Video Marketing is not a new phenomenon with marketers advertising the products or services using videos for almost 70 years with the first-ever commercial can be traced back to a baseball game billboard in New York in 1941 for a brand called Bulova – a company selling watches.
Digital Marketers should not disregard the convenience of video marketing when it comes to promoting the brands.
Video marketing enables marketers in sharing their valuable information with their target audience.
Studies on video marketing have shown that using videos in advertising campaigns has resulted in an increase of brand awareness and affectivity by 600% over other conventional marketing tools.
In the United States of America, an estimated 75 million people watch videos every day and as such about 97% of marketers opined that these videos have helped their consumers in a better understanding of their products and services.
By the end of 2020, about 85% of the total consumer internet traffic would be dominated by online video stream.
These figures alone are proof of the significance of video marketing in boosting engagement and brand recognition of products and services.
The content of video marketing may be in the following forms such as-
Twitter Video
Facebook Video
LinkedIn Video
Facebook Live
360 Video
Virtual Reality
Snapchat
YouTube Video
Marketers can choose any one or more options of these videos for their video content strategy.
However, there are five key areas or things about video marketing that marketers should know before choosing the above mentioned video marketing channels.
These five things are-
Understanding Different Types Of Video Content
Marketers should ensure in utilizing the right video content on the right video platform or channel that has a holistic view of the target audiences.
The message of the video should reach the target audience when uploaded on a particular video platform from the choices mentioned above.
The length of the video such as short or long time duration videos is also one of the factors while choosing the right video platform.
For instance, short duration videos can be uploaded easily on Twitter and Facebook whereas longer duration videos require video streaming sites like YouTube.
Marketers must do through research while choosing the right material and platform for their marketing campaigns.
Budgeting
For producing video content – marketers can produce video content either through in-house or by hiring a professional video creator.
In-house video creation provides the marketer with more independence over their content by enabling them to apply their own personal touches but the major drawback of the in-house video creation is it involves a lot of time and money and lost productivity if the concerned marketer is a novice in the field of video creation techniques.
On the other hand, hiring professional video creators is the best option to save time and effort as these professional video creators can immediately provide professional looking videos.
Regardless of the options a marketer chooses, it all depends upon the budget one has to get the best video content by applying their creativity and hiring a technical team for the creation of the video.
Video SEO
Like the text content – the video content should also be optimized for search engines and as such marketers need to apply the best SEO techniques on their video content to derive maximum SEO value.
The digital marketers must also ensure that they enable the embedded feature of the videos so as to improve the chances of getting inbound marketing links.
It is also recommended to create a video sitemap for videos to enable search engines in finding these videos on the website. Optimizing video descriptions is also important so that search engine spiders can understand about the content in a better way.
Distribution Strategy
Video marketing also involves having a distribution strategy that pertains to video sharing strategy and where the video content should appear.
When creating a distribution strategy – the marketer should have the following questions in his/her mind such as-
- Should the video content be shared on social media
- Where should the video content be posted
- Which video content channel will give the biggest value for money
- The time and effort required when creating video content
As a marketer, one should know where to upload the video as it would be easier to know where the target audiences are hanging out.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn have specific group of audiences across the globe so it is important to choose the right channel for the video thereby giving the best value for money invested and in maximizing the purpose of the video content.
Defining KPIs or Key Performance Indicators
One of the most important things about video marketing is the KPI or Key Performance Indicators that are extremely beneficial in providing key insights into the progress of the marketing efforts.
KPIs help the marketer in determining when campaigns may go bad at the earliest possible time and as such prevent these campaigns from negatively affecting the primary marketing goals.
Digital marketers should have two sets of KPIs for campaigns involving video content – one for the video and the other for all overall video marketing strategy.
In conclusion, it can be said that video marketing has now emerged as one of the most powerful online marketing tools for promoting brands and services.
