Videos have immense power on the internet. They are ubiquitous and can be found from social media to e-commerce sites to email inboxes. With effective use, video marketing can enhance brand visibility, engagement, and conversion rates.
In order to maximize the benefits of your video marketing endeavors, it is essential to employ suitable video marketing tactics that efficiently showcase engaging videos to your viewers, without necessitating a considerable investment of time, funds, or energy.
1. Repurpose your videos
Creating captivating videos goes beyond simply filming and editing. To genuinely engage your audience and evoke their emotions, it’s necessary to invest time in critical tasks such as comprehending their issues, brainstorming inventive concepts, constructing a content schedule, crafting compelling scripts, and more.
Repurposing is the solution.
By repurposing videos, you can not only save time, but also money and effort. This means reusing video content that you’ve already created across various channels in different ways. Whether it’s product videos, customer testimonials, or educational content, you can easily repurpose and distribute them across multiple channels.
An hour-long webinar can be repurposed into several shorter clips that can be posted on social media channels, or the audio can be extracted to create podcast episodes from your videos.
It is also possible to transform webinars or YouTube videos into blog posts, or vice versa by converting text to videos. Ryan Prior, Modash’s Marketing Director, prefers to modify high-performing blog posts into YouTube videos since “we are aware that these topics appeal to customers and we already possess the content.”
Therefore, it makes sense to transform them into videos and optimize them on the second largest search platform, YouTube. Even though we have just started implementing this video strategy, we have observed that approximately 30 trial sign-ups per month are attributed to YouTube referral traffic. This is an ongoing source of free traffic that will significantly increase over time.
Additionally, it’s not always necessary to have a distinct approach for each channel. According to Chloe West, a freelance SaaS writer well-versed in video marketing, videos can be shared across platforms.
Marketers can expand their audience reach by sharing short-form video clips across various platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts without the need for diverse video content for each platform.
2. Add UGC videos to your marketing campaigns
Customers are becoming weary of witnessing the identical excessively fabricated videos created by brands. Alternatively, they desire to encounter videos that seem genuine and connected with reality.
Incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into a video marketing strategy is an effective means of cultivating a sense of authenticity and relatability. UGC encompasses the content produced and distributed by a brand’s unpaid contributors or users about their offerings.
UGC videos have higher chances of gaining the trust and connection of audiences compared to brand-generated content. To make use of UGC videos, there are several ways that you can employ:
- Including them in your paid advertisements.
- Featuring them on your website or landing pages.
- Adding them to your email marketing campaigns.
- Posting them on your socials.
If you intend to use UGC videos in your marketing campaigns, it is necessary to have your customers create and share videos that talk about your brand. In case you don’t have an extensive collection of UGC videos, you can:
- Host a hashtag contest – you can ask your customers to create videos of themselves using your product/service and posting them on their social media channels with your branded hashtag.
- Reach out to your loyal customers – you can personally reach out to your loyal customers and ask them to share their experience with your brand.
- Send a heartfelt note to your customers – this will help you build a positive image, and they may even share their experience on social media.
Alternatively, in a scenario where countless UGC videos remain untapped on the internet, it would be wise to utilize them. According to Vitaliy Verbitskiy, Videowise’s Marketing Head, “Brands and retailers possess an exceptional chance to benefit from their most valuable resource – UGC videos. UGC product videos can offer significant insights and boost the product’s value. Additionally, by enabling a shoppable feature, an eCommerce store can offer a captivating and engaging shopping experience.”
Videowise streamlines the process for brands searching for user-generated content (UGC) videos with their feature, Find UGC. The feature swiftly discovers UGC material that mentions the brand or products, saving the hassle of manual searching. Furthermore, for e-commerce businesses, the shoppable option is available to elevate conversions and boost sales.
Incorporating user-generated videos in marketing initiatives supports the establishment of brand loyalty and credibility amongst patrons, while fostering a collective identity around the brand.
3. Invest in vertical videos
Do you enjoy scrolling through your TikTok feed or Instagram Reels?
Due to the increase in mobile usage, vertical videos have gained significant popularity in recent years. The number of mobile users worldwide has reached 5.44 billion people (equivalent to 68 percent of the world’s population).
A major issue that people encounter when watching videos on their mobile phones is the need to rotate the device in order to view the content in full screen, though they enjoy watching videos on their mobiles.
While individuals may tilt their smartphones to view engrossing content such as vlogs, documentaries, movies, and TV shows on platforms like YouTube, Netflix, or Disney+, they are unlikely to rotate their device to view a promotional video.
Vertical videos are a solution to the fact that less than 30 percent of individuals turn their smartphones into full-screen mode to view advertisements, and those who do only watch an average of 14 percent of the advertisement.
Vertical videos offer a more convenient viewing experience as there is no need for users to rotate their phones. Additionally, they are highly engaging and can be addictive to watch. According to Rachel Macfarlane, a Content Marketing Strategist at redfox visual, investing in vertical videos is now crucial for businesses if they want to effectively reach their target audience on social media. This marketing strategy is ideal for social media platforms. Since a growing number of users are consuming content on mobile devices, vertical videos provide a seamless and immersive viewing experience.
