What is video content marketing and how it works

We all are familiar with content marketing, right? But what is video content marketing? The goal of marketing is to have a meaningful conversation with target audience and potential customers. Today, video content production, as the most powerful and engaging form of communication, plays a significant role in marketing strategy.

Video content marketing follows the same principles of content marketing which is creating and distributing valuable content to attract, engage, and convert qualified leads. The most important rule is to figure out how to integrate your video content into your broader marketing strategy in line with other content types like blog posts and podcasts.

Having the best video ROI requires strategic thinking rather than random themeless production.

Video content marketing process

Video can strengthen stages of marketing funnel, build loyalty and trust, better position your brand, increase conversion rates, and more. Marketing funnel includes awareness, considering, and decision stages.

At each stage, a specific type of video is proper. For instance, at the Awareness stage documentaries and brand film are great for amaze content; inspirational / entertaining videos are suitable for appeal content; and educational or explainer videos are used for answer content.

Videos in email, Product / service videos, Case study videos, and culture videos are great for Consideration stage. Finally, FAQ videos, Instructional videos, and Personalized videos are best for the Decision stage.

If you want to create a valuable video for your audience, you need to spend time, use talent and creative ideas, set firm goals, identify target audience, and perform extensive research.

The whole process of video content marketing can be explained in three phases:

• Strategy

An essential prerequisite to effective marketing strategy is extensive planning and research. This phase starts with the essence of your business and setting your goals for video content marketing.

Next is to find out who the target audience is, what they are looking for, and what their issues are. Gathering audience insight through interviews and surveys will help you differentiate between marketing and buyer personas.

While you are at the research phase, it is better to survey your competitors and collect information on videos available in your industry.

Based on this research, you can decide how to move forward with the video content marketing funnel and the types of videos that will suit each stage. Furthermore, having a distribution plan will determine how each video will be used.

• Production

You may choose to produce your video in-house, through freelancers, or with a production agency. What matters is that you trust the creatives with your research and manage an efficient video content production process to save on time and resources.

To embrace economies of scale and keep a consistent look and feel to your videos, you can film and edit across multiple videos and even use templates. Planning and using correctly searched audience insights make your video content production more efficient and effective.

 

• Marketing

The last phase is executing the marketing plan you devised at the strategic stage. The goal here is to move leads from awareness to consideration to decision down the marketing funnel.

Find the specific channel for each stage of the funnel. For awareness, social media platforms are best. Don’t forget to search optimize your video through proper SEO techniques. you can use paid ads to gain traction. Identify the right influencers for your brand who can extend your reach.

How is video marketing helpful?

To establish brand authority, it is important to produce a series of videos regularly, say weekly or monthly and share them with diversified channels. There is more than one reason that social media is dominated by video content. Businesses can increase sales and conversion rates through effective video content marketing. In addition to live videos, animation can combine nostalgia, entertainment, and simplicity to effectively deliver your message.

Video marketing also increases business ROI and brand reliability considerably. Watching videos means spending more time on your website by visitors which is positive signal to search engines.

Social Media and Video Content Marketing

Regardless of your industry, type of business, and product, it is safe to say a significant portion of your audience are on social media. And the most preferred form of content on social networks like Facebook and Instagram is videos. Also, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat are platforms exclusively built for video content.

Video content marketing is turning to a major asset in marketing strategy of many companies. There are many platforms you can use to publish your video content. Here is the list of most popular ones:

• Facebook is one of the most popular social networks around the world with almost 61% of its users share videos. Facebook has Creator Studio, a useful tool to create original videos, go live, connect with communities on Facebook, and share stories.
• YouTube is the video content sharing platform with more than 2.2 billion users around the world. It is believed to be the most effective channel according to more than 87% of marketers while more than 70% of them publish their videos on YouTube.
• Instagram is proven to be significantly effective on customer purchase behavior, statistics show that almost 75% of customers decided to purchase a product after seeing them on Instagram. Businesses and brands can benefit from hashtag projects to increase awareness and generate relevant conversation.
• LinkedIn is a platform with more professional vibe. Yet, using videos on your LinkedIn enables you to generate authenticity organically and engage your target audience. LinkedIn is especially an effective tool in B2B marketing campaigns. Having professional talking about your product or service in a video is certainly more impressive than publishing a blog post online.
• Twitter is a cost-effective method of engaging your followers with the video content you have produced. There are well over 2 billion video views on Twitter each day. An average user spends more than 5 hours per month on Twitter. This is a great opportunity to expand your reach, promote your services, products, and brand, as well as increasing traffic to your site.

Consistently posting quality videos will derive awareness and engage audience effectively.

SEO and Video Content Marketing

Like content marketing and inbound marketing, video content marketing also can benefit from SEO. Google ranks consistent quality content higher. High quality videos signal Google that you are the expert in your field. That creates authority and relevance over time. Including videos would also increase the chance of placing your website on top search results significantly.

Search engines consider watch time and engagement to rank videos. Have in mind that YouTube is effectively the second largest search engine after Google and videos that rank high in YouTube also rank high on Google.

How to create contents that convert visitors into customers?

How to measure success in video marketing?

Search engines look at engagement factors like number of views, shares, and comments to decide how to rank a page containing videos. Platforms like videos analyze these data in the following ways.

• View count: YouTube can measure the total number times a video is viewed on the web, even if that video is embedded on another site.
• Traffic source: to understand what works and what doesn’t work to drive traffic, you can rely on Google analytics and YouTube to view your traffic source.
• Demographics: marketing departments are interested in any information regarding their audiences, including age, gender, and geographic location.
• Social shares: it is important to know how many times and on what platforms your video is being shared.