Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience and increase engagement. It is an excellent way to showcase your brand, products, and services in an engaging and visually appealing way. Video marketing can also be used to increase website traffic, boost sales, and build brand awareness.
In this blog post, we’ll explore what video marketing is, its benefits, and why it is so effective. We’ll also discuss the types of videos you can create, our top tips, and how to create an effective video marketing strategy.
What is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses videos to promote products and services. It is an effective way to attract, engage, and convert customers. Videos are perfect for educating, informing, and entertaining viewers. As such, video marketing can be used to build relationships with customers, increase brand awareness, and generate trust and credibility for your brand.
Video marketing can be used to show potential customers how to use your product or service by demonstrating the features and benefits. Videos can also be used to answer frequently asked questions and provide customer support.
Benefits of Video Marketing
Video marketing has a wide range of benefits for any business. Let’s run through them below:
- Increased sales: Videos can help to increase sales by providing customers with more information about a product or service, thus reassuring them in their purchase.
- Increased brand awareness: Videos can help to build brand awareness by showcasing your products and services in an engaging and visually appealing way. They’re also more likely to be shared than other types of content.
- Increased website traffic: Since videos increase brand awareness and are more likely to be shared than other content types, they can lead to an increase in website traffic too.
- Increased customer engagement: Videos provide customers with a more personal and compelling experience, which in turn improves customer engagement.
- Improved customer retention: Videos can improve customer retention by providing customers with helpful information and building relationships with them so that any friction is removed from their customer journey. Without this friction, customers are more likely to return again and less likely to drop off throughout the funnel.
Video Marketing Statistics
The following video marketing statistics demonstrate the power of video marketing:
- 87% of marketers use video as a marketing tool (HubSpot)
- 85% of businesses report that video has increased their website traffic (Animoto)
- 80% of people are more likely to watch a video than read text (Animoto)
- 72% of people prefer to learn about a product or service through video (Animoto)
- 75% of people have purchased a product or service after watching a video (Animoto)
- 69% of marketers say that video has helped to increase customer understanding of their product or service (Animoto)
Why is Video Marketing so Effective?
There are a number of reasons for the effectiveness of video marketing. We’ve covered many of them above when highlighting the benefits of video marketing. We’ll expand below.
Firstly, videos are more engaging than text-based content; it’s more likely that customers will watch and share a video than read an entire piece of written content and share that. Due to the high-engagement rate of videos, they are more memorable than text too. This memorability makes them hugely effective for marketing purposes.
Just like copy can be optimized for search engines, so too can videos. Optimizing a video, such as by adding keywords, timestamps, and transcripts, can help to increase website traffic and improve search engine rankings. What’s more, having a video in itself is wonderful for a website’s SEO. That’s because it’s a highly valuable and engaging resource, which search engine algorithms take into account when determining where to rank a site in the SERPs.
These are just a few of the reasons why video marketing is so effective.
Types of Video You can Create
There are many types of videos you can create for video marketing. Here are some of the most popular types of videos you can create:
- Explainer videos: Short videos that explain a product or service in an engaging and visually appealing way. Check out our guide on how to create an explainer video.
- Tutorial videos: Videos that show viewers how to use a product or service.
- Testimonial videos: Videos that feature customers talking about their experience with a product or service.
- Live videos: Videos that are streamed live on social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram.
- Product demonstration videos: Videos that show viewers all of the features of a product or service.
- App preview/ promo videos: Videos that appear on an app page in an app store to showcase the app and its features. If you want to learn more, we have a guide to app store preview videos.
These are just a few of the types of videos you can create for video marketing.
How to Create an Effective Video Marketing Strategy
Creating an effective video marketing strategy is essential for success. To begin, you need to identify your target audience so that the content you create will appeal to them. Following that, you need to define your campaign goals and KPIs. Setting clear and measurable goals will keep the entire campaign on track.
Developing a content plan comes next, in which you should outline the types of videos you will create, creative concepts to execute, and a timeline of video releases. Once that’s done, it’s time to promote your videos, which is best done on social media, but can also be done on your own website and in your email newsletter, for example. It’s essential to ensure that you are promoting your videos in places where your target audience will be exposed to them.
Finally, the last step is to measure and analyze the campaign to understand its performance. This way, you can establish how effective each video and the broader strategy has been, and identify areas for improvement that can be implemented into your strategy moving forward.
Interested in getting help with your video marketing strategy?
Our excellent team of Video Marketers are on hand to help!
Tips for Effective Video Marketing
It’s always wise to keep your videos as short and to-the-point as possible. This is to ensure that viewers stay engaged and don’t drop off at any point. The more concise, the better.
Beyond that, you should focus on creating high-quality videos that are engaging and visually appealing. The more compelling your videos, the more success they will bring your brand. The best way to do this is through the visuals, which you must keep interesting and innovative.
Including a call to action is vital in video marketing. Getting the timing of the CTA right is vital. On the one hand, it should appear at the end of your videos to encourage users to take action once they’ve finished watching. On the other hand, you want viewers to reach the CTA before they’ve dropped off from the video (which in most videos happens after 30 seconds). For any gray areas like this, you can work with a video marketing agency with a team of experts who can use their experience and data to make these decisions.
Optimization, as with everything in digital marketing, is key. You can optimize your videos for search engines by including relevant keywords, timestamps, and a transcript. A video itself cannot be read by search engines, which is why tags and metadata are important to add to enable them to find your video and understand its context.
Conclusion
As we’ve established, video marketing is an effective way to reach target audiences, increase website traffic, boost sales, and build brand awareness. It’s one of the most engaging forms of marketing out there, meaning it often leads to a high return on investment.
Videos allow you to educate potential customers about your brand in an entertaining format, which removes elements of friction from the customer journey, improves the customer experience when interacting with your brand, and therefore increases the likelihood of them converting.
By following this guide, you can create an effective video marketing campaign within a broader successful video marketing strategy.
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