By Caroline Manning
If you aren’t already using video to promote your business, it’s not too late to start. Follow this smart advice for adding video to your company’s overall marketing strategy.
1. Making a video for the sake of having a video is not a good strategy
No matter what industry you’re in, you have seen countless articles goading you into producing video content for your brand. The truth is until you have identified a specific problem that video content can solve, it’s better to wait until you can flesh out your wider marketing strategy, and then flag the areas where video fits in.
Video can be a big investment of both time and resources, so don’t just reiterate the “About Us” page of your website. Instead, answer the questions your sales team is asked frequently, show other companies using your product successfully, and explain your USP in the least technical/jargon-free way.
Bottom line: Know your why.
2. Make it trackable
Beyond simply knowing why you’re making a video, you need to establish what is going to make the project a success. Just like any piece of marketing material, simply having a video is not the be all and end all.
Luckily, the digital aspect makes video marketing relatively easy to track. If you are using video as part of an email campaign, you’ll want to reach a certain open rate or click through rate. If you’re creating a video for social platforms, then you’ll want to know how many people who see it visit your site. If a video is hosted on your website, perhaps success will be a certain number of contact forms completed.
Every campaign will be different, but no matter what you’re tracking, it will be more difficult to do after the fact, so get your ducks in a row before you hit record.
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3. If you are going to invest in video, you MUST distribute it properly
The internet is a wild and wonderful place, and with over 36 hours of video uploaded to YouTube alone every SECOND, there is a lot of content to compete with. This is why you need to formulate a watertight distribution strategy from the get-go.
First things first, ask yourself, Who is my ideal audience? Are they more likely to be spending their time on LinkedIn or Instagram? Is it better to reach them by email or through another channel?
It is vital that your team knows which social media platforms you will be using, and dedicates some time to build up your audience (with real followers, not bots) in the run-up to publishing the videos. While it’s not totally necessary, it is definitely beneficial to dedicate some of your budget to paid advertising and, once the videos go up, engage with your viewers.
4. See what your competitors are doing, and then do something different
Odds are you’re swimming in a red ocean right now (meaning all of the sharks are fighting for the same fish), but even if you’re a unicorn in a blue sea, it’s tempting to follow what the kings and queens of the internet have deemed to be the “top trends for (insert industry/year/medium here).”