Video Marketing: The Complete Guide (2021)

What Is Video Marketing?

Be it for sales or entertainment purposes, combining these two elements helps to promote your brand on the forefront in an enjoyable, interactive, and meaningful way. It incorporates various themes, speech, action, specific material, and honed content strategies to really entice viewers. Essentially, you’re showcasing your brand in a real-life manner with practical elements to demonstrate what it’s all about.

Video marketing deploys video (animations) to promote and market your products or services plus boost engagement on both online digital and social platforms. 

Furthermore, it helps to inform your customers and tap your audience via a neo framework. Let’s discuss a few trending video marketing strategies that can bring serious results.

Why Is Video Marketing Required?

Need you to ask? This is the pinnacle of many successful brand campaigns. With fidelity and focused criteria, you can easily present people with your vision and take them on the same journey. 

This experience is not only more memorable and encourages retention as well as revisiting your site but increases recommendation across the board. 

Let’s not overlook the importance of word of mouth which is still very much in today’s setting. Certain concepts are timeless and just don’t change. 

Keep it authentic, precise but allow for expansive descriptions where they count. 

For instance, an aptly shot or compiled video in 4K may appear stellar, however, if it overlooks the main point of answering the main question or serving its primary purpose, then it’s almost redundant. 

Whereas an acceptable quality yet structured graphic will offer more coherence and would be appreciated by people. Ultimately you want to garner more interest and followers after all, right? 

You can even personalize and customize your videos, be it for onboarding or inductions; videoconferencing or calls, and other affiliated services. 

Harness the power of video marketing today and witness an increase in conversion rates too. Higher qualified leads are always great for business by boosting ROI plus creating new revenue streams.

Channelize your concepts into actionable ideas to literally illustrate and draw out – sketching these for others to visualize. Raise the stakes with increased user time spent on your site pages and even traffic routed or diverted there. Great!

Why Is Video Becoming Increasingly Popular Amongst Businesses?

All to do with ROI, as aforementioned. It’s quite simple: incorporate effective videos as part of your marketing campaigns and you can quite safely assume that monetization will ensue.

How To Design A Video Marketing Strategy?

This requires consistency and tact, so let’s explore what’s really required:

• Research your customer’s issues
• Produce topics that address these needs
• Write your video material
• Adopt a distinctive appearance and tangible merchandising
• Shoot and edit your videos
• Implement videos into textual marketing content 
• Sharing videos over social media and established platforms (such as YouTube)
• Gauge how well your videos perform
• Hone this based on data-driven feedback from your target audience

Videos Marketing Content Types

1) The How-to Video

As the name suggests, this enumerates a stepwise approach to give convenient instructions on how to make, fix or do just about anything. Often search terms with the prefix ‘How to…?’ makes this category quite popular with the likes of YouTube. The animated and practical nature of this format really does enact what needs to be done, making it easy to follow. 

2) Product Demo

Introduce the issue, sample the solution, present your product with its features and advantages.

3) Explainer Video

Simply introduce the conceptual context, pose questions for introspection, explain the solution and perhaps even promote the product itself. The aim to convince or persuade the customer why your product is worthwhile investing in to promote sales with a good pitch. 

4) The Case Study

AKA a testimonial video to again present a problem and the associated solution, except this time with real contented customers who can vouch for the product or service (as the case may be). It’s akin to exploring the background situation and comparison of before vs. after, with a conclusive recommendation to others on what to do or how to handle the situation.

How To Create Brilliant Videos

1) Deploy a script or outline

Not only does this help you to save time but also improves your editing process, driving overall efficiency. Now you can spend more time on actual content development, rather than repeat takes – makes sense!

2) Use 3-point lighting

Illuminate your background, the actual person, and of course general ambient light too. This helps to balance and eliminate unsightly shadows. These are all adjusted with various intensities for the best effect.

3) Set up soundproofing

Avoid echoes…they sound so unsettling and drain your actual voice. Simply lay your floor surfaces with mats and perhaps even surround yourself with thickish fabric, such as a blanket to dampen or absorb any reverberations. This’ll even take care of wayward sounds escaping and then reflecting off your ceiling. Job did and sorted! 

Video Editing To Create Masterpieces

1) Color correction

Colour temperature and saturation are key – the last thing you want is either under (washed out and diluted) or over (where you’d end up quite literally resembling a cartoon character). Adjusting this will highlight the presenter better with a complementary (rather than competing) background.

2) Many cuts

Nowadays, time is really of the essence, so people will shy away from overly lengthy videos. Keep it short and snappy by using jump cuts to eliminate surplus material and those awkward transitions or pauses.

3) Graphics and animations

It’s advisable to keep these to a minimum in the interests of simplicity, although you can customize with available effects (should you wish to do so).

4) Shoot for the edit

This just means to be mindful of the upcoming editing process and organize your files accordingly. This avoids misdirection and unnecessary delays in piecing everything together. Now all parts can be conveniently categorized.

YouTube SEO

This is fairly simple. The greater your accrued viewing time is for any videos, the higher your ranking is going to be on Google. Make it more competitive with great keyword implementation and research to be found more easily. 

