How Does Video Marketing Work? A Quick Guide!

As all marketing professionals know, getting your brand noticed by its target audience is harder now than ever before.

Every day, consumers are exposed to so many marketing messages, and helping your business to stand out from its competitors can feel like an increasingly impossible task.

As marketers look for innovative ways to cut through the noise and ensure their messages are heard, one marketing tool that stands out above the rest is video marketing.

Video content is proving itself to be an essential marketing tool.

After all, video is packed with all the features that make a marketing tool great.

Video can be creative, engaging, attention-grabbing and dynamic.

But, it can only be all of these things if it is used effectively.

When done right, video marketing strategies can be your brand’s superpower.

So, building your understanding of how video marketing works and how different video marketing strategies can benefit your business is crucial.

Keep reading to discover how video marketing works, its benefits, and how to create a video marketing campaign that delivers impressive results.

What is Video Marketing?

So, what is video marketing, and how can it help your business?

In simple terms, video marketing is the use of video content to promote a product or service and capture the attention of customers and potential customers.

Video marketing strategies are increasingly used as an integral part of digital marketing campaigns to drive brand awareness and engage target audiences.

Written digital content and imagery will always be the backbone of marketing campaigns.

But, these marketing efforts alone are no longer enough to reach an over-stimulated audience.

Video content brings your products and services to life and presents them to your target audience in a format that instantly grabs their attention.

Plus, audiences have a big appetite for video content.

If you are not using video marketing yet, now is the time to embrace video or risk being left behind by your competitors.

Statista predicts that in 2023, almost 3.5 billion internet users will stream or download video content at least once a month.

This presents a significant opportunity for your business.

Not sure how to get started with video marketing?

No problem.

Here, we will deep dive into the world of video marketing to help you harness its power and discover how it can transform your marketing efforts for the better.

Why Use Video Marketing?

In the past, producing high quality video content as part of a marketing campaign was something a marketing team could only dream about.

The budget needed to create quality videos made video marketing impossible for the majority of companies.

The good news is that a vast budget is no longer needed, and video marketing is accessible to businesses of all sizes.

But is using video marketing worthwhile?

Check out these stats that demonstrate the importance of video marketing:

• 74% of marketers believe video offers a better return on investment than static imagery (Biteable).
• 94% of marketers that currently use video plan to continue doing so (Biteable).
• Viewers can retain 95% of a message when viewed as a video compared with just 10% when reading it in text form (Insivia).

Benefits of Video Marketing

Tapping into video marketing can produce far-reaching benefits for your business.

Here are just some of the benefits of video marketing:

• Improves Search Engine Optimization
• Videos boost information retention
• Raises Brand Awareness
• Increases Customer Engagement
• Drives Sales

Types of Video Marketing

There are many different marketing videos that you could produce for your video marketing campaign.

Thinking carefully about your goals and expectations for your video content is an excellent way to ensure you gain the full benefits of video marketing.

You will also need to consider your target audience and the type of video content you think would most capture their attention and appeal to them.

Take a look at the main types of marketing video so you can choose the best one for your needs:

Animated Videos

Animated video content can prove an excellent addition to your video marketing strategy.

Using animation rather than capturing video footage can be a far more cost-effective option.

But as well as helping you save money, animated videos can also add value to your video content.

If you are producing online content that deals with a complex subject, using animated video can help simplify this and present the information in a way that is uncomplicated and easy to understand.

How To Videos

How to videos allow your business to share useful knowledge and tips with your audience while also positioning your products as the solution to their problems.

By addressing pain points that your audience faces and then demonstrating how your product can fix these issues with how to videos, you can create engaging video content that adds value to your brand.

Event Videos

Is your business hosting a product launch event, celebrating a milestone in the company’s history, or organizing a conference?

If so, you could produce event videos which capture these events for you to share as part of your video marketing campaigns.

Having these events filmed and then editing the footage to create a showreel is an excellent opportunity to showcase your business at its best and to share this on your website and social media channels.

Videos of events that your business has hosted will help to strengthen your company’s reputation as an authoritative presence in its field.

Explainer Videos

If you want to introduce prospective and current customers to a new product in your range, or a newly-added product feature, explainer videos are the way to go.

Your explainer video should answer any questions that your target audience may have about your product, in the process removing any barriers that may prevent them from converting.

Explainer videos can be extremely cost-effective, and outsourcing the production of your explainer video could save you time and money.

Check out the Fat Joe Explainer Video Service to see how easy it is to order professional explainer videos.

