With the rise of many social media platforms, video marketing is emerging as one of the most strategic ways to promote and market products or services and increase customer engagement.
In the past quinquennial, there has been a tremendous rise in content consumption via videos. As a result, about 17% of the companies that have used video marketing in their communication strategy have seen a massive surge in overall engagement and reported a direct business impact.
Today, businesses can leverage video marketing to develop customer rapport and improve their brand and advertising services or products.
The power of video marketing and the fundamentals of visual storytelling help businesses to generate investments and leads and create a strong global impact.
But before whipping out your devices, and creating a video, take a moment to develop the strategic plan to build stronger customer relationships. This powerful content medium of storytelling can set you apart from your competition, and the benefits are worth it.
This post shares 4 ways to incorporate video marketing into your communication strategy to increase engagement with the potential audience. Here we go:
Know your audience
The first step in creating an impactful brand/business is to understand your audience. Put yourself in their shoes and understand what they need or are looking for. If you are trying to market to everyone, chances are you will fail.
As a business, your goal must be clear and concise when engaging with the audience, i.e., drive awareness, leads, sales, traffic, etc. How you are going to make compelling videos begins with identifying with your ideal customer base.
Then, you need to conduct proper research to understand your customer’s needs and preferences, get regular feedback, respond positively to feedback, constantly engage with them, answer their queries, and finally determine:
- What platforms do they mostly use to consume video content
- The type of languages they best communicate in
- What queries do they have
- What products or services are they looking for
To connect with your ideal customers, you need to speak in their language to convey the message in the most meaningful way. When you focus on creating customer-targeted videos to resolve their issues and questions, you’re more likely to drive better outcomes for your business and be more targeted to your audience.
Outline your video goals
Once you recognize your target audience, the next step in creating an impactful video marketing strategy is outlining your video content goals. Ideally, you need to create video content for each stage of the marketing funnel. Yet, at the start, you ought to determine which stage is the most significant to target.
For those who don’t know what a marketing funnel is, it is a visualization to understand the process of turning leads into customers with careful analysis of their needs and preferences.
It begins when they become aware of your business and their journey with you continues even after they make a purchase.
Instead of simply focusing on sales, it analyzes the complete 360-degree customer journey and strives to nourish connections and create more considerable brand experiences.
Awareness: At this stage, both the challenges and the opportunities are defined, and videos are created to introduce your brands to a new and fresh target audience.
Consideration: It involves a process of analyzing a problem and researching the means to resolve it, asking for recommendations, watching product reviews, and trying to find cost-effective solutions.
Decision: Present proof of brand satisfaction and why a customer should choose your products and services over your opponents.
Use a featured Video Editor to create videos to delight your existing customers and update them with new products and services.
Figure out what stories you want to convey
Deciding what stories to showcase through your videos can be the most challenging as well as a fun process. Storytelling is vital for making an impactful video. Viewers always remember a clever or inspirational anecdote that connects with them emotionally.
Stories can be one of the safest strategies to communicate a complex situation or purpose.
This is how you can incorporate compelling storytelling:
Showcase your expertise: Share customer stories that inspire or create a video on the topic of customer interest to highlight challenges and emotions similar to theirs.
Go with the trend: Create videos on hot new popular topics from your industry by participating and sharing your idea or your unique take on the trend.
Show a process: Behind-the-scenes is a great way to engage with your customers constantly; this makes them feel like a brand insider and helps them understand your brand more clearly.
Analyze and optimize
To make people watch your videos and know about your brand, you need to optimize to help your customers find them. Trace your KPIs in a spreadsheet to measure variations periodically.
Imagine getting more likes and views for a post on LinkedIn with ‘apply now’ than on Facebook. So, focus and decide which platform is best suited for what content. Thus, do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.
You need to be aware of the current best practices for video marketing on each social media platform when you optimize your videos. For instance, keep your videos clear, short, and concise when drafting videos for Facebook and add captions.
Once you launch a video on Youtube, wait at least two weeks before you tweak or refine your target audience. Similarly, Reels is a great digital marketing platform on Instagram to find your target audience.
Apart from this, you need to make your content ready and optimized for SEO. For instance, plan keywords, include them in titles and descriptions, keep short and informative titles, create tags, cards, high-quality thumbnails, and work on mobile optimization.
Conclusion
Continue to evolve as you repeatedly measure changes. Video marketing is a powerful medium to convey what your brand delivers and a valuable tool to reach out to your target audience. Keep these strategic points in mind while incorporating video marketing into your communication strategy and witness how it bolsters your business.
