What is video content marketing?

Marketing is a vital part of any thriving business. It’s a great tool to communicate who you are and what you have to offer. You can use marketing to build relationships that benefit both your customers and your company.

One highly successful method is video content marketing. Here we’ll go over what this means and how you can use it to grow your business.‍

Video content marketing defined

‍Before we define video content marketing, let’s look into what content marketing is. Content marketing is the production and promotion of content meant to attract and retain a targeted audience.

Initially, the digital side of content marketing focused largely on producing written web articles/blogs, eBooks, and infographics. But over time, video has become an integral part of content marketing.

Video content marketing is the production and distribution of video to generate interest in a product or service. In other words, video content marketing is all about making quality videos in support of your company that people will watch and find valuable. These could be anything from how-to videos to about us videos, or any other type of video content that supports your marketing goals.‍

Why use video content marketing?

‍Because video is everywhere! The ubiquity of video means one important thing for content marketers: you have an endless list of places to market your brand.

What’s more, video gives you a great way to communicate with your audience. Because you can use both audio and visual media, you can pack a ton of information into a short amount of time.

Video can be more digestible and memorable than written content. It allows you to make a deeper emotional connection with your target audience. Through impactful imagery, scripting, and music, your viewers will connect to your brand on a whole new level. Also, if you want high-quality videos for your marketing strategy, you can tap marketing agencies in Pittsburgh, as some of them are experts in video production

Perhaps more importantly, there’s a guaranteed audience for online video. You watch videos. Your parents watch videos. Even your grandparents watch videos. According to the latest data from Statista, 85% of U.S. internet users watch videos online. That’s a huge captive audience waiting to see what you have to offer.

Take advantage and use this video-oriented audience to sell your product. Video content marketing works for a reason: people are visual learners and want to be shown (not told) why they should buy your product. In fact, 74% of users would like to learn about a product or service via video. There is an enormous market out there that wants to learn about what you have to offer.

If you're still debating whether to get into video content marketing, consider the following advantages it can offer to your business:

• Video marketing tends to have a strong ROI
• Videos are usually shared more often than other types of content 
• Viewers tend to convert better than readers 
• Mobile users prefer video‍

How to create an effective video content marketing strategy for your business

‍Why bother with video content marketing at all? It does require some work, but the payoff is huge. In fact, 80% of video marketers say that video has directly helped increase their company’s sales.

Creating your YouTube channel is one of the first things you’ll want to do when starting to build out your content video strategy. We don’t have to tell you how big YouTube is. It will be one of the most important video marketing tools you’ll use. Follow our YouTube tips for beginners to help you get started.

You’ll also want to create social media profiles. Each major platform has unique video capabilities that you can use to your marketing advantage. Whether you’re generating brand awareness or convincing a customer to convert, knowing social media video best practices can help grow your business.

Once you have your YouTube and social channels established, follow these 5 steps for creating an effective video content marketing strategy.‍

Step 1: Define your business goals

‍Your high-level business goals are probably well established. Now it’s time to get more focused and figure out the goals of your video marketing strategy. These goals will help you measure the performance success of your video content.

Video marketing goals typically fall somewhere along the buying funnel. You’re going to want to produce videos that accomplish at least one of the following: 

• Grab viewers’ attention 
• Educate and inform
• Build trust with your brand
• Convert
• Retain and build advocacy 
  

That’s not to say a video can’t accomplish more than one of these goals. It’s just better to be focused and avoid doing too much in a single video. Once your goals are defined, you’ll have a clearer vision for what your video content marketing strategy should be.‍

Step 2: Define your target audience

‍Defining your target audience is a massive part of video content marketing. Your target audience is the main reason you are making videos.

You’ve probably already done most of the work when you defined your company’s target market. The audience you want to target with video should align with the target market you identified for your overall business.

Then, you can start to get more specific defining the audience for your specific video campaigns. It may help to ask: 

• Where and how will your target audience watch your videos? On mobile or desktop? On social or on your website? 
• What is your target audience’s biggest pain points?
• What segment of your overall target audience is most likely to engage with video?
• Are there certain demographics within your target audience that you want to focus on?
• Where is your target audience located?‍

Step 3: Create content

‍Making videos requires planning.  Pinpoint what type of video you want to make before starting production.

Be sure to consider:

• Who your target audience is 
• How your video will address your target audience’s pain points
• What visual elements best serve your product and audience
• Whether your video will require actors 
• What tone and emotions will be most impactful
• How your branding fits into the video messaging
• What point your target audience is at in the buyer’s journey

Answering these questions will help you decide if you should be making a short tutorial on how your product works, a long behind-the-scenes video, or one of several other types of video content.

Once you start producing your videos, don’t stop. Regularly making and publishing videos is the key to a successful video content marketing strategy. This is how your brand will continue to gain and grow its awareness with new potential customers.

People will start to follow your YouTube and social channels just for the chance to see what new videos you’re producing. You’ll can sustain a long-lasting and valuable relationship with your customers through video content. Remember: they want to be shown, not told, why they should be loyal to your brand. Seeing is believing!‍

Pro tip: Be sure to write your script before you hit record. You may be extremely confident in your public speaking abilities. However, in front of the camera, you’re likely to discover just how much you tend to ramble. Don’t skip the script, or else you’re going to end up with very little usable footage and a lot of editing. Write out your script, rehearse it, and time it.

‍Step 4: Promote your videos

‍Your first stop with video promotion could easily be social media, especially if you’ve already gained a following. Even if you don’t have a large following, you can use video to quickly grow your brand on social. Video allows you to give potential followers an intimate look at what your brand is all about and what problems your products solve.

To really give your video the best shot at reaching your target audience, you may need to invest in paid ads. Run video ad campaigns on Facebook and/or YouTube.

For your paid campaigns, constantly test things like:

• Target demographic
• Accompanying ad copy
• CTAs
• Keywords 
• Campaign length
• Budget

It takes practice, but as you refine your video content marketing strategy, you’ll start to see greater returns on your investments.‍

Step 5: Measure success‍

Your videos are posted. Now, it’s time to see how they're performing. There are several metrics you can look at to gauge how successful your videos are.

One of the most important is watch time. YouTube considers watch time one of the most important factors when determining search rankings and featured videos. Watch time also gives you a great understanding of how the audience receives your videos. High watch times indicate the audience finds value in what they see.

You’ll also want to look at metrics like:

• Views
• Impressions
• Shares
• Likes/Dislikes
• Click-through Rate (CTR) to measure if any CTAs are working
  

These are just some of the metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of your videos.

‍How video content marketing can help you sell online courses‍

Video content marketing is a great tactic for knowledge entrepreneurs who sell online courses because your audience enjoy consuming videos online. After all, the best online courses are through video.

You can use your video content marketing to help sell courses in a few ways: 

• Use freebies to generate leads: Giving away free assets is a great way to generate leads for your courses. These freebies can be videos that deliver a taste of what your course has to offer. For example, one Kajabi Hero used Instagram to sell online courses by posting free videos about yoga for back pain. Her audience became interested in learning more and bought her courses. 
• Use video content marketing to build up your audience. Whether it’s through YouTube, Twitch, Instagram or TikTok, video can help build you a strong online following. From there, you can guide those followers to buy your courses through your website.

‍Video content marketing is good for business

‍Now that you know more about video content marketing, you can see all the potential it holds. While it takes some time to get familiar and comfortable with filming, your audience will grow over time and reassure you that the time spent on making solid video content is well worth it. Adding video content to your marketing strategy can make an enormous impact on the success of your business.

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