The Ultimate Guide To Get Started With Video Marketing For The Beginners

With the constantly evolving digital media landscape, brands nowadays can no longer be dependent only on content and images to promote their products and services or grab potential leads.

The attention span of customers is becoming shorter with each passing day, and snackable content is on the rise, which is why video marketing has become a crucial tool for businesses because it has the best ROI.

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People are engrossed with live streams, engaging 360 videos, and augmented reality. That’s why the popularity of video marketing is skyrocketing and not only on YouTube but every platform.
Source: Oberlo

The significance of videos has increased in the dynamic contemporary landscape. That's why video marketing has become one of the most crucial marketing tools for businesses.

However, getting started with video marketing could be tedious if you are a beginner in the niche.

This article will discuss a few steps to help you design the best video marketing strategy for your business so that you can learn the ins and outs of video marketing and find the answers to the two critical questions:

1. Which kind of videos would be the best fit for your business?
2. How can you promote your videos to get the maximum results?

Before jumping straight to how to get started with video marketing, let's look at some fundamentals
 

How Would You Define Video Marketing In Simple Terms?

Video marketing is the practice of leveraging videos for marketing your business, products, and services.

Source: Tekshapers

Video marketing comprises planning, creation, editing, broadcasting, and promoting/sharing relevant video content on various platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, etc.

The primary purpose of doing video marketing might vary from one business to another, but the most common objectives are:

1. Educating existing customers and potential leads about your offerings.
2. Optimizing engagement on digital and social platforms.
3. Reaching the target audience on different mediums.

A robust marketing plan must have video marketing into the mix in different forms such as live videos, how-to-videos, corporate training videos, explainer videos, etc.

Why Is Video Marketing Crucial For Your Business?

Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular. Especially during the pandemic, it has become one of the most powerful strategies because maximum people stay at home, increasing their video consumption.

Source: Hubspot

Video marketing helps businesses improve product awareness and lets them optimize their brand identity by telling engaging stories in a few minutes and persuading more visitors to explore your offerings!

Videos help potential buyers understand and learn more about your products and services that increase their chance to make the buying decision. Videos, if created correctly, become addictive to the audience as they feel a personal connection with a business.

Marketing through engaging videos allow brands to demonstrate the crucial features of their offerings by incorporating:

1. Fun graphics
2. Engaging visuals
3. Intuitive music
4. Interesting voice
5. Effective graphics

With the help of effective video marketing, you can grow your reach and engagement with target customers and grab potential leads to turn into paying customers.

How To Get Started With Video Marketing If You Are A Beginner In The Video Landscape?

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is a library.”

 Srinivas Narayanan (Facebook’s Engineering Director)

Source: GEC Designs

Video marketing is an integral aspect of digital marketing and overlaps with content marketing. Videos have been there in mainstream digital media for many years.

But from the past few years, they have become accessible to small businesses because of:

1. Evolution of social media channels.
2. Rise of online video making, editing, and broadcasting tools.

Video marketing isn’t about only creating videos and praying that they will go viral automatically. You must develop a winning video marketing game plan if you want to succeed in grabbing more eyeballs for your video content.

Creating a video marketing game plan is crucial because it guides you, your timelines, budget, production processes, conversion KPIs, etc. Building a holistic video marketing strategy becomes tedious if you are a newbie on the video bandwagon.

However, you can quickly develop a video marketing strategy for your business by following a few critical steps discussed later in the article.

First, let’s understand what a video marketing game plan is all about?

What’s A Video Marketing Strategy?

Video marketing strategy is similar to any other marketing strategy where creative teams design a plan to create, curate, and leverage engaging videos to promote their products and services to the target customers.

A winning video marketing strategy can help you achieve your specific business objectives and create video content that addresses the actual pain points of your target audience, so more of them become interested in exploring your products or services.

Building trust with your potential buyers, existing customers, and employees must be one of your video marketing strategy goals. There’s a funnel for a video marketing strategy like every other marketing campaign that helps in:

• Attract potential leads to educating and introducing them about your company’s products and services and explaining how they will solve their specific pain points.
• Nurture qualified leads with engaging videos related to your business but should be informative and helpful rather than being promotional or salesy all the time.
• Convert potential leads to paying customers and keeping them engaged with diverse video content so they become loyal to your business and spread the word about it among their peers, which will grab more prospects.

