Video content still rules the statistics as one of the best performing content formats. All social media platforms are leaning towards video. Facebook stories, Instagram stories, Snapchat – these are all platforms driven by video materials. Even Twitter has seen an increase in video consumption. The latest statistic shows than now 82% of users consume video on Twitter.
The reason behind high video viewership is simple – videos are more engaging. A brand that uses videos in their marketing strategy ensures that the viewers are exposed to their branding, logo or at least their values. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but one second of a video has 60 photos in it.
The real question is – how to harness the power of a video material if you are on a budget? With carefully planned and executed strategy, of course.
1. Know Your Target Audience
It is a crucial piece of advice, and we cannot stress this enough. If you want to sell or promote, increase awareness, or whatever other goals you are pursuing with video marketing, you have to know to whom you are selling. The audience dictates the type of video marketing strategy.
Many brands make a mistake of presuming who their target customers are – don’t be subjective, use data. Social media analytics tools, Google Analytics, they all have information about your customers.
2. Video Production Can Break Your Bank
If you have a highly expensive brand, then spending a lot of money on video production makes sense. However, you probably wouldn’t read this blog if that’s the case. For all other businesses, production doesn’t have to break your bank, mainly if you are targeting Millennials or Generation Z. They belong to generations who consume video content on a daily basis, which means that they also absorb large quantities. Latest statistics show that people watch more than 500 million hours of video material on YouTube – every day.
A decent smartphone can produce excellent video footage – especially if you plan on using it on social networks. Using props like stands, tripods, or a gimbal can increase your video quality. Videos up to 2 minutes have the highest engagement rate, but make sure you also create short video formats for numerous social media campaigns.
3. Paid Campaigns
Make sure to find the right balance between the video production budget and advertising budget. Having a fantastic video that you can’t show to many people because there’s no more money left should be a video marketing crime. The correct path is to target the right people with a presentable video. Leave Hollywood production to Hollywood, and invest in paid ads, especially if you segmented your buyer personas accurately.
Also, invest some time into understanding what the right goal of your campaign is. If you want to increase brand awareness, you should push impressions. If you want to sell more; use call to actions, focus on making leads and conversions.
4. Test, Optimize and Test Again
Don’t burn through your budget without trying to optimize your ads. Platforms have various ad sets that let you display the same video with different copy, different goals, and even serve it to a diverse audience. Run several ad sets and then see how each performs. Shut down the ones that are spending your money without providing satisfactory results. It’s better to allocate that budget to the campaign that’s performing well.
Each channel you use should be optimized differently. More than 85% of videos on Facebook are muted, so make sure you add captions. You can use longer formats for YouTube.
There are a lot of things that go into planning your video marketing strategies, and that is always overlapping with social media marketing and ad placement. You can leave it to the pros, and we will make sure that you stay within the budget, and get the best possible, optimized results. Contact us, and we will discuss your video marketing strategy.