Digital Marketing is all about promoting your brand through various online media. Before the advent of digital marketing, big businesses promoted their brands through video advertising, spending millions if not thousands of dollars on editing, creating and airing the video advertisement. 

Thankfully, to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. and the internet, anyone can create video and advertise their product through video animation. Video is a powerful medium. It lets businesses communicate with their audience in a more intimate manner. Due to the conventional idea surrounding video advertisements, small businesses assume that it is out of their league, or it is only accessible to established and larger corporations. The budget, time, and the skills required to create videos is why small business owners often shy away from this type of marketing.

However, video marketing yields significant results.

Goal of Video Marketing

The main goal of a video is to promote your brand, products or services. However, another aim you have with video marketing is to create, organize and use videos to promote your products to a large audience and keep those potential customers engaged with your brand. The engagement becomes more entertaining and digestible through video marketing. Video marketing can deliver exceptional results.

Advantages of Video Marketing

Video marketing has the following advantaes:

1. Video Marketing can Result in Higher Conversion Rates
2. It can Enhance Your Social Reach
3. Video Marketing Leads to Improved Credibility and Trust
4. Video Marketing Improves Other Marketing Strategies

Video Marketing and Higher Conversion Raters

According to a study from Vidyard, video marketing delivered 27 percent higher clickthrough rate, with a 34 percent higher conversion rate. Users generally prefer videos to static images and text. Videos tend to be informative and entertaining. This is why video content is far better than other form of content regarding user consumption.

If you place your video astutely you can easily raise conversion rates.  

Enhanced Social Reach through Video Marketing

Like any type of content, videos can also be shared across a wide array of social media platforms. Almost all social media handles are optimal for visual content. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and even Twitter give you the opportunity to improve your social reach. Hence, you can increase brand awareness. Videos are easy to share, and have greater potential to reach than other forms of advertising post. 

Video Marketing and Improved Credibility and Trust

Videos are an excellent way of building trust and credibility with your target audience. For videos, you have to come up with a script, support your stance with stats and sometimes even hire individuals to articulate valuable information in an easy-to-understand video format. 

Videos can include product descriptions, instructional videos, customer reviews, tutorials etc. 

Unlike static images, videos tend to be easily understandable. Reading a bunch of lines off about how to put together an Ikea closet, is much less interesting and more difficult to grasp as compared to watching a Tutorial video where an actual individual puts together the Ikea cupboard.

Videos provide valuable content to the viewers for free. It can also position your business as an authority in the field. 

Video Marketing Improves other Marketing Strategies

Videos are dynamic. They can easily be infused into other forms of marketing strategy. Like I mentioned earlier, instead of just posting instructions on your page, you can put the instructions in a tutorial video and post it for people to understand the process better. You can also incorporate video marketing into your email campaigns to increase their effectiveness. 

How to Plan and Create Your Video Marketing Strategy

To create an excellent video marketing strategy you need to follow a few steps:

1. Pick the Target Audience and Set Your Goals
2. Maintain Continuous and Consistent Branding
3. Select between Outsourcing or In-House Production
4. Do not Forget to Optimize Videos for Every Platform

Pick the Target Audience and Set Your Goals

You cannot just wing your marketing campaign. It all starts from research. Look for apropos information to guide your efforts and boost the chances of converting people into paying customers.

Set the stage for successful video marketing strategy by focusing on the following questions:

1. The target audience you want to reach.
2. The kind of content your target market will react positively to.
3. The social platform they spend the most time on/
4. The results you want to achieve with your campaign.
5. Consider your goals and how you can convert it into a video format.

Maintain Continuous and Consistent Branding

Another factor you want to consider is the consistency. Remain consistent and create a strategy that coincides with your brand’s character. Always remain on-brand. Your audience will be more receptive, and new viewers will like to remain engaged if the content is consistent.

There are several factors you can focus on, such as 

1. The script and tone of the video
2. The length of the video
3. Background music
4. The angles of the cameras
5. The intros and exits of the video

It does not mean you should sacrifice creativity. Infuse the two, and get a unique brand identity through video marketing.

Select between Outsourcing or In-House Production

After you have determined the goals of your video strategy you need to start producing. Small businesses are usually dithering between ensuring quality and saving money. 

You can reach a conclusion and choose between in house production and outsourcing by hiring a professional team for creating video by considering the following points:

1. The amount of money you want to spend on marketing
2. Your capability of in house production
3. Level of quality you want
4. The amount professionals in your area might be charging.

Do not Forget to Optimize Videos for Every Platform

Do not overlook this minor but crucial detail. Many instinctively film horizontally for a broader view and because movies are usually in the vertical format. However, social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter etc. use the vertical formats for videos.

Therefore, you need to optimize your video for each platform to increase the likelihood of conversions. 

Landscape format is the classic, horizontal format. It is used for desktop, TV and YouTube.

Portrait format is the vertical one. It is ideal for mobile devices, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.

Conclusion

Video marketing could be tool you have been looking for all along. It has the ability to change your marketing game, improve conversion rates and result in higher profits. As visual beings, humans are instinctively and naturally attracted to videos and response to them in a much better way. With a smart video marketing strategy you can appeal to a wide pool of potential customers.