How Can Brands Leverage Social Media for Video Marketing in 2018?

social media video marketing

How Can Brands Leverage Social Media for Video Marketing in 2018?

Social media is one of the major and most prominent sources of entertainment and recreation for individuals living in the twenty-first century. The advent of social media over the past few decades has completely revolutionized the way in which most people spend their time and interact with their peers, friends, family, and society, in general. Apart from that, it has also had a profound impact on consumer behavior and the buying habits of the average individual.

Buying and consuming things is no longer a solitary or private activity. Rather, consumption has become a part of the social domain in the digital world. People buy goods and services online, review them, and then share the reviews with their friends on social media. Many people purchase things that they have seen their friends using and sharing on social media platforms. This is one of the reasons for the popularity of social media influencers, who now have the power to drive huge demand for a particular product or service if they endorse it on their platform.

Using Social Media for Video Marketing

Digital marketing professionals use various mediums to promote and advertise their products and services on social media. One of the most popular mediums is video-based marketing. This is because videos provide viewers with a personalized and holistic experience that can be informative, entertaining, or both. Therefore, videos offer a visceral appeal and are very popular with consumers from all walks of life.

Social media is populated with individuals from all parts of the world and from every strata of society. As videos are highly visual in nature and not affected by linguistic barriers, they are the best way to connect with current and potential consumers by engaging with a diverse array of individuals and groups. As a result, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram favor video content to a great extent. Sites like YouTube are dedicated completely to hosting video content and attract billions of views per day.

Some Specifics for Creating Videos for Social Media Platforms

1. YouTube Videos

YouTube is an excellent video marketing platform that can be used by businesses to meaningfully engage customers and potential clients. YouTube is dedicated completely to videos and it hosts different formats such as explainer videos, DIY videos, video tutorials, and testimonials. Videos posted on YouTube should be optimized for viewing on mobile devices, as a majority of YouTube videos nowadays are watched on smart-phones. People are also more likely to share videos that they have watched on mobile devices.

Most people do not spend more than a few minutes at a time on YouTube. Therefore, the five minute mark is the ideal length for YouTube videos. It has been found that 16:9 is the best aspect ratio for videos on YouTube.

2. Facebook Videos

Over the past few years, Facebook has shifted its focus to video content to a great extent. As a result, marketers from various industries are creating and posting high quality promotional videos on Facebook, which is the most popular social networking site on earth. Some of the most watched video types on Facebook include unboxing videos, DIY tips, funny videos, and videos for social causes.

Facebook also tends to emphasize its Live video feature quite a bit, as a result of which well-timed and interesting Live videos can attract quite a lot of views. Facebook videos should also be highly visual in nature, as most of them are watched on mute, which is the default setting.

3. Instagram Videos

Instagram is essentially a photo-based website that boasts more than 800 million monthly users. Over 500 people visit the site every single day. Companies that are marketing to the young, urban demographic should definitely consider using Instagram for social media video marketing campaigns, as most of the platform’s users fall within this category.

Creative video ads enjoy a high viewership rate on Instagram as they appear in-between the organic feed. Strategic use of the ‘story’ feature on Instagram can also drive huge consumer demand if used wisely. An ideal Instagram story video should be no more than ten seconds long.

4. Twitter Videos

As a social media platform, Twitter is largely news-based and celebrity driven. Therefore, a social media video marketing campaign on Twitter must take these factors into account. Products and services should be marketed via videos focusing on current issues and events. Twitter also offers one of the fastest scroll features of all the social networking sites.

Therefore, to catch the attention of the viewer, a promotional video must be very eye-catching and able to grab immediate attention. The title, content, as well as the thumbnail of Twitter videos should thus be original, creative, and striking. Twitter videos should be no more than about a minute long; nor should they be shorter than 30 seconds. The videos must also be optimized for mobile viewing as over 90 percent of all Twitter videos are watched on cell phones.

In Conclusion

These are some of the strategies that will help you design an effective and popular social media video marketing campaign on various social media platforms for your business. Social media videos that deliver value and solve problems for the viewers can build consumer trust and enhance the credibility and profitability of your business or brand.

