The majority of marketers nowadays are fully aware of the benefits of using videos in their marketing campaigns. In fact, it is a safe bet that you know just how effective videos can be as well and have heard many times over how they are unrivaled in terms of engagement and conversions.
While all that is certainly true, carrying out an effective video marketing campaign is a lot easier said than done. At the end of the day while videos have a staggering amount of potential – you need to ensure that you maximize it.
With that in mind, you should try implementing the following tips:
Define the goal and message of each video
Every video that you publish should have a single goal and a message that helps to achieve it. It is important that you define both the goal and the message and then focus on it in your video.
As a rule, it would be best to never attempt to cover more than a single goal and message in a video. Not only will it dilute your message, but it will also distract the viewer and you may end up achieving none of the goals that you’re aiming for.
Structure of a video marketing campaign
Always remember that ‘video marketing’ doesn’t exist in a void and you can’t expect to just publish videos and see your engagement and conversion levels go through the roof. Instead, your video marketing should be part of an overarching campaign that will help incrementally achieve your goals.
In some ways, this ties into the individual goals of each video – and you should use them in the structure of your marketing campaign. For example, you may use how-to videos to drive traffic to a website, then use a product demonstration to convert viewers and increase sales.
Granted that is just a simple 2-step example, but you should see how it can be scaled to larger marketing campaigns as well.
Tell a story instead of trying to hard sell
All too often marketing videos attempt to ‘hard sell’ viewers by directly pitching and promoting products, and it rarely works all that well. It would be far better if you structured your videos as stories rather than pitches, and inform viewers of the benefits of the products that you’re marketing.
The difference between these two approaches is that if you ‘hard sell’ odds are viewers will feel as though they’re being pushed to make a purchase, and are likely to push back. On the other hand, by being more subtle you can convince them to make a purchase without making them feel they’re being sold to.
Always try to nail the introduction
One of the main challenges of video marketing is the fact that viewers’ attention spans have gotten shorter, and that is why it is important to nail the introduction. Most viewers will spend just 7 seconds (or less) watching a video before they decide whether or not to continue, so you only have that much time to convince them.
In order to nail the introduction, you can’t afford to beat around the bush. Be as direct as possible and get straight to the point by letting them know what the video is about and more importantly why it will benefit them to stay and watch more.
Evoke emotional responses
Almost all highly effective marketing videos have one thing in common: They evoke emotions in their viewers. Needless to say, you should attempt to do the same, and use emotional triggers in your videos by engineering its words, visuals, and even music accordingly.
Some of the emotions that are often leveraged by marketing videos include joy, sorrow, pride, amusement, fear, surprise, trust, uncertainty, and inspiration. The exact emotion that you choose to evoke isn’t as important as its intensity however, as that is what will propel your marketing videos.
Get empirical by tracking and analyzing your videos
If you want your video marketing to really get into gear, you should start to track and analyze the performance of your video in terms of its viewers, bounce rate, conversion rate, engagement, and so on. Overall you should track as many metrics as possible, as each will help you to understand how your videos are performing in specific areas.
It is important that you track and analyze your videos based on these metrics so that you can measure how well they’re doing, learn from any mistakes, and try to improve on them.
It goes without saying that in addition to the tips above you’ll want to be able to record high-quality videos and learn how to edit videos on Mac or PC.
Once you can do that and are able to create the kind of high-quality video content that is required for marketing videos, you can implement everything you just learned and watch your engagement levels and conversion rates improve dramatically.