10 Ways to Incorporate Videos into Your Marketing
6 Minute Read
Video marketing isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s a necessity for standing out online and dominating the competition. And simply having a long-neglected YouTube channel isn’t enough; you need a robust, multifaceted strategy for delivering videos to customers.
Perhaps you have an in-house team that shoots your videos, or maybe you invest in an agency that provides professional video production services. Regardless, it is crucial to know the kinds of videos your business needs to succeed and all of the platforms available for distributing video content.
More than 90% of consumers demand video content from brands. Unsurprisingly, more than 90% of brands report that they are using video marketing in 2023. Is your business positioned to succeed?
The Power of Video: 10 Strategies to Elevate Your Marketing Efforts
Marketing videos come in many different forms. The challenge is determining (a) what videos you need to meet your goals and (b) where to deliver videos so they reach your target audience.
Our Video Marketing Experts provide the following roadmap for getting the most from video content:
1. Explaining Your Product or Service
Repeat business is crucial, but you should never overlook the importance of courting newcomers to your company. Often, informative video content can help explain new services and products to a potential customer. This can break down barriers to entry much faster than written text or images, which in turn shortens the sales cycle.
2. Advertising
Perhaps the most obvious way videos can boost your business is through digital advertising. Digital video ads are supported by countless different platforms:
- Social media networks (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
- Video sharing networks (YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.)
- Websites (purchased through networks like Google, The Trade Desk, Amazon, etc.)
- Connected TV (i.e., streaming services, OTT, and TV-based apps like Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, YouTubeTV, Freevee, etc.)
- Mobile devices (apps and websites like the examples above)
No matter where you use video ads (and we recommend a diverse media mix across multiple platforms to maximize your reach), it is important to refresh the content every few months. You don’t want customers seeing the same videos over and over again.
3. Engaging Fans on Social Media
Sprout Social reports that more than 90% of companies generate new business through video content on social media. It should come as no surprise, then, that the majority of marketers believe video is the most important type of content for social media marketing.
Video is vital not only for organic engagement but advertising on social media as well. If you run video ad campaigns on multiple social media channels, you need to ensure that the videos meet the specs and other requirements used by each platform. For example, if you are creating a video ad on Facebook, the video needs to be optimized for the Facebook feed, Facebook Stories, and/or any other placements.
In addition, video consumption habits on the various social media networks are unique. Your video content needs to match the expectations of users on each platform. A video that works well on Facebook might not work well on TikTok, Pinterest, or LinkedIn.
Read More: How Do I Optimize My Facebook Ads?
4. TV Advertising
It might seem like streaming has totally taken the place of television ads. However, TV advertising still represents a major opportunity—especially for more traditional industries and appealing to older demographics.
The principles for successful digital video ads are basically the same as what it takes to create a successful TV commercial. Ads need to be memorable, succinct, and provide viewers with a clear call to action (e.g., calling your business, going to the website, etc.).
It is also necessary to refresh your TV ad inventory every few months so customers don’t get sick of seeing the same commercials. You need to pay close attention to the frequency with which your ads are airing. Oversaturating the audience is a waste of money and can cause ad fatigue in your target audience if your ads air too often in a single commercial break or multiple times over multiple ad breaks.
Finally, TV advertisers must meet strict specs for their ads to make it to air—stricter than the requirements used by digital platforms. It is often necessary to work with an experienced television advertising agency to abide by these parameters.
5. Complementing Your SEO
Once people arrive on your website from a search result, you need to keep them there. Retaining visitors and maximizing the average time on page are both crucial for search engine optimization, as they communicate to Google that users find valuable answers to their queries on your site.
Videos can go a long way toward keeping searchers engaged. Try embedding multiple types of videos on your most important pages:
- Q&A videos
- Explanatory videos on products and services
- Testimonial videos
- Videos highlighting your history, values, and people
- Animated/dynamic videos
Read More: How Google Search Works in 2023
6. Building Your Brand
Your brand is unique (or at least it should be), and showing customers how your business is truly different is the heart and soul of marketing. Successful brands develop a cohesive and engaging brand identity and ensure all aspects of marketing and advertising are an extension of that message.
Many businesses are content to just tell customers who they are through the website, social media posts, etc. With video marketing, you can actually show customers who you are.
Brand videos are an excellent way to tell your story in a much more engaging fashion than static text and images. We have found that the most effective strategy is creating several short branding videos (rather than one long-form video explaining everything). These videos can be used across marketing channels to convey your identity to multiple audiences. Relying on multiple videos also provides insights into what aspects of your story are most important and engaging to your customers.
Read More: How to Build Your Brand with Custom Marketing Videos
7. Reaching People Through Email
Video is an overlooked aspect of email marketing. Despite the fact that embedding a video in an email increases click-through rate by six times, only about one-quarter of marketers are using videos in their email campaigns.
Platforms like Mailchimp make it incredibly easy to embed videos in marketing emails. Add a compelling subject line, and you can easily boost your click-through rate by leaps and bounds. This, in turn, should make it possible to drive engagement and conversions among your email subscribers.
8. Upgrading Your Content
Chances are you consider video content totally separate from website content. In reality, there are countless opportunities to marry the two into engaging visual content—often by repurposing written text into a dynamic video.
At Twelve Three Media, we have created a new content type called a motion infographic. We take existing high-quality web copy, design a template similar to an infographic, and then add animation to make the text and visuals pop off the screen.
9. Streamlining Operations
Customer service is another underutilized application for video content. A majority of marketers report that videos reduce the number of support queries they receive from customers. Using videos to educate your customers and address common issues doesn’t just free up time for your customer service employees; it shows that you have given thought to your customers’ needs and developed content to address them.
Read More: 5 Tips for Your Business to Minimize Bad Customer Experiences
10. Tracking Results
Done correctly, video marketing requires no guesswork. You can access analytics and reporting tools directly to understand how users interact with your videos. Key metrics to watch include:
- Views
- Duration (i.e., how much of the video viewers watch before clicking away)
- Response (e.g., likes, comments, reactions, etc.; the exact metrics vary by platform)
- Actions viewers take (e.g., skipping ahead, going back, looping, etc.)
- Click-through rate (for pre-roll and mid-roll video ads)
- Inquiries, sales, and revenue
YouTube is obviously the go-to option for hosting videos, and the native analytics provides a number of insights for how videos perform. For more robust reporting, however, we often use Wistia. Wistia provides extensive information on user behavior, enabling us to track how viewers interact with videos and make adjustments to the video content accordingly.
Up Your Video Marketing Game Today!
Twelve Three Media is a full-service creative agency that understands the unmatched power of video. Our Video Experts have produced high-quality marketing and branding videos, custom animations, motion infographics, and more. Furthermore, our Paid Media Team has the capabilities, expertise, and experience to build a video strategy and execute video placements across formats, services, and networks.
Clients often have us visit their office to capture them in their natural habitat. This enables us to shoot one-of-a-kind video content for a wide range of marketing and advertising campaigns.