Explore the suggestions list and compile a set of potential words for optimal words. This is a great way to start to optimize and then proceed onto popularity by using the filter tags. 

The videos which have the greatest viewer volumes will carry something special in their tags, titles, and descriptions. This is what sets them apart from the rest of the crowd. 

Focus on these criteria and you can even delve into the traffic source to see which words were entered to reach your videos. The more distinctive and low competition keywords are especially useful when trying to grow your audience. 

A simple method is to perform a Google search for the respective keyword(s) and observe the approximate number of results yielded. The higher the number, the more competitive the word is (and consequently may be avoided). There’s another thing that you can do…

Have you ever noticed that upon a Google search, the results page often contains typically a selection of videos (which tend to be the most popular & highly ranked). If you wish to join this club & be included here, why not try:

• How-to keywords (‘how to run fast?’)
• Reviews (‘Apple reviews’)
• Tutorials (‘Installing Windows’)
• Health & exercise based (‘Circuit training’)
• Amusing videos (‘Hilarious fails’)

This way you’ll also reap traffic from direct Google searches & can monitor the search volume via Google’s Keyword Planner. There are various useful video marketing tools that can help in this and beyond to get maximum benefits from your video marketing campaign.

Advanced SEO Methods for Video Marketing

1) Nail the first 5-10 seconds

Just think about it – what really grabs your attention when watching something? This needs to be achieved fast, otherwise, we all just end up shying away & abandoning the video. 

Nowadays, people’s patience levels are generally lower & boredom soon sets in. Refrain from using animation, keep the content concise, lively & have an upbeat tone. You need to set the energy bar high right from the outset & maintain it throughout for that exhilarating experience.  

2) The sequel technique

Why not be one of those channels which appear as YouTube suggestions, as this often attracts wider audiences? This paves the way for a great journey whereby the majority of users will take notice of Google’s advice. 

Keep your videos along with popular channels & sort by popularity. Increased viewing time will push it up all the way to the top. This way, you can also boost your CTR which draws further views.

Hopefully, you can now see how proliferative this can quickly become – which is exactly what we want!

3) Mix things up

Ensure that your video is dynamic & aim for at least 3 new or different themes for each minute’s worth of video. This keeps viewers interested & you can also consolidate more material too. 

Something as elementary as a change of camera angle, a transition effect to supplementary b-roll footage, or even animation are just some of the ways to achieve this. The interest created by doing any of this will increase the chances or retention of viewers & that they’re more likely to watch the entire video!

4) Try longer Videos

Don’t feel restricted by the length in fear of losing audiences or repelling people. If you’ve incorporated the aforementioned principles into your video, you should still be good to go. YouTube does rank good long videos highly too!

5) Opt for a reproducible appearance & theme

Branding & merchandising are key so that people begin to recognize your brand & ultimately can relate to your objective.

6) Apply humor

Lighten things up – as no one likes a bore! This is especially true & required when discussing or explaining technical or detailed descriptive topics.  

Set Aims And Gauge Progress

Analyze your performance against set benchmarks to really see where you can improve and what you’re already excelling at. You also need to be absolutely clear about your objective. 

Is it to increase brand awareness, inform your audience about something or simply entertain perhaps? Engaging or converting in exchange for a free trial can incentivize such ventures. 

A primer video to familiarise people with your brand during its inception is also useful. Let’s take a look at some of the metrics, of which all should be taken into account for:

1) View count

Pretty self-explanatory (also referred to as ‘reach’). Obviously, you want to maximize this by sharing or being viewed by as many people as possible. Just bear in mind that various video platforms set their own respective criteria as to what’s considered as a view. This can range from just a few seconds to half a minute across the board.

2) Play rate

This is the proportion of people who actually played your video expressed over the volume of impressions (or ‘hits’) received. You want to keep this high, as anything less means that you’d need to consider revising your content. It needs to be optimized so that whoever has a glance, actually ends up watching it too!

3) Social media sharing and distributing comments

You can gather praise this way & promote your video effectively, via word of mouth. It’s a great measure of how well you target your audience.

4) Video completions

This is a measure of how many times has your video been played in its entirety, hence more accurate & representative than view count merely. It helps you to assess the worthiness of time investment to formulate a video & how long it should be to avoid abandonment midway. 

5) Completion rate

This is simply the aforementioned (video completions) divided by the total number of views. The greater, the better, as this gives a fair indication of how successful you are at keeping your viewers engaged. It essentially reveals the type of audience response you’re yielding.

6) Click-through rate

This is the volume of CTA (Calls To Action) clicks expressed as a portion of the number of views. The higher, the more likely viewers will be enticed to proceed accordingly. If not high enough, perhaps revisiting the design of your CTA may be in order.

7) Conversion rate

Following on from CTR, this is the volume of visitors completing a specified action over the number of clicks on your CTA. This provides a good indication of enrolment, subscription & ultimately revenue generation success (if applicable). Including a video to your main landing page can certainly boost this.

8) Bounce rate and time-on-page

How often do people abandon your video & after how long? Try to minimize the former, whilst maximizing the latter. Engage & retain your audience as much as you can for optimal results. 

A regular review of your overall marketing strategy will enable you to adapt to evolving trends & keep pace with these.