65% of people are visual learners. If you don’t create content that appeals to this massive chunk of your audience, you will miss out on engagement, traffic and sales. One way to attract visual learners is by creating videos. That’s why a video content strategy is critical to your marketing.
Many people shy away from creating videos because they can be time-consuming. But they are worth the time investment as they can really lift your content marketing strategy. As people prefer videos over other types of content such as email and blog posts.
So, to help you create a powerful video content strategy and get comfortable with using it, I have put together this easy to follow guide…
Find out what type of content your audience wants to see:
Before you create your videos you need to know what type of content your audience wants to see. Quite often people don’t do any research to find out what their followers and readers want to know. Instead, they go with whatever they ‘feel’ or ‘think’ their audience needs.
So, they end up creating videos that they themselves want and not what their followers want. This leads to low levels of engagement and loss in viewers as people don’t like their content.
One way to figure out what your audience wants is by conducting a survey. You can easily set up a survey by using a tool like Typeform that asks questions such as what your customers’ challenges are, what topics they prefer, which social media they are active on, etc. And then you should promote the survey to your email list, social media followers and personal outreach.
Another technique you can try is to create polls on social media itself.
For example, on Facebook, you can publish a series of poll posts that enquire about your fans’ content preferences. You can also use Instagram story stickers such as polls, quizzes, questions, etc. to conduct your survey on Instagram.
Study competitors’ content and brainstorm topics
Another way to figure out what type of content your audience wants to see is by researching your competitors. You should make a list of your top 20 competitors (who create video content) on a spreadsheet. After that, you should get a good social media analytics tool such as SocialBakers to analyze your competitors.
It will show you which of their videos drive the most engagement.
You can then watch the videos by yourself to see if they will suit your own brand and audience. If it does you can create similar content to engage your followers.
Also, make sure you check out what their worst-performing videos are, as you should avoid creating those types of videos. You can put a spin on those videos and create a better version that drives more engagement.
After you have a good idea about what types of videos work, you should open up a spreadsheet and fill your video calendar with a lot of topics.
Create different content for different social media
It goes without saying that including videos as an essential part of your social media content strategy can benefit your video content marketing. Here’s exactly what you should be doing to best leverage social.
Once you know what content already works and what content will work for you, you can begin creating them. For optimal results, you should be actively creating videos for 3 to 4 networks at least. But make sure you create different videos for different social networks as publishing the same video on all networks won’t provide the same results.
As different types of videos work well on different networks. For example, on YouTube, landscape videos work best. But on Facebook, portrait videos drive more engagement.
And videos that around 1-minute long work best on Facebook, but videos that are around 26 seconds work best on Instagram.
If you find creating different videos for different networks time-consuming. You can check out InVideo.
It’s a social video creation platform that comes equipped with premade templates for social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, IGTV and more. All you need to do is pick a template, upload your own video footage or use some of theirs and then modify the overlays over it using their video editor.
They also have a feature that lets you convert blog posts into videos.
Optimize videos for conversions:
Creating useful content to engage your audience on social media is important, but you should also take steps to convert it. One way to do this is to send them to a product page where they can check out the product and buy.
An example is this video From Nordstrom’s IGTV account. Here, they interview Lafayette 148’s CEO & Co-Founder, Deirdre Quinn and their Creative Director, Emily Smith.
And in the description, they include a link to their (Nordstrom’s) website where you can purchase clothing crafted by Lafayette 148.
Another way to gain conversions is to send viewers to a landing page where they can optin to a lead magnet/newsletter.
For some inspiration out this video from Elise Darma…
In the YouTube video, Elise shows you how to create an Instagram business account and towards the end, she informs you that there is a link in the description for a free masterclass.
When you click on it you go to a landing page where you can sign up.
You don’t have to always send them to a landing page. You can send them to a blog post as long as it is similar to the topic of the video and is optimized for conversions with optin forms such as popups, sliders, content upgrades, and contact forms.
An example of a conversion-optimized post is this one on from Stellar SEO.
They don’t have optin forms for lead magnets, but they have a contact form on the right side of the post. This will help convert the ready to buy visitors into customers.
Promote the content:
Once your video is published and it is optimized for conversion, you can begin promoting it to generate as many views as possible. Here are a few ways you can promote your videos…
Cross-promotion:
Cross-promote your content on your other social media pages so that your followers/fans can check them out. You can also embed the videos on your website and/or blog, especially if it receives a lot of traffic.
An example can be seen on Buzzfeed. Their website gets a lot of traffic and they are also very active on video networks such as YouTube.
So, to drive more views they created an entire page where they embed their YouTube videos.
Outreach:
The next thing you should do is reach out to influencers and ask them to check out your video and share it with their followers if they like it. You can also team up with them to do a more detailed promotion.
SEO:
You can use SEO to promote your videos if you are publishing your videos on YouTube. As YouTube isn’t just a social network, it is also a search engine where billions of searches are made each month.
So, figure out what keywords people are searching for on YouTube by using a tool such as Keywordtool.
Just type in a keyword related to your niche into their search field and it will start showing you relevant keywords. You can then place these keywords in your YouTube video title, description and tags and ensure it surfaces at the top results.
Ads:
The next technique you should try out is advertising. There are two ways to promote your videos with advertising. One is to just run ads provided by the social network by directly paying them.
While the other is to find influencers and team up with them (by paying them or offering your product for free) and then getting them to promote a cut from your videos in their videos. They should also recommend your social media account to their followers.
I recommend that you try out both to see which one works better for you.
Conclusion:
These are my top tips for creating a powerful video content strategy. Start by finding out what type of video content your audience wants to consume by conducting a survey and analyzing your competitors.
After you know what type of video content will work for you (and the social networks you want to create them for), you can brainstorm several ideas and fill up your content calendar.
Next, you can begin creating content. Make sure you create different content for different social media and optimize them for conversion. This will complete your video content marketing funnel.
Finally, all that will be left to do is the promotion part to drive as many views as you can.
Is video a part of your content marketing strategy? Are there any tips you would like to share with us? Please leave your comments below.
Mitt Ray is an expert on Content Marketing. Mitt is the founder of Social Marketing Writing. He helps businesses with social media and content marketing. Mitt and his work have been featured on sites like Business Insider and Wired. Follow him on Twitter @MittRay.