Video Marketing: An In-Depth Guide For Every Business Owner Today

Marketers have used videos since the 1940s, but the term “video marketing” has gained momentum in the last decade.

Google’s purchase of YouTube in 2006 can be considered a critical turning point in the growth of video marketing.

Video marketing is a hot discussion topic and a focus area for every marketing team, irrespective of the industry or size of the organization.

So, for readers still confused about the term video marketing, here is a standard definition that explains it: Video marketing is leveraging videos to educate, entertain, and engage the audience to achieve your business or personal goals.

These can be short how-to videos, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, YouTube videos, and more.

Why Video Marketing?

Video marketing has gained so much traction over the last decade that almost every business is exploring it now.

There are several reasons behind the increased adoption of video as a content format for marketing. Here are some of them:

• Humans love visuals more than words: Our brain process visuals much faster than words, and an MIT study found that we can identify images we’ve seen for as little as 13 milliseconds. With the dwindling attention span of your audience, videos are the best bet to grab their attention.
• Videos evoke emotions: Via impactful storytelling, videos can evoke the right emotions in viewers. Creators can plan their storytelling based on the goals they are trying to achieve with their content.
• Videos engage multiple senses of viewers: A video can engage a viewer’s senses, like sight and hearing. This helps evoke emotions and persuade.

Key Business Goals Videos Can Help You Achieve

Video content can help businesses achieve several of their goals and objectives. Some of these goals include:

• Boosting website traffic & engagement: Video is an effective medium for driving quality traffic to your website and increasing engagement with your brand.
• Building a social media community: Video can act as both an entertaining and an educational resource for audiences. By providing this type of value to people, video content can help you engage with social media users and grow your social community.
• Customer acquisition and retention: Video can be used to educate potential prospects on your brand, your product, and your value proposition. In this sense, it is often helpful in converting people into customers and, ultimately, boosting your bottom line.
• Raising content consumption: There’s no doubt that video is one of the most popular and highly-consumed content formats today – so leveraging it on the right platforms to tell the right stories can help you reach more people.
• Gaining thought leadership: Provided you follow best practices and focus on unique storytelling, video can help you stand out in a crowded marketplace and tell your story.
• Improving customer experience: Video content can augment your efforts to deliver the best experience for your customers, whether that’s through product explainers, how-tos, and tutorials, or customer case studies.

Statistics Proving The Rise Of Video Marketing

To understand the power and dominance of video in the world of marketing, we need to look at some latest statistics from Wyzowl’s 2022 State of Video Marketing report:

• 86% of businesses used video as part of their marketing strategy in 2022.
• 81% of marketers said video has helped them increase sales in 2022.
• 94% of viewers have watched explainer videos to learn more about products or services in 2022.
• 87% of marketers say videos have helped them increase traffic in 2022.

It’s clear from these statistics alone that video has become an integral part of the average company’s marketing strategy, irrespective of size and industry.

And while, in the past, marketers faced challenging barriers to entry with video content, such as high costs, inadequate tools, and lack of access to talent, the advent of affordable plug-and-play tools has made video content doable for any business today.

Video Formats Dominating Marketing Now

If you are exploring videos as part of your content strategy, this is the best time to research and think about how you’ll approach video content.

There is a wide range of platforms and formats available for marketers and business owners to experiment with when it comes to telling your brand story.

• YouTube videos (how-to videos, behind-the-scenes videos, product intro videos, etc.).
• Instagram Reels.
• YouTube Shorts.
• Animated videos.
• Livestreaming videos
• TikTok videos.
• Webinars.
• And more.

Questions To Ask Before Building Your Video Marketing Strategy

With the various formats available for your video marketing, you’ll need to ask yourself a few critical questions before kicking off your video marketing efforts.

Please answer the following questions honestly, so they can help you build an authentic and powerful video content strategy for your business.

• Do you know your audience well? Knowing your audience well is the cornerstone of your video marketing success.
• Does your audience consume video content? If you answer “no” here, there is no point wasting your energy or resources on video marketing.
• Do you have a compelling story (or stories) to tell your audience? Every business must have an interesting story to tell its audience. If you don’t know yours, it’s time to go find it!
• Do you have the time and resources to run a video marketing strategy? This critical question will help you decide what gaps you might need to fill to make your program successful.
• How committed are you to successfully running a video marketing program? Video marketing, like any other marketing tactic, will demand your long-term commitment for it to bring results for your business.

All these questions will deliver the right answers to build a successful video marketing program.

Building A Powerful Video Marketing Strategy

A well-designed video marketing strategy can do wonders for your business or personal brand.

Video content can be leveraged for various goals for your business, like improving brand awareness, increasing website traffic, generating leads, booking demos, and much more.

Since videos can often pique an audience’s attention quickly, they can help you achieve your goals if executed correctly.

Here are the basic steps you can follow to build an effective video marketing strategy for your business:

Audience Research (Including A Buyer Persona Exercise)

The first step in building an effective video strategy is researching your audience.

Your goal during this step is to understand your audience’s demographics, challenges, and content preferences.

This exercise will help you determine whether video content will be useful in solving your target audience’s challenges.

Determining The Themes For Video Storytelling

Once you are clear on your audience’s preferences, you can move on to identifying some key themes you can use in your content strategy.

These themes will help you decide on content types and stories you can tell using videos.

These themes can be educational, holidays, events, regular updates, and more.

Identifying The Right Tools For The Program

Once the themes are clear, you can move on to identify the right tools needed for your video marketing strategy.

These can be tools for the creation, topic research, SEO, content distribution, and performance tracking of videos.

Choosing The Right People For The Program 

The most critical element for the program’s success is the people running it.

If you are a small business owner, this could be you! Or, if you are strapped for time, you may have to hire or identify the right people for the job.

Putting The Right Measurement Mechanism In Place

The success of your video content strategy depends on how to monitor and measure the performance.

Identify the crucial metrics for your goals, and put mechanisms in place for measuring them consistently.

Improving The Video Strategy Consistently

Constant monitoring will help you determine the changes needed to boost the effectiveness of your video marketing.

Keep improving the program by incorporating timely modifications