4 Types of Videography to Include in Your Marketing Strategy

video marketing

4 Types of Videography to Include in Your Marketing Strategy

Most people are surrounded by digital devices at all times. A significant portion of the young, middle class population now prefers to shop online, rather than wandering from shop to shop in search of the perfect product that would meet their needs. The growing popularity of digital marketing has been both a cause and an effect of the paradigm shift in consumer behavior that online shopping platforms have brought about.

Nowadays, businesses operating in almost every industry use digital marketing strategies to promote their products and services. As a result, more and more companies are spending a lot of time, money, and resources on online or digital marketing strategies. This is particularly true of companies whose customer base is largely young and urban as most modern, young people spend a significant amount of their time online.

Video Content Marketing

Video content marketing is one of the most important pillars or tenets of digital marketing. The times when the Internet was largely text-based are long gone. Rapid advancements in technology have ensured that video production has become easier and more affordable than ever before. Being an audio-visual media form, videos are also far more impactful and can attract customers more effectively than pure text-based marketing. Most creative and successful marketers have therefore developed innovative and nuanced video marketing strategies to promote their products and services.

While creating video content has gotten easier and more affordable over the years, marketers must be creative and innovative in order to stand out from the competition in the digital space. Digital marketing professionals must therefore know about the different types of videography that they would need to create a diverse range of video content, thus developing a robust video marketing strategy for their brand.

The Four Types of Videography to Include in Your Marketing Strategy

1. Video for Increasing Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the first step in any video marketing strategy simply because you cannot promote a product or service that nobody knows about. Your target audience must be aware of the existence of your product in order for them to be interested in buying it. Videos that are meant to spread brand awareness generally fall into one of two categories. These categories include storytelling videos and product demo videos.

Product demo videos are those that explain how a particular product or service works and why it is important. This type of video is ideal for spreading awareness about an innovative product or service that not many people know of. New types of gadgets and other technological equipment can be marketed through product demo videos, so that potential customers are made aware of the existence of this new type of product. On the other hand, storytelling videos are ideal for spreading awareness about companies selling more conventional products and services, who need to stand out from the competition in order to attract customers.

2. Video for Providing Value and Information

Video content that provides your audience with valuable information and substantive subject matter is extremely useful and important. Nobody likes being bombarded with advertisements all the time. Therefore, savvy digital marketers are developing different types of videography that cater to the needs and desires of the potential customer, instead of focusing solely on brand promotion.

The types of videos that provide value to potential customers tend to usually be either educational or informative in nature. Tutorial videos are an excellent example of this. For example, a company selling cosmetics can produce makeup tutorials to help potential customers learn about the best ways to use and apply their products. This type of video content will ensure that viewers keep coming back to the website of the company to learn about new things on a regular basis. This strategy also makes the videos more shareable, thus enhancing the reach of the marketing campaign.

3. Videos for Lead Conversion

After making potential customers aware of and interested in your brand, the next step involves trust building. You must develop and invest in different types of videography that can help you gain the trust of your viewers. In the modern, interconnected world, trust building is the only thing that can reliably result in lead conversion and customer loyalty.

Consumers today are overwhelmed with choices, and they need to identify with and believe in a company before they purchase its products. Customer testimonial videos can be quite ideal for this purpose, because consumers tend to trust the opinions of their peers more than that of advertisers and marketers. Case study videos exploring the positive experiences of a particular customer with the brand, can make viewers feel like they too can trust that company.

4. Videos for Customer Engagement

It is widely believed that lead conversion is the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign. However, generating customer loyalty is even more important than making a sale, because a one-time buyer is worth a lot less than a loyal repeat-customer. Digital marketers must use analytics to analyze and interpret which types of videos their core customer base are watching the most.

Then they must produce and publish those types of videos at regular intervals in order to maximize customer engagement. This will ensure that customers keep returning to the company’s website and even recommend their products and services to friends and family.

Conclusion

It can be said that all the different types of videography have an important role to play in the overall video marketing strategy of a brand. Companies and businesses wanting to attract new customers and retain old ones should hire a reputed video production and marketing firm in order to avail all the different types of video content essential for generating business.

5 Achievable Steps in a Successful Video Marketing Strategy

video marketing

5 Achievable Steps in a Successful Video Marketing Strategy

Digital screens are an inevitable part of our day’s active moments. From morning alarms to news and messages, our phones are with us from our waking moments, right up to the time we retire to bed.

