Here’s the thing: if your content strategy doesn’t include video, your marketing reach and results are always going to be limited. As for your competitors who are using video… well, they’ll always be one step ahead.
Except there’s one pretty big caveat to all of this. If no one out there sees your video, it’s just another ineffective strand of your marketing. And a pretty expensive one at that!
The upshot of all this is that it really doesn’t matter what you are saying in your videos, or how you are saying it, if your customers never get to see them.
How then, do you go about ensuring that your video content is reaching, engaging, and connecting with as many potential customers as possible… and then turning those views into sales?
Content is king
Crafting a good marketing video takes so much more than some creative ideas. Of course, this is a great place to start, but every video for your business needs to be created strategically with your customer in mind.
Make no mistake, your video is there to do a job. The exact requirements of that job may of course differ depending on the product or service your company is selling, but it’s crucial to remember that a marketing video needs to do far more than just look pretty.
That’s where your video content agency can come in with the experience, knowledge and expertise to deliver a video that grabs your audience’s attention, and – most importantly – persuades them that your product or service is one they want to buy.
There are countless different types of videos to choose from, and which type will work the best for you and your business will largely depend on what you are selling and who you are selling it to.
Take for example, a personal consultancy service – professional services tend to have a lot of “me too” competitors, so you need to figure out a way to differentiate your offering from the others. A video focused on real customer testimonials can work really well here, as you are essentially trying to persuade your audience to trust and invest in you and your team, the people behind the business, not just a product. Your customers are really looking for personality.
On the other hand, a video that is designed to sell a specific product might be focused around demonstrating what it can do, how it works and how it can positively impact your customer’s life on a day-to-day basis. That’s the beauty and the power of video; when done right it can impart a lot of information in a short amount of time, in a way that simply isn’t possible with words and still images alone.
Clicks aren’t the same as leads, let alone sales
If your latest marketing video is getting loads of views, don’t get the champagne out just yet. Yes, those views are important – it means your video is doing its job of grabbing your audience’s attention – but how those views translate into enquiries, and ultimately sales, is key here.
Are those views converting into sales, or are people just watching your video? When potential customers click through to your video, are they watching the whole thing or just the first couple of seconds?
The length of your video is really important; make it too long and you’ll lose your audience’s attention, too short and you might be missing out on valuable content. If you want to know how long your marketing video needs to be, it’s roughly the same as a piece of string… it depends!
Your video production company should be able to guide and advise you with this, so that you are able to hit the real sweet spot of giving your audience enough to convince them to buy from you – but not so much that they switch off.
It’s a fine line, and it’s where so many businesses get it wrong!
A content strategy that works across multiple marketing channels
There’s no denying that social media plays a key part in marketing strategies today, and in particular social video content. Making sure your content strategy aligns across all your marketing channels to build a consistent, recognisable brand is crucial.
Social media provides the perfect platform to reach a wide audience and build engagement, but only when done right. Take, for example, YouTube. It’s no new platform, but this year, it’s been cited by HubSpot as the most effective social media platform for brands, beating the likes of Instagram and Facebook. In fact, it’s been growing by an incredible 79% year on year!
It’s success can in part be put down to the fact that YouTube gives opportunities for brands to engage quickly and valuably with audiences across both short form and long form videos, delivering strong ROI across the board.
Other big-hitters like TikTok provide great opportunities to reach new audiences, but success on social media is certainly not a given; the more you know about your customers, the more effective you can make your content strategy in order to reach them on the platforms they use most.
If you don’t know your Snapchat from your Pinterest, don’t panic – your video production company should have a wealth of knowledge of what videos perform best where, as well as being able to advise on where you should be focusing your video efforts in order to reach and engage with the audience who are most likely to buy from you.
Understanding which platforms will deliver for your product and service is part of our everyday work here at Life Media UK, and that should be true of most other video production companies.
Ultimately, video is all about maximising the opportunity to get in front of your customers and then taking that opportunity to persuade them to buy from you.
To understand a bit more about how we drive the content creation process, just get in touch – we’d welcome an opportunity to talk with you about how a strong marketing video could help you reach more customers and boost your sales.
