect with them in a meaningful way. When you create videos that are carefully targeted and that are specific to the needs or questions of your audience that they might have, this will drive better outcomes for your business, and be much more useful to your audience.

Consistently Brand Your Videos

Whether you are creating live videos or having them professionally scripted and edited, or anything between, you need to be consistent with your digital branding.

This will make it much easier for people to recognize your business when they see a video that you share. It can also create a sense of professionalism, and build trust over time.

Decide what branding elements you are going to include in all of your videos, which will help your viewers to recognize that the video content is you when they see it. This could range from something simple like always wearing a unique item of clothing when you record a video, your brand’s logo in the same corner of your video each time, or always including a short, branded intro and/or outro for your videos.

Make The Video Topic Clear

There is a lot of video content online, all competing for attention. Because of all this competition, you need to quickly grab the interest of the viewer, and clearly communicate what the video is actually about with the video’s title and description. You need to give enough information for people to decide whether or not they want to watch your videos. Viewers will often decide what they want to watch based entirely on the video’s title alone.

If you want someone to watch a longer video, you need to give them an accurate and informative synopsis. In this synopsis, highlight a few benefits that the viewer will get from watching the video, or give the main plot points if it’s a narrative.

It’s also a good idea to transcribe your videos. This is not only good for accessibility, but it also allows viewers to skim the content if they prefer to, and it can also help search engines to index your video content and deliver it for relevant search queries.

Tell Stories With Your Video

Storytelling is very important for successful video marketing. Viewers will often forget the various stats and numbers that you share in a video, but they will remember an engaging anecdote with which they connected with.

People use storytelling every day to understand the world around them. Stories can be one of the most effective ways to communicate ideas.

Here are some ways to incorporate effective storytelling into your videos:

• Showcase your expertise. Share success stories, or create deep-dive videos on a topic of interest to your viewers in order to show your expert knowledge and how you have already helped people with similar challenges.
• Explain a trend. Join the conversation on hot topics in your industry by sharing your opinion on the trend.
• Show a process. Make your viewers feel like they’re seeing behind the scenes of your processes, or help them to solve a problem using a video that gives a step-by-step solution.
• Inspire. Share an inspirational or aspirational, story that captures the attention of your viewers and creates feelings, which the viewer will then associate with your brand.
• Get personal. Let your viewers get to know the people behind your brand. This can also help them to feel more connected to your business.

Use Social Proof

Social proof is a key factor that consumers use when they decide who they want to do business with.

People like to see what others have done when they make a decision, which is why reviews, testimonials, and endorsements are so important.

Social proof helps people to make decisions when they’re not sure, based on the choices others are making or have made.

Social proof can come in many different forms, such as likes, votes, views, or comments on your videos. You could share customer testimonials and case study videos. Depending on your budget, you might also want to think about incorporating experts or influencers into your marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Videos

In order for people to want to watch your videos, you need to find those people first. This is very important for YouTube marketing, as it is the second-largest search engine, behind only Google.

When you optimize your videos for social media, make sure that you under the best practices for video on the platform that you’re planning on sharing the video on. For example:

• Facebook. Keep videos short. Upload the videos directly to Facebook, and always add captions.
• YouTube. After you have launched the video, wait two weeks before you make any tweaks or start refining your target audience.
• Twitter. Upload your video directly to Twitter. Keep videos short and find a balance between fine-tuned targeting (using interests, keywords, and devices) and not over-targeting, so you can accurately track results.

As well as optimizing your videos for each channel you’re sharing them on, you also need to optimize them for SEO. Keep this in mind when you create your videos, so people can find them when your ideal target audience is making a search for related topics.

• Plan your keywords for your video, in the same way as you would for a blog post.
• Include your keywords in the title and description.
• Keep your title short and informative. Under 60 characters is ideal for most videos.
• Always include a link to your website.
• Use tags with different variations on your keywords.
• Build natural backlinks to your videos.
• Use eye-catching, branded, high-quality thumbnails.
• Optimize your videos for being viewed on a mobile device.

LinkedIn Native Video

LinkedIn makes it easy to post video, as you can upload and share video from your mobile phone. This lets your network enjoy unique and original content that interests and is relevant to them.

You can also see how well your videos are performing on LinkedIn. Check how many views they’re getting, as well as how much engagement they are getting, at any time you want.