We love commercial video at Blend. It’s one of the most engaging marketing mediums we have in our arsenal and we’ve used it many times to successfully deliver our clients vision to their target audiences.
Video marketing in the digital marketing world has been growing in popularity for many years. It has now become a vital part of a content marketing strategy for business’s to promote and enforce their brand, products or services. There are many aspects to video marketing, but this article will focus on how to understand your audiences viewing habits and capture their imagination.
Social Media First?
Social Media consumers specifically expect to be served video content. With this in mind, we recommend that you read our recent blog post: Video Creation for Social Media. In this article we explain how your video marketing strategy should be adapted for the different platforms, and we breakdown how to plan, film and broadcast your message.
Video IS Expected
It’s not just social media users who expect video to help them to determine their buying habits. It is forecasted that by 2020 over 70% of all internet traffic will be video content. This means that you need to tailor your production plans to suit every broadcast medium. Forbes magazine recently ran a poll asking marketing teams if they were planning a video campaign in 2018 and 68% replied YES. This likely means that your competitors have already created a video strategy to maximise on this trend.
Quality Over Quantity
Whether your target audience is viewing video on your website, social media, YouTube or even TV or Film adverts, shorter videos tend to increase the impact and number of views. This is because viewing habits have changed over time, the largest number of videos are now watched on mobile devices or computers while browsing, and your audience will only stick with a video if its engaging. There are some exceptions to this rule, for example instructional videos or high quality feature length productions.
Make Video Part Of The Sales Process
As consumers now expect video to inform or entertain them, we have seen that bringing video into a sales process can not only increase the sales conversion rate, but it can lead to referrals if you make your video easy to share. People are less inclined to actually call or email during the buying cycle and video can replace their need to do this and offer a self-service experience.
Create a Video Marketing Plan
This may sound obvious, but the first place to start is with a plan. Just like any marketing activity you need to assign budget, time and resources. Once you have the basics in place your plan needs to incorporate a storyboard and production strategy approach. Each video should have a defined goal and making a plan will start this process.
Focus On People
When you start out, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making your products or services the star of the show. It’s a better tactic to actually focus on people and how they interact with your products or services. However, it is still important to explain what you offer, but you need to do this by creating a story that is compelling and engaging. People really do identify with a personality so when you storyboard your video it is important to consider these factors.
Call To Action
Video marketing like all marketing still requires a definitive call to action. Make sure that your video comes to a conclusion that guides the viewer to your sales funnel. It’s best to try and be subtle with this element, but it really can’t be overlooked or your video has no purpose or potential ROI.
Metrics And More Metrics
The final tactic again might seem obvious. You must assess and review the results from your video. This includes the number of views and shares, average time viewing, number of leads or purchases and many other metrics that allow you to refine your strategy for your next production. In some cases it’s even worth doing A/B testing with different edits of your video before you broadcast it.
At Blend we create and produce engaging content across all media channels. Video is one area that you can’t afford to miss. Contact us to discuss how we can help deploy our video marketing tactics for your business.