Demo Videos

Showing your target audience your products in action is an excellent conversion tool.

Demo videos are your opportunity to highlight all the features and benefits of your product and help to build customer confidence in the capabilities of your product.

These product videos enable you to target customers during the product research stage and help consumers make informed purchase decisions.

Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials are an excellent addition to your video marketing campaign.

Transforming loyal customers into brand advocates is a powerful way to build trust in your products and increase those all-important conversion rates.

Word of mouth has always been a powerful way to drive sales. According to Mckinsey & Company, word of mouth is responsible for 20 to 50% of all purchase decisions.

This most basic form of marketing has now evolved to the needs of the digital age, thanks to customer video testimonials.

User-generated video content featuring customer testimonials is an excellent addition to your video marketing strategy.

How to Create an Effective Video Marketing Strategy

Video marketing can deliver impressive results for your business and is a powerful tool for customer engagement.

However, you need to ensure that your video marketing strategy is thoroughly planned to ensure it is truly effective.

Here are the steps to take to ensure you gain the full benefits of video marketing:

Set Your Video Marketing Goals and Targets

To ensure you maximize the results of your video marketing strategy, you need to first understand what you hope to achieve.

Video marketing can be highly effective, but this is only the case if your video marketing campaign is carefully planned.

When setting your goals, it is helpful to consider the marketing funnel and decide where your video marketing content is positioned within the funnel.

Raise Awareness

Are you trying to raise awareness of your products?

If so, your video content will be positioned at the top of the marketing funnel, and your goal will be to grow your audience.

Consideration

Consideration is positioned in the middle of the marketing funnel.

If your aim is to get your potential customers to consider your products as a viable option, your goal will be to increase engagement.

This can be measured by your click-through rate and also whether viewers watched the entire video.

Conversion

Conversion sits at the bottom of the marketing funnel and directly relates to customers clocking through to watch your videos and then making a purchase.

Conversion is the easiest metric to track, as it relates directly to your sales.

Identify Your Target Audience

Having a clear understanding of your target audience is essential when planning your video marketing strategy.

Considering your customer personas will help inform many of your decisions throughout the video creation process.

Once you have created strong customer personas, you can consider the type of online video that will appeal most to your audience.

At this stage, it is also helpful to select the platforms you will use to show your marketing videos.

Decide on Your Campaign Timeline and Set Your Budget

Careful planning and ongoing management of your video marketing campaign are essential.

Without proper planning, video production is likely to take a lot longer than anticipated and cost more than you hoped to spend.

Setting a timescale for the production of your online videos and a budget for producing them is essential to ensure you achieve a healthy ROI for your efforts.

Video Creation Process

Navigating the video creation process can seem daunting to start with.

However, breaking down your video marketing tasks into the following areas will help simplify the process:

• Select your video style
• Write your video script
• Set up your studio
• Choose your talent
• Shoot your video
• Edit your video
• Complete the Post Production Process

Writing your video script is the most crucial task, as you need to ensure it delivers your message as concisely as possible.

Using the Optimo Video Script tool will instantly generate a video script up to 2000 characters long, saving you valuable time in the production process, and all for free!

How to Share Your Video Content

Choosing the best video platforms is essential to extend the reach of your video content.

YouTube is the obvious choice and for good reason.

YouTube is the most popular video platform, and the sheer volume of content available here is mind-boggling.

Every minute, over 500 hours of video content is uploaded onto YouTube.

Uploading your video content to YouTube is essential, and the potential audience for your video is vast.

But how do you ensure your video generates views when there is so much competition?

Check out this video explaining how to get your YouTube video ranking:

Share Your Video Campaign on Social Media Channels

Sharing your video content on social media platforms is essential to maximize views.

Carrying out some research to determine which social media platforms your target audience uses most and then incorporating your video in social media posts on these channels is a great place to start.

Measuring the Success of Your Video Marketing Campaign

Once you have filmed your video footage, completed the video editing process and shared the content across digital and social channels, it is time to step back and measure your video’s success.

Ensuring that you track customer engagement and measure the performance of your video strategy against your key metrics is vital.

Based on this information, you can establish whether your target audience prefers live videos, explainer videos, which video type converts best, and what you should focus on in your next video marketing campaign.

Next Steps for Your Video Marketing Strategy

Now that you have started video marketing, your knowledge of this subject will accelerate pretty quickly.

While there are many different video marketing strategies available, you will soon understand which are best suited to your business.

Continuing to monitor your video campaigns and assessing how the content is performing will enable you to tweak your video marketing strategy until you have found your winning formula.