Have you produced video marketing strategy for your business and it hasn’t done what you’d hoped in terms of landing well, and producing an actual ROI for your business? Are you wanting to use video to raise awareness of what you do as a business to attract more customers, to ultimately walk through your door? Have you popped some things on YouTube but it just got no engagement or no new leads? Have your video efforts been a little bit underwhelming in terms of actual results?
Well, in this post we’re continuing our journey towards the creation of a video marketing strategy for your business. And if you’ve been creating videos and they’ve just not being doing well, it could well be an issue about how do you define your target audience.
Successful video content is all about your audience. In fact arguably all marketing should be about your audience – Why? Well, because ultimately these are the people that may well become your next customers. So it makes sense that you should get to know and understand them, on how your product or service can help them. A critical step towards you creating a video marketing strategy for your business.
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Understanding the needs and wants of your audience
So another thing that it’s vital to understand is how your customers find you online? What is it that they are searching for which will lead them to discover your content, or product, or service? Following on from that comes the question, what problems are these potential customers coming to you in order to solve? Exactly how does your product or service help them?
By asking these questions you’re starting to get yourself in the mindset of your potential clients. A really critical first step in understanding their needs and wants, empathising with them and getting to the bones of how you can best help them. And this is the core of business, right?
Businesses exist to serve their customers, to help solve problems for them and to ultimately make their customers’ lives better in some way or another.
When, how and what platform should you deliver your video content?
And in terms of the online landscape, what are people doing on search engines like Google or YouTube? And the clue there is in the name, they’re searching.
Now, at this point is worth drawing our attention I think to the difference between the search engines and the social platforms. And forgive me if I’m teaching you to suck eggs, but I think it’s a point that’s really often missed.
Social platforms are just that, they’re gathering places where people can commune and socially interact online. Their primary focus and certainly the primary focus of the users at that point is definitely on the social element. They’re not there to be sold to.
So for example, if you’re producing content for Facebook and the video is a massive sales pitch, well that’s really unlikely to do massively well because it’s just not very likely to be meeting the audience’s needs at that point.
If I’m minding my own business interacting with my family and friends, and suddenly your video appears metaphorically smashing me over the head with an unsubtle and I’ll conceived sales message, that’s just not ideal. The best case is I click off, the worst case is that I resent your company’s intrusion into my life. So much that video is a great power for good when used well, beware that badly thought through video marketing strategies can end up damaging your business’s perception in the market. Now don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely sell on these social platforms and the how’s and why’s of that are for a different video, on a different day. But the point here of the example, is to underline the critical notion of understanding your audience. And part of that is understanding when, how and on what platform to deliver your content.
Getting it wrong will absolutely cost your business more than money. Trust takes a second to lose but years to build up so don’t squander it.
Know what people are searching for
So in terms of Google and search engines, people are coming from those sources in a different mode to those that we find on socials. These people are fundamentally looking for solutions. They’ve actively typed a search query into Google and they’re looking for answers. With that in mind, it’s a powerful strategy to put yourself in the shoes of these people and ask yourself, what content could you generate to help these people?
Approaching this from the perspective of genuinely being of service to your audience, is a really powerful path I’d suggest to creating, engaging and valuable video that will really resonate well with your audience of potential customers. Just as in real life the role of video content is to start to build and foster relationships with people online.
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Build trust with your audience
The first time you meet someone in real life, you’re really unlikely I’d suggest to launch into a massive sales pitch at full tilt, right? It’s really unlikely to lead to any kind of meaningful sales. And it’s hardly likely to be the start of a beautiful relationship based on trust, is it? And the same is online.
In order to create an ecosystem of sustainable clients that return to you and your business time and again, you must nurture and build. You must earn people’s trust and respect. Give unconditionally of your expertise and knowledge, and people will respond to that by trusting you over time.
So having unselfishly invested in providing that advice, expertise, and knowledge who do you think your audience will come to when they’re next looking for what it is that you offer as a product or service? Someone that they know, like, and trust, you.
Consistency in your marketing strategy
Now it’s worth saying at this point, none of this will happen overnight. It’s not a magic bullet. This approach requires effort and consistency but the rewards are worth it, just as they are with any real human relationship.
So what does this distil into in terms of actionable nuggets? First up, identify the different groups of people that you serve as a business, and for each of them think about the reasons they might come to your business. What issues or pain points are they looking for you to solve?
Ultimately, you’re going to need to invest time in creating customer or client personas. They’re really detailed portraits of the different customer groups that you serve within your business. This will take time to do, but it’s a really really worthwhile investment in your business. To know exactly who you’re talking to, and how you as a business can help them.So I really do urge you to take the time out to do this, it’s really well worth it.
Secondly, I’d think about the problems that your product or service help resolve. And in that way, we can start to think about the sorts of informational videos that you could produce, to start building that know, like and trust within the market.
Finally understand where your customers live online. This will have a massive bearing on the content you create too, and ultimately how you’ll implement it.
Final thoughts
Whatever your brand, we hope that these tips will encourage you to get creating amazing video content for your business. At Motion Picture Video Production, we’re on a mission to empower businesses, whatever their size, to make the most out of video. It’s the heart of everything we do.
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