Source: Blue Corona

The core idea behind developing a video marketing strategy is to keep the target audience engaged with a business by incorporating videos in the marketing mix for optimizing brand awareness and recognition.

What Are The Crucial Tips To Get Started With Designing A Video Marketing Campaign?

Leveraging videos help fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads; however, developing a relevant and measurable video marketing strategy needs time and resources. Here are a few actionable video marketing tips to help you get started with crafting a winning video marketing game plan for your business:

1. Begin By Asking Yourself Is Video Marketing The Right Option For Your Business?

It’s not good to do something only because it’s trending or working for others, and the same applies to video marketing!

Getting started with video marketing just because everyone around you is doing it would be like launching a rocket in space without finalizing a destination. Before creating a video marketing campaign, you must ask yourself - is video marketing the right option for your business?

To get the answer to this question, you have to consider a few critical things and figure out the solutions to two questions:

• Are you able to design a video marketing plan with clear goals specifying what you want to achieve?
• Are you able to establish measurable video marketing goals that you can analyze to track your performance, learn from the gaps and take inspiration from the achievements.

If the answer to the above two questions is yes, you are all set to step into the video marketing landscape and put some excellent video content out there!

2. Determine SMART Goals For Your Video Marketing Campaign

Once you have found out that video marketing is the right option for your business, the next step is to outline specific goals for your video marketing campaign. In the absence of goals, you won’t have a definition of success or measure your performance.

The goals of video marketing can vary from one company to another but some of the most common goals but you should identify the ones aligned with your specific business objectives:

1. Do you want to leverage videos to generate more qualified leads?
2. Do you want to become a thought leader in your niche with the help of engaging videos?
3. Do you want to concentrate on educating the target audience about your new products and services through videos?

While identifying goals for your video marketing strategy, make sure that you are choosing SMART goals:

Source: Fit Small Business

SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, giving you a clear vision of what you want from video marketing.

For example, “getting more views on your videos” might be a very generic goal. But it would help if you focused on making the goal specific, like “exploring the memes trend by creating animated and fun videos so that the prospects can discover your website.”

Similarly, establishing achievable goals for your video marketing campaign is a must. For example, “getting millions of views on your videos daily” isn’t a practical goal. But something like “increasing views on your videos by 10% every month” looks achievable.

3. Establish A Realistic Budget For Your Video Marketing Strategy

It’s crucial to set a budget for your strategy. It will help you keep track of your expenses and prevent you from spending on unnecessary things.

Without a proper budget, it will be daunting for you to realize your video marketing goals. You should plan for the resources and money at your disposal and figure out do you want to create in-house videos or hire a production company and outsource your video marketing efforts.

To design a realistic budget, you should ask industry experts about their charges for the shooting, sound editing, social media distribution, etc. It will help you determine how much you might have to pay if you hire a production company or a freelancer.

Specific videos and features might be expensive to research properly before deciding which type of videos you want to create and how you will go about shooting, editing, and promoting those videos.

4. Find Out The Intended Audience For Your Video Marketing Gameplan

If you start creating videos without even knowing your target audience, your strategy will be a flop. Hence, identifying your target audience is crucial if you want your video marketing efforts to bear fruits.

The key to finding who your target audience is developing buyer personas to help you identify the people interested in purchasing your products or services. These will be the ones you want to reach out with your videos.

Determining buyer personas is the practice of characterizing and classifying target groups. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a person who has all the characteristics of a target group.

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Source: Mynd

While creating buyer personas, you leverage data to figure out the following details of your ideal buyers:

a.    Name
b.    Age
c.    Gender
d.    Demographics
e.    Industry
f.    Role
g.    Preferences
h.    Pain points
i.    Social media participation
j.    Preferred video content

Create multiple buyer personas to target different segments of your audience and guide you in diverse instances.

For example, you might want to attract female business owners through Instagram videos, but your target audience is male entrepreneurs on YouTube. You must revisit your personas regularly as your video marketing strategy progresses and refine them based on the data you gather on the journey!

5. Decide What Types of Videos You Will Create Before Starting The Production

Once you have your target audience and video marketing budget figured out, the next crucial step is to identify the types of videos you want to create or the kind of story you want to tell.

It would help if you brainstormed which specific video styles or types will be a perfect fit for your target audience. Four crucial elements make up the foundation of a great video story:

1.    Protagonist with a clear purpose - This person should align with your target audience.
2.    Conflict - This represents your customers’ pain points.
3.    Quest - This is how you will introduce your product or service in the story.
4.    Resolution - This is how your offerings solve the specific pain points of your target customers.

Source: Lemonlight

There are countless types of videos that you can create to grab leads for your brand; however, not every video type will suit your specific marketing goals.

So, let’s explore various video marketing trends to get a better idea of which ones you can choose:

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I. Explainer Videos

Teach your target audience more about your business, products, and services and how they can get benefitted from your offerings.

Here’s an example of an explainer video by Dollar Shave Club trying to grab potential customers’ attention by explaining the perks of their products:
Source: Oberlo

II. Social Content Videos 

Short, fun, and playful video clips exclusively created for social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.

Source: Lemonlight

III. Educational Or How-to Videos

These videos teach your audience about something they want to know or learn. You can use these videos for:

a.    Teach customers how to get the most out of your products or services.

b.    Build a long-lasting relationship with potential buyers.

Here’s an example of an educational video:

Source: Oberlo

IV. Live Videos

Live streams are extremely popular nowadays because it helps you to engage with your target audience in real-time. Also, through live streams, you can promote presentations, interviews, events, etc.

Here’s an example of a live video by BuzzFeed:
Source: ManyCam

V. Demo/Product Videos

Demo videos or product videos are all about showcasing your product to the target audience. These videos contain a relevant call-to-action (CTA) and highlight the key benefits of your offerings for encouraging the visitors to purchase.

Here’s an example of a product demo video by Zendesk where the brand is introducing a new solution for its customers:
Source: HubSpot

As mentioned earlier, there are countless video types, and these five types are the most popular ones.

Also, you can try other types of video such as testimonial videos, event videos, animated videos, augmented reality (AR) videos, expert interview videos, etc. Just make sure that the video types you choose are relevant to your business niche and are easily doable so that you can expect to get the most out of them!

6. Determine Where Your Videos Will Be Published

Only creating quality and engaging videos isn’t enough. You must figure out the channels where you will publish your videos.

While choosing the publishing platforms for your videos, remember that every channel has its specifications or limitations, such as Instagram videos can’t exceed 60 seconds.
Source: Lemonlight

Besides, your video publishing channels depend on your target audience and align with your video marketing goals.

Some of the most effective video distribution platforms are:

a.    Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)
b.    Your website
c.    YouTube
d.    Vimeo
e.    Snapchat stories
f.    Diverse pages on your website (product pages, landing page, blog, resource hub, etc.)

7. Never Forget To Measure Your Video Marketing Campaign’s Performance

Without having a robust plan to measure the performance of your video marketing efforts, it would be impossible for you to refine your strategies for the future.

Source: Lemonlight

If your goal is to build brand awareness, then measuring likes, shares, and views would be crucial. However, there are numerous metrics for video marketing.

A few crucial metrics that you must track for measuring the performance of your video marketing gameplan are:

1. The number of views and Unique viewers - Help you understand if your video marketing strategy is working.
2. Attention span and Drop-off rates - What percentage of your audience makes it to the end of the video?
3. Demand generation - The number of leads generated as a result of your videos.
4. Content consumption - The number of videos your leads watch in a day, a week, or a month.

Measuring these KPIs helps you analyze how well your video content aligns with your target customers and business objectives so that you can start leveraging the assets more effectively.

Wrapping Up!

Keep in mind that the audience is fond of authentic, raw, and engaging videos.

So, make sure to build a holistic video marketing strategy and implement it to create relevant video content by leveraging the resources and platforms available.

Getting started with video marketing looks daunting and not an easy technique to build brand awareness.

If you follow the video marketing tips mentioned in the guide, you will be dominating the digital media landscape with engaging video content.

Remember to embrace a learner’s mindset and witness how video marketing, when done right, can grow your business by helping you grab potential customers and build brand awareness!

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