Many businesses realise the effectiveness of using video as a marketing tool but, if you’ve read my previous articles, you will understand that to make the best use of video you must be strategic in your approach. Below I will introduce the 7 elements of an effective video marketing strategy that aligns with your audience, your chosen distribution platforms and your business goals.

A strategy-first approach means that you take a ‘big picture’ view and map out what you want to achieve through using video, how you’re going to achieve it and how you’re going to measure its success.

You begin by identifying your target audience, who you are aiming to reach with video.  Then you determine your own business goals, what you’re trying to achieve through the use of video.  These first two critical steps will combine to inform your content, what your message will be and your methods for distribution, the platform(s) you will use for sharing your videos. Optimisation of your content is crucial if you’re to achieve the best results so you will also need to know which metrics to track and analyse. Finally, you can decide on the method and style of production that is the best fit for your strategy.

These individual elements combine to form a robust video marketing strategy. Let’s take a closer look at each of them:

1. Identify your audience

Your first step is to identify the audience you want to reach using video.

Normally, for a business, your target audience will be your ideal customer. You won’t be able to position what you’re offering to meet customers’ (and potential customers’) needs without knowing who they are.

To be successful, it is important to consider your audience with every piece of content that you create.

• How well do you know your ideal customers’ backgrounds, their goals, and their challenges?
• How well do you understand their interests and needs?

These questions may sound specific, but you need to really understand your customer and your audience. Because when you understand your audience, you understand what they care about and therefore what content you can create that’s going to cut through and mean something to them. You’ll know what videos to make, where those videos need to be distributed and how to create a cohesive video marketing strategy that resonates with your ideal customer throughout their journey as they become aware of, engage with and decide to buy your product or service.

Consider creating a detailed profile or ‘customer persona’ of your ideal customer that will help you understand them better.

2. Set your goals

• What do you need your video content to achieve?
• Where along your ideal customer’s journey could you use video content most effectively?
• What areas of your marketing and customer engagement funnel need improvement and where are the gaps that could potentially be filled by online video content?

Having the answers to these questions is important when developing a video marketing strategy for your business. Video marketing can be used to raise brand awareness, build customer relationships, grow your mailing list, or to promote products and services. You can use it to answer questions, educate, share testimonials, tell your brand story, stream live events or deliver entertaining content.

Combined with an understanding of what your audience needs, your goals will help you pinpoint the kind of video(s) that you need to produce.

3. Define your video’s key message

Now you are clear on your goals and the audience you want to reach, you can begin shaping the key message of the planned video(s).

• What is it that you want to say?
• What is the main thing that you want people to take away and remember after watching the video?

As with all successful marketing, the key is to make your message clear and concise.

The video needs to speak to its audience in a way that rings true and with a message they can’t ignore. Without something useful and interesting to say to the target audience, you risk seeing your video sink without a trace.

If there is a lot you want to say about a particular topic, you could always create a video series covering bite-sized elements of the same subject. This is an effective way to build anticipation in potential customers who see one video and want to view more from you.

4. Decide your primary distribution platform

An advantage of knowing your audience is that you’ll understand how they like to spend their time and how they like to consume video.

• Where do they watch video?
• How do they watch video?
• What devices do they prefer?

The answers to these questions will help you plan what will be your primary distribution platform and how you might use other platforms to promote your content.

• Are you going to publish the video on your website?
• Will you start a YouTube channel?
• Which social media channels do your customers love?

It’s critical that you produce your video content according to the optimum specifications for each particular platform. This includes such things as screen ratio, the size of the video frame, how to use captions or titles on the screen, and even the overall duration of your video.

It’s not just technical specifications you need to think about; the way that the video is actually structured should be considered too.

All of those decisions need to be made in a way that recognises the nuances of the individual platforms that you’re going to be publishing on. The reality is that YouTube is a different platform to Facebook. And LinkedIn video is different from Instagram video. Every social media platform is a video platform these days and you need to create content with production considerations aligned to your chosen distribution platforms.

5. Determine your optimisation techniques

In brief, you’ll need to optimise your video for your audience and also for the algorithms of the various video platforms.  If you don’t, your videos might not even be seen by your intended audience.

Optimising for an audience means enticing them to actually press play.  To stop their thumb scrolling and attract their attention.  Not only that, but you’ll also need to retain their interest long enough to get your message across.

Optimising for the algorithms is similar to search engine optimisation and makes use of some common digital marketing techniques. There are many optimisation strategies to give your videos a higher chance of ranking. In general though, if your videos are getting watched and maintaining the interest of your audience then the algorithms will also look favourably upon your content.

6. Analyse your video’s performance

What gets measured gets improved and no online marketing campaign can be successful without measuring and analysing performance.

There is a lot of useful data available to help determine the effectiveness of the video in achieving your desired goal. In fact, this is one of the real strengths of digital video marketing as opposed to traditional video advertising.

Pay attention to the metrics that matter so that you can refine your video marketing strategy moving forward.  No matter what your chosen distribution platform is, think about what data you have access to and how that data can inform your future strategy.

One of the critical pieces of data when it comes to online video is how long people are actually watching your videos for. Take some time to understand the data. Look at those places where people are dropping off in your retention graphs, whether that be on YouTube, Facebook or wherever and identify what could be improved in the future.

If you’ve never created marketing videos before then your first opportunity for analysis will come after your first video is released. If, however, you already have a back catalogue of videos then I would advise that you do this immediately.  You can use the analytics already at your disposal to inform many of your future video production decisions. So, make this the starting point for your ongoing video marketing strategy.

7. Decide what kind of videos you will make

Production considerations are the last element in an effective video marketing strategy. When you make strategic decisions about audience, goals, content, distribution, optimisation and metrics BEFORE you plan for production, the power of a video marketing strategy becomes clear.

By completing the various steps above, you should have a much stronger sense of who you want to reach and why, your key message, and the kind of video that will have the biggest impact on your audience.

As we’ve seen, different types of video are likely to be appropriate for different segments of your audience.

• Do you want a product demonstration video for people interested in a particular product range?
• Do you want to share a customer success story to promote a service?
• Or do you want to film a behind the scenes video about your staff?

These are just a few of your options.  In my next article, I’ll be demonstrating how you can use video content throughout the customer journey.

Summary

Developing an effective video marketing strategy for your business can take some time and effort but it’s essential if you’re to achieve the desired results with video. With each and every video within your marketing strategy, you need to understand what it is that you want the video to do.  What action do you want your audience to take?  How do you want them to feel?  What do you want them to think?  Content that does not have a clear idea of what the intended goal is for the video is simply noise.  Your mission is to cut through the noise.

A carefully designed strategy is your roadmap for success with your video content.

And, by taking time to reflect and track the results each time a new video is launched, you can strengthen your video marketing strategy. In turn, this will boost your visibility, develop your voice, build your audience and improve conversions.

Do you need help creating an effective video strategy for your business? At Reach Video we provide the strategy, content and ability to connect to your target audience, drive them to action and deliver tangible, profitable results.