Despite being created and improved with the intention of retaining user attention, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok possess an irresistible quality that sparks interest among individuals, particularly younger demographics, in vertical videos.
Animaker, a software that allows users to create animations themselves, conducted an experiment by producing two versions of a single video in both horizontal and vertical formats to determine which version was more effective.
It was noticed that vertical videos have greater reach, as it managed to reach 58 percent more people compared to horizontal videos. Additionally, vertical videos received 28.5 percent more reactions signifying that they provide better post engagement.
4. Define your goals for a video
Consider the objective of your video before producing it. What is your intended outcome for the video? How do you define success? Determining your goal is crucial to the type of video you develop, its material, its intended audience, and the platform where it will be shown. It is, therefore, a vital initial phase.
To determine the objective of your video, it is effective to identify its position in the marketing funnel.
Stage of awareness
Are you interested in increasing the visibility of your brand, service, or products and captivating a wider audience with a video? If so, consider creating snackable social videos, videos showcasing your brand or company culture, or explainer videos. These options could be the solution you’re looking for to promote your brand and enhance brand recognition.
The stage of consideration
If your objective is to inform potential clients about the diverse features and advantages of your product or service, and encourage them to make a purchase, or demonstrate your expertise, producing product demonstrations, detailed explanations, and tutorials may be worthwhile.
The phase of making a choice
If your aim is to sway individuals who are unsure and encourage them to make a purchase through a video, options such as case studies, social proof, testimonial videos, and customized videos may prove to be effective strategies.
5. Be crystal clear on who your target audience is
After establishing the reason for your video marketing campaign, it’s crucial to comprehend the target audience. Keep in mind that your audience is equally significant to the message you are conveying.
It’s important to identify the target audience for your video by considering their gender, age, profession, and interests. Additionally, it’s crucial to recognize the issues they encounter and find ways your product/service can offer solutions to their problems.
It is possible to develop a persona for your video that reflects the characteristics of your ideal viewer/buyer. This approach can be helpful in crafting videos that resonate with viewers and yield desired outcomes. Identifying the challenges faced by your audience and what they seek in a product, and then building your video around these factors can enhance its effectiveness in attracting and converting them.
6. Choose your marketing channel wisely
When preparing your videos for success, consider the platform in which they will be uploaded to prior to beginning their production, and continue to keep this in mind throughout the process.
Suppose you aim to produce a testimonial video exclusively for your landing page or homepage. In such a scenario, it’s vital to keep the video brief, preferably under 2 minutes, to impart crucial information and prevent your viewers from losing interest and navigating away.
The selection of channels depends primarily on your intended audience and their preferred platform. If your intended audience is more engaged on Facebook than on TikTok, it is beneficial to produce video content and run video ads on the former to maximize your return on investment.
The type of video you create will play a role in determining which platform is best for your channel. Complex tutorials and explainer videos perform well on YouTube, while brief and easily consumable listicle videos may fare better on Instagram and Facebook than on YouTube.
7. Fix a budget from the get-go
Our suggestion is to allocate a video marketing budget early on to avoid excessive spending on video production and enhance the ability to assess their long-term return on investment.
It should be kept in mind that spending large sums of money on videos is not a guarantee for success. Nonetheless, it is important to produce videos that captivate your audience with high-quality visuals and audio. Thus, it may be worthwhile to invest in talent and fundamental equipment.
Consider questions such as when determining your budget:
Are you planning to distribute your video on organic platforms or promote it as an advertisement? What style of video are you interested in creating? For example, a simple talking-head video is typically more cost-effective and easier to edit than an animated one. Are you considering partnering with an influencer for the video? Are you planning to produce the video in-house or hire a production company? Will your internal team feature in the video or will you engage actors or content creators? Lastly, have you decided on a location for the filming, such as the office, home, or a studio?
Using this as a basis, you can determine which tasks you are able to handle independently and which ones will require external assistance in order to accurately develop a budget.
8. Don’t dwell on the equipment
Some businesses believe that they cannot create or use videos because they lack expensive equipment. Although producing high-quality videos that showcase the best of your brand is desirable, equipment should not hinder you.
The one who puts it most eloquently is Jonah, the former sales manager of Wistia.
You already have the necessary tools to capture high-quality footage if you own a smartphone. Your priority would be to select a suitable backdrop, arrange proper lighting, and minimize any disruptions. Nonetheless, in the future, you can consider purchasing economical, fundamental gear to enhance the quality of your videos. These may include:
To produce high-quality videos, it is recommended to have a DSLR camera, a tripod for stability, a microphone to improve clarity and engagement, a ring light for consistent lighting, and a teleprompter that displays scrolling text for the speaker to read while recording.
In addition to equipment, video editing is a vital part of producing videos that are sharp and captivating. It’s important to invest in video editing software, and InVideo is an intuitive and user-friendly option that provides various features such as music, text, animation, voiceovers, and overlays for improving the overall appearance and mood of your videos.
In addition to enabling the creation of videos for multiple platforms such as YouTube and Instagram Stories, this tool provides users with pre-designed templates that can be quickly modified with personal footage, resulting in videos with a polished and refined appearance within a matter of minutes.
