Vidyard's Ultimate Video Marketing Guide defines video marketing as “a digital strategy that leverages the power of video to attract, engage, and convert an audience into prospects or customers.” Both B2C and B2B businesses are increasingly using video in every part of the marketing funnel to engage audiences throughout the customer journey, from building awareness to providing product information and demonstrations, to offering customer testimonials, and more.
Customers learn and seek to access relevant information in multiple ways today, not just by reading blog posts (thank you for reading this one, by the way). Video is incredibly popular (TikTok reports over 1 billion users!) and represents a powerful communication channel that can evoke human emotion and forge prospect/customer connections at scale. Video also has advantages around measurability.
But you can’t just shift your marketing budget/focus to video and start filming. Video marketing needs to be intelligently integrated into your overall marketing mix, and you need a clear strategy behind it . . .
Building a Video Marketing strategy: 9 steps to success
Begin every journey with the destination in mind, carefully considering your “why” (i.e., your strategy for video) before moving on to your what and how. You can’t just throw spaghetti against a wall and see what sticks; you’ll waste limited resources that way (and who wants to look at walls covered in spaghetti). Instead, you need to put the right people, technology, processes, and budget behind your video marketing efforts.
When it comes to building a video marketing strategy, Vidyard recommends the following nine steps:
1. Define your video marketing goals. Moving the needle with video means understanding what success looks like, knowing what key performance indicators/KPIs you’re trying to impact through video. Define and divide these KPIs into three big buckets: (1) increasing brand awareness; (2) driving leads into and through your funnel; and (3) driving customer/viewer engagement. Putting KPIs in each of these “big buckets” will help you connect and attribute your video marketing efforts to revenue-impacting outcomes as well as “prove” and improve ROI.
2. Create a video marketing strategy mission statement. This mission statement should be no more than a sentence or two, so everyone involved in your video marketing can remember it, and should answer three foundational questions about your video strategy:
- What type of video content do we plan to create? Will we educate, inform, entertain, or take a blended approach?
- Who is our intended audience? What’s the demographic/target customer we’re seeking to reach?
- What do we want our audience to take away from our videos? What actions or feelings will be sparked?
3. Research your target audience for video. Video marketing is still marketing, so it’s essential to understand your target audience. What do they like and dislike, what do they need, what are their pain points, what concerns keep them up at night? Having a clear conception of your audience will help you create video content that connects and converts.
4. Decide what kind of videos you’ll make. Know the stories you want to tell and the tone of voice you want to tell them in. Once you have that in place, it’s easier to decide what video styles and types are most appropriate for sharing that story. “It’s important to consider where video will fit into your organization’s customer journey and marketing funnel (or flywheel),” says Vidyard. “Remember that your audience will likely need different video types and messages at different points in their journey.”
5. Set a video budget. Your budget is obviously a major factor in how you produce videos. Will you use internal resources or outsource video production? Do you want many shorter videos or a few longer ones? Again, your budget and internal resources must align with your strategy and goals. It’s exactly the same for all marketing efforts: resources are limited and should be allocated wisely.
6. Define who’s responsible for video creation. Whether you decide to produce videos in-house or you outsource production, Vidyard recommends that you clearly define who does what:
- Who’s responsible for creative concepts and storyboarding
- Who writes the scripts, when needed
- Who gets a say in the content and who’s responsible for final approvals
- Who organizes the logistics of a video shoot
- Who shoots and edits video content
- Who is responsible for distributing the finished videos
7. Plan your video campaign strategy. Each of your video campaigns will require you to create a video marketing campaign strategy, which is simply a campaign-focused version of your larger video marketing strategy (see #2 above) that answers all the relevant questions for the individual campaign. You’ll also need to consider cost, target audience, goals, and more for each campaign.
8. Decide where video content will live. You’ll need to decide where your videos will live on the web and on your site. When it comes to video marketing, you should be leveraging multiple distribution channels to maximize reach and engagement. Some channels to consider: multiple pages on your website (blog, a resource hub, product pages, etc.), outbound email marketing campaigns, social media channels (the ones your prospects are present on), YouTube, and more.
9. Measure performance. In the same way you track KPIs for written content, you need to produce, share, and review your video’s engagement data to understand how well you’re performing (and drive improvement). Some KPIs for video could include: Number of Views and Unique Viewers, Drop-Off Rates (what % of viewers don’t watch the entire video), and Demand Generation (new leads and pipeline generated as a result of watching).
Like any marketing effort, you need the right people, technology, and resources, but you’ll also need the right mindset, which means “learning as you move forward.” Measuring your KPIs for video will help you do that.
To learn more about video marketing, you can read the full Vidyard's Ultimate Video Marketing Guide. To learn more about making video marketing a part of your marketing strategy aligned to your customer journey (including the integration of key data points and activities), reach out to us here.