From a marketing perspective, it is undoubtedly evident that the quickest and surest way to connect with the audience and customers alike is through engaging video content. A successful video marketing strategy can gain a high influx of costumers and enhance the ROI on any marketing campaign.

Video marketing can be expensive, given the amount of critical thinking and cosmetic effort involved in the process. However, here are some invaluable tips to develop a video marketing strategy that is affordable, scalable, and successful.

Establish the Aim for Your Video Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy can serve various purposes but if it gets to be too self-promotional, it can lose its impact and the audiences will stop noticing it.

While giving out your message, the video must be informative, entertaining, and motivational for the viewers to remember it and share it with their friends and colleagues. By sharing your marketing video with everyone, you are invoking an emotion that the audiences can relate to. Apart from the sales perspective, your video can thus become an experience for all watchers to keep in mind.

For your video marketing strategy to fetch you the best results, here are some of the things you have to establish beforehand:

  • The kind of target audience who are likely to buy your product or enable your services
  • What are the most likely mindsets that will lead them to find your video attractive and shareable, and finally
  • The route, content, placement and duration, that you should take for your video content to be appreciated and shared

Decide the Topic And Format To Follow In Your Video Marketing Campaign

Establish a theme for your videos and ensure a dedicated team looks after the project at every step of approval. It is important at this stage to stress on the senior management overseeing the content and placement of the brand. The video will reach out to the masses and thus has great potential to carry forward the brand’s image in the digital space.

If you have a product or service that provides health and wellness programs for individuals, you might want to emphasize the benefits of staying fit in your videos rather than just asking them to join your program. Highlighting the takeaways for the audience will make them want to know more about your product.

Find the Best Medium that Fits Your Budget to Develop Your Video

There may be several options at hand for deciding who will develop the video content for your company. For those who have the time to research and expertise in creating quality content, developing a video can be done in-house. One must dedicate enough time, effort, and insight in maintaining the desired standards of production.

You can even choose to work with an advertising agency for creating and marketing your video. The agency will look into the quality of content and strategic placement of your video on various digital and social media platforms.

Depending on your product and niche, there is also the option of working in partnership with freelance video bloggers and influencers. With their relevant followers and audience on social media, bloggers can integrate your product with little extra effort.

When deciding on the best way to develop your videos, keep in mind your target audience, your time availability, your budget, and your creativity. Review these elements to decide the best option for your brand.

Create Content that will Make Audiences Want to Know More About Your Brand

A video campaign can be a series where a thought or story is left incomplete in each video and continued forward in the next. Audiences will then look forward to what will unfold in the upcoming video and if they like what they see, they will share your videos. This way you will know that you have struck the right chord and that your campaign is a success. While attracting the attention of potential customers, the video will be proudly shared by the existing ones.

Promote Your Video on the Right Platforms

While your videos should be fun and insightful to watch, they must help you get to the right audience at the right time and give your business the right traction. You can partner with related brands and promote your service or product in conjunction with them. Such partnerships can be limited by your budget. However, you can organically increase views of your published content by sharing through employees, bloggers and other businesses. Reiterating the necessity of good content, if your videos are attractive enough they will find audiences who will promote your brand willingly and for free.

Here is a quick recap of the quintessential checklist for social media posts:

  • Keep publishing videos at uniformly spaced time intervals
  • Focus on content to make it more informative and interactive
  • Watch out for user-reviews and customize content in accordance with the feedback
  • Give live videos a preference
  • Make the best of performance metrics such as open-rates, peak time, lead generation etc.
  • Use appropriate keywords in tags, title and description for your videos to improve search engine optimization
  • Try out various platforms and keep track of performance

5 Achievable Steps in a Successful Video Marketing Strategy

Dig into the various ways for delivering the most effective approach and topics for your brand messaging. Experiment with ideas and while you are looking into something new and different, it may help if you can have a look into what others are up to. Videos that touch the heart of the viewer are accepted more readily. Audiences are likely to share and view the video more than once. Small and growing businesses can particularly benefit from creative video marketing for gaining better reach to the audiences within a shorter time span.

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