ADVICE AND TIPS
5 Reasons Why Video Marketing Is Essential For Your Brand
If your business isn’t already using video as a marketing tool, your campaigns aren’t likely to achieve the success you want.
With 85% of businesses using video marketing and 88% of these saying it gives positive ROI, according to Wyzowl’s annual survey, video is now an integral part of marketing campaigns on social media and other channels. But, video isn’t only transforming the way businesses promote their products and services; it’s also changing how consumers shops and how salespeople connect and convert prospects.
Here are the five main reasons why you can’t afford to ignore video marketing in 2020.
1. Growing your audience
Video is the fastest-growing type of online content. With more people in Australia and around the world preferring to get their news and other information through videos, and being more likely to share videos with friends, you need to promote your brand where your biggest audience is.
YouTube is now the second most popular website in the world (after Google), according to Alexa rankings, and videos are becoming ever more prominent in Google search results too. The leading social networks Facebook and Instagram have also become major video platforms in their own right.
2. Making an impression
Video grabs your audience’s attention like no other content when scrolling through search results and feeds. It’s also more memorable, with studies finding that people are more likely to remember information presented in a video than in text. Of course, this depends on how well crafted the video is.
3. Building trust
Whether it’s a presentation, Q&A or informal content such as a behind-the-scenes tour, video gives you opportunities to show the real people behind your business. This makes you more relatable and trustworthy to your audience, who are more likely to follow and recommend your brand to others.
4. Increasing conversions
As well as helping you reach more people and driving traffic to your websites, including video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by more than 80%, according to HubSpot. Visitors are more inclined to watch a video explaining what you do or breaking down complex instructions than to read about it.
5. Long-term ROI
Measuring the success of video marketing campaigns isn’t straightforward. Satisfaction rates have drastically improved over the last five years as businesses have increasingly understood the many ways a successful video strategy can improve traffic, leads and sales, as well as less tangible metrics such as reputation and brand loyalty.
How to improve your video marketing
Adding video to your content marketing strategy or stepping up your existing video production will help you to compete on increasingly crowded platforms, as long as you make sure your videos stand out.
Follow our tips to get more from your video ads and marketing.
Quality production
You don’t need to invest in expensive recording equipment when you can shoot high-quality footage on your phone, but it’s important that your video looks and sounds as professional as you want to present yourself.
If you are using a mobile device, make sure you’re using the best angle. Flip your phone to horizontal for the best viewing experience if you’re filming for Facebook. An extra tip; when you are filming set your phone to Do Not Disturb to avoid distracting notifications from coming through.
Quality content
Your videos should offer real value to audiences and address their needs, or no one will want to watch them. Seeing what successful brands are doing and creating a content calendar could help you to come up with ideas. To help you get started, we’ve created a free content calendar template you can use to help you plan and map out your quality content.
Once you’re done the content calendar, consider scripting your video. There’s a time and place for off-the-cuff videos and completely unscripted videos, but if you want to deliver quality content to your audience, then a script is the way to go. If you skip this step, you may find yourself editing more than you need too and releasing videos that are far longer than what they should be (and losing your audience along the way).
Go live
Live video has more engagement than any other type of social media marketing, and it can work for most businesses with a little creativity. From YouTube and Facebook to LinkedIn, all the major social networks have jumped on the bandwagon to offer brands opportunities to connect with engaged audiences in real-time.
According to Adweek, Facebook Live videos receive 3x higher engagement than a video that is no longer live. And, Facebook Live videos also receive 5x more than standard photo posts.
Here are our handy tips for going live on Facebook & Instagram:
- Always face a window. If you have your back to a window, the video will be glaringly bright and hard to focus.
- Pick the platforms best angle and film that way. On Facebook, it’s best to film horizontally as it displays best in the newsfeed. Whereas on Instagram, we are used to watching videos vertically, so film that way.
- It’s OK to make mistakes, embrace them. Rather than getting embarrassed and ending your video half-way through, laugh at the fact you’ve made a mistake. It adds personality to your video and helps your audience understand that, just like them, you’re human.
- Get your audience involved. Posts that have lots of likes, comments, shares and views are prioritised on the newsfeed and the same applies for Lives. Ask questions, get your audience to reply in the comments or perhaps run a live content; the options are endless.
- Have someone monitoring comments and feeding you questions. Trying to do everything by yourself when you are live can be tricky. If you can, round up a colleague or friend to read questions to you. It will make the experience much for enjoyable for your audience (instead of them watching you read questions).
Keep in mind that your live video will be broadcast from the platform itself, so that’s where you should be promoting your broadcasts primarily. Treat your Live campaigns just like an in-person event, where you market them to your audience to ensure they know the when, what, where, why of your going live plan.
Choose the right platforms
Marketing on YouTube and Facebook will put your videos in front of your largest audience, but depending on who your audience is, you could also find success on Instagram, LinkedIn (for B2B) or growing platforms such as TikTok (popular with the younger generation).
Make sure you are producing videos for the platform you are posting them on. For example, Facebook favours longer videos in their newsfeed algorithm and the goal with this shift is to better surface videos that are most relevant to the viewer. With Facebook pushing video content out to more eyeballs if a video is uploaded directly, the platform makes a compelling case for uploading videos natively.
Promote your videos
Once your videos have been uploaded to one or more platforms, you should leverage this valuable content by cross-promoting it to your audience through your blog, social media feeds, email newsletters and any other relevant channels.
You can also boost your post and run an ad campaign like on your other Facebook videos and posts. Take advantage of the audience and geo-targeting features to get your recorded live videos in affront of a larger but still relevant audience.
With Cisco forecasting that more than 80% of internet traffic will be video by 2021, video marketing continues to grow in importance every year.
Build a content strategy that works.
If you could benefit from some expert help with your video marketing strategy, contact our team to organise your free strategy session.
