The keys to a successful video marketing strategy

So you’re convinced that you need to start leveraging video content to remain competitive. That’s great! But you can’t just start producing videos all willy-nilly and expect them to accomplish your business goals. You have to think strategically and devise a methodical approach toward video marketing. Here are the components of a video marketing strategy that gets results. 

1. Define your goals 
2. Identify your target audience
3. Choose your video types 
4. Consistently create compelling video content
5. Optimize your videos for SEO
6. Distribute your videos widely
7. Track metrics and analyze performance
8. Rinse & repeat!

Define Your Goals 

First things first, you must define your goals. The marketing team, and other stakeholders if necessary, need to discuss what goals they seek to achieve by adding video to the content mix. Whether it’s increased brand awareness, more organic website traffic, enhanced brand loyalty,  and/or a boost in conversion rates, define your goals so you can set a path toward achieving them. Additionally, make sure you identify the right KPIs to measure on the path toward achieving those goals.

Identify Your Target Audience

Your video content isn’t meant for everyone, so who exactly is it meant for? Your audience will likely include your prospects, but could also include current customers, current and potential employees, or even investors. Conduct market research and gather feedback to understand who you’d like to reach (their demographics, preferences, interest, and behaviors). Doing so enables you to create videos that will resonate with them.

Choose Your Video Types 

There are so many different types of video marketing content to offer — customer success stories, webinars, product explainers, short and long-form videos, animated and live-action. Choose the type of videos that your defined audience would take time out of their day to watch. 

Consistently Create Compelling Video Content

(Enjoy that alliteration?) There are multiple avenues you can use to create compelling video content for your audience. You can do it in-house with a production team, hire freelancers, outsource to a marketing agency, contract a production company, or some combination thereof.

The key is to produce content on a consistent basis. The good news is that you don’t need to make content creation an over-the-top, ultra-polished endeavor. In fact, videos that are natural and feel a little homespun (featuring, for example, a subject matter expert or client) often excel at achieving the intended impact because they feel less like “marketing” and more like plain old helpful content. 

Optimize Your Videos for SEO

Now that you’ve created your videos, optimize them for SEO so Google and other search engines can find and deliver them to your target audiences. This means adding relevant keywords to the video titles, descriptions, and tags, as well as captions for speakers or voice-over narration so search engines can find the content. (An added bonus of captioning audio is that it increases accessibility and allows viewers to consume content even with the volume off.) 

Doing all of the above will also boost your SEO, even for videos posted to YouTube or Vimeo. However, those platforms will ultimately experience the web traffic, rather than your own website. Of course, web surfers can find your website after watching the videos on YouTube or Vimeo. Still, you must simply decide whether it makes sense to host on those platforms, or on one of your own web pages.  

Distribute Your Videos

Time and time again, we notice that marketers create great content, but have no plan for actually distributing it other than posting it to their website and leaving it there. Create a plan for distributing your videos. Some avenues include:

• posting to your organization’s social media channels, 
• including videos in your email campaigns, 
• sharing with the sales team to use in outreach and meetings,
• and even using the videos in paid advertising to reach as many eyeballs as possible.

Track Metrics and Analytics 

Measuring results is the only way to truly know whether your video marketing efforts are paying off. To that end, track relevant metrics and analytics as they relate to video performance. These can include: 

• views, 
• engagement, 
• watch time, 
• and conversion rates. 

By tracking these metrics you can see which videos are working and which are not. For example, metrics and analysis might tell you that your product explainer videos lead to more conversions than, say, customer success videos. Thus, it would make more sense to create more of the former and less of the latter.  Use data to understand whether your videos are having the desired effect, and let it inform your next steps.

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