How Can I Create A Video Marketing Strategy?

In this post, we’ll take you through what a video marketing strategy is and what they can do for your business. We’ll also learn how you can create one so you can get on the road to producing content, that will enable your business to grow using video.

I think it’s fair to say that most business owners and marketers understand that video is important. Some of you will already be producing video of some sort or another and that’s great.

According to a 2018 survey by Wyzowl, businesses using video as a marketing tool increased from 63% in 2017 to 81% just one year later.

But I think you can often find that the video content is produced maybe on kind of an ad hoc basis and isn’t really a cohesive part of an overarching marketing plan. Sometimes I think it’s regarded as a bit of a bolt-on to other marketing channels. Consequently, as video creators, we often hear the refrain, “Well, we tried YouTube and it didn’t really work for us,” or “We made the video but no one watched it.” This, I think, is more common than you may reckon.

As video and its consumption becomes more omnipresent online, there are some really good reasons to take video seriously as a marketing channel. When it’s done well, it can deliver some incredible results.

What is a video marketing strategy?

Well, simply put, it’s a distillation of your main marketing strategy that is concerned specifically with video. If you’re making the odd video here and there and maybe popping it online somewhere, formulating a video marketing strategy allows you to move from that ‘throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks’ type approach, to something that is a bit more considered and integrated into your main marketing plan as a business.

The plan includes setting video goals, then creating content that addresses actual business needs and objectives, that is laser targeted to specific audiences. Importantly, it also includes tracking the results, so you know what’s working and what’s not. Obviously, this then allows you to test, tweak, tweak and test, refine and improve your engagement and effectiveness – as you continually learn what resonates best with your audience.

How do you create a video marketing strategy?

1. Define your goals

This is so important. If you don’t set goals, you’ll never know if you’ve reached them or you haven’t.

Broadly, the goals can be grouped into revenue-based goals and brand goals. Revenue goals would be things like increasing leads into the business, whereas a brand goal might be driving more traffic to your blog or site, or growing your email list. Something like that. Revenue goals would be things that have a more measurable impact on the bottom line of the business in the medium term, whereas brand goals tend to be longer term and more about positioning for the future.

2. Define your audience

Who are you targeting for each of your video campaigns? What are their characteristics when it comes to your target audience? The more specific they are, the better. It doesn’t matter if your content isn’t interesting to anyone outside of that group. The point of this, is to allow the audience to self-qualify. You’re not trying to appeal to masses of people. You’re wanting to filter out those who have the strongest buying intent. If someone engages with that specific content or carries out a call to action in the video, you immediately know that they are a stronger lead.

It might be useful to create a client avatar at this point, to build out a comprehensive persona. This would cover things such as job, role, gender, and age, as well as asking yourself what their primary and secondary goals are in their job. The point of profiling your audience in this way, is to make sure that your messaging and content is speaking directly to those people’s pain points and offering them a way of resolving it with your product or service.

At this point, you’re also thinking about where your audience ‘live’ online. Therefore, which platforms would be most effective to reach them? This will have a knock-on effect, in terms of what type of videos would work best on those platforms. Optimal running times ratios, etc. So, it’s vital that this sort of leg work is done before you start producing content

3. Define your ‘Buyer’s Journey’

Video is a great tool for moving prospects through the stages of the ‘Buyer’s Journey’.

The first stage is awareness where your potential client becomes aware that you exist and maybe a solution for their problem or pain point. Each of these stages lasts a while, as people work their way through.

Then, they enter the stage of consideration. Having been made aware of you and your content and maybe interacting with it, they’d moved to a place where they’d perhaps interact with a form to leave their details or something like that. So, they’re becoming a warmer lead. Then helped targeted communications from you.

You’d look to move them to the decision stage where they’d hopefully make a purchasing decision. That’s a really truncated version of what can be a complex nuanced journey. But the point is by mapping out for your product or service, you can plot points in that journey where video can help that transition with your audience through that process.

Obviously, each of these videos would have a specific purpose and a different vibe to them. For example, an awareness stage video may be much more informational aiming to answer questions that are in your audience minds and offering genuine value, but not asking for anything in return. That would be different in tone to a video sales letter, for example, that they would see once they’d opted in to join a webinar, for example, which would feature an overt call to action.

The other thing to note is that these videos throughout this journey should really stick to one call to action each. You want the viewer to know exactly what you want them to do, as a result of watching each video. If you confuse people, they’ll fall out of the process and ultimately won’t buy.

4. Optimize and test

Each channel you upload your video onto will have different factors in play in order to drive engagement and make sure the results you get are optimal on each platform. This is a subject frankly for a video in its own right, but you need to think about, for example, making sure that for platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you are thinking about video on mobile – quick 15 second or so snippets, cropped to a mobile friendly 4:5 ratio. With YouTube, the ratio is 16:9 like a normal landscape telly. The running times can be much longer and therefore the format of the content needs to be structured differently, compared to the content that you might put out on Facebook, for example, where you’re trying to grab attention and buy in from the audience, within three to seven seconds.

With all these versions – test, test and test again. Every day is a school day. Keep an eye on engagement rates, shares and comments. All these metrics give you really valuable feedback as to how your content is landing with the audiences in question.

After consistent posting, you’ll soon build up a picture of what works on each platform for each audience. Also, keep an eye on what your competitors are doing too. Is there something that they’re doing which is resonating? Is it something that you can adapt for your campaign?

Final Thoughts

So that’s a really quick scoot around how to create a video marketing strategy. I hope you found that useful and get the old cogs whirring on your journey to creating some really effective video content for your business. Let me know any questions you have in the comments below. I’d love to know your thoughts on what else you’d like me to cover in future videos. Just leave me a message below. I’d really appreciate that. Also, share any successes you’ve had with video marketing too, so we can all learn from each other. It’s not just about me prattling on.