How to Create a Winning Video Marketing Strategy

By now you should be aware of how important video marketing is to any business, yet many firms struggle when it comes to creating a video marketing strategy.

In this article, you will learn how to plan a video marketing strategy that will help accomplish your overall marketing objectives.

For those who prefer consuming video content, there’s a great video that you can watch below which covers everything you need to know.

But for those who love a good read, carry on scrolling.

What is video marketing?

Video marketing is the use of video content to reach and engage target audiences. It is often integrated within an overall digital marketing strategy, and helps build stronger relationships between a business and its customers.

I’ve been creating video content since 2008, and I’ve noticed how impactful video has become over time – especially in the last 2-3 years. I’ve utilised my experience to come up with strategies that will take your video marketing to the next level.

Here are some tips to create a video marketing strategy that will beat the competition.

1. Have goals in mind

There’s no point in creating videos for the sake of creating videos.

Your business must think of the outcomes that you want to achieve.

For many businesses, this would be acquiring new leads, but there are many other goals for a video marketing strategy, including brand awareness and authority building.

Of course, you can have multiple goals or different goals for different videos, but you should always keep them distinct to avoid confusion.

Whatever your goals are, you need to write them down and look at them every time you even think of making a video.

That way, you’ll be less likely to go off on a tangent and create video content that isn’t aligned with your overall vision.

2. Identify your target audience

This may sound simple, but it is often overlooked when it comes to video marketing.

The reason is that many businesses assume that everyone will watch their videos, which often leads to an incorrect video marketing strategy.

Here are some key questions that must be addressed in this step:

• Who is your target audience?
• Where do they hang out online?
• How do they engage with competitors’ videos?
• Which times/days get the most engagement?
• Which video hosting platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion) are prominent amongst this audience?

Every niche will have different answers, which is why you should always conduct manual research into your audience.

And yes, this can take time and involve many different platforms, which is why I’ve got a video that will help you find your audiences online.

Once you know your target audience in terms of their online behaviours, not only will you get fresh ideas about your brand communication, but you can also move on to step 3.

3. Pick the right types of video

This step is much easier once you have identified how your target audience engage with videos.

However, the hurdle is that there are so many video types to choose from.

What types of videos get the most views?

Here are some of the most popular video types:

• Vlogs
• Live streaming
• Webinars
• Product demos
• Tutorials
• Expert interviews
• Animated
• Testimonials

Depending on what the competition is doing, you can choose to replicate their video types for yourself, but it’s always worth experimenting with different types of videos.

You may find that some perform better than others, in which case you can double down and decide to create more of those types of videos.

For a business’ video marketing strategy, I’d recommend to come up with three video types to start with. That way, you won’t find yourself stressing out about creating absolutely every video type out there.

4. Plan your video series

Now comes the step where you need to be creative.

You want your video series to be easily recognisable, memorable, and engaging.

For starters, you need to choose a good name.

Something that rolls of the tongue, is easy to remember, and clearly outlines what your videos are about.

Once you have a name, here are some questions to think about:

• Will the videos be episodic?
• Who will take part?
• What is the video’s value proposition?
• What will be the duration of videos?
• What will be the script?
• Where will the videos be filmed?
• What hashtag will be used?

All of these questions must be addressed before it comes to filming a video.

You want to be clear about the theory behind your video series before being practical.

5. Plan your video production

Video production is the ‘make or break’ of any video strategy.

You want to have good (yet affordable) equipment to make your videos look professional.

What equipment do you need to make a video?

The four critical pieces of equipment you need are:

• Camera – this can be a professional video camera, camcorder, or even a webcam.
• Microphone – this can be handheld, lavalier, or even a plug-and-play USB microphone.
• Lighting – this can be tungsten, HMI, fluorescent, or LED lights.
• Video editing software – this can be free (OpenShot, Shotcut, iMovie) or paid (Sony Vegas Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X).

In my experience, your microphone and lighting will be the most important in terms of producing quality videos, especially as a good camera with bad lighting will make a video look terrible.

There is so much choice nowadays for video production equipment, so you should easily be able to get a quality setup without needing to break the bank.

6. Plan your video marketing

Now that you’ve produced your videos, how will you get them in front of your potential customers?

This is essentially the final hurdle where many firms trip.

Assuming you already know where your audience hang out online, you can upload to these platforms and get more engagement.

The best way to do this is to render a short snippet or ‘trailer’ of your video, and then upload it natively on the platforms where your audiences hang out.

Not only do native uploads get more engagement, but you can entice viewers of the ‘trailer’ to engage with your other video content.

A simple way to do this is by adding a comment to your native upload that includes a link to the full video.

You can also use relevant hashtags to help drive more reach towards your post.

This tactic provides strong engagement on your audience’s preferred platforms, but also shifts them to your chosen video hosting platform whereby they can watch more of your video content.

For optimal engagement, try to identify what the best time and day is to post on these platforms – but you should already know this from step 2.

Summing it up

Video marketing is and will continue to dominate as a preferred content type for consumption.

Now is the best time to delve into video, and it’s always worth experimenting with video to see how you can build and curate an audience.

If your main hub for video content is YouTube, it’s a good idea to read about YouTube SEO and how to optimise your videos/channel.

Don’t hesitate to speak to a video marketing consultant if you want to leverage video to get ahead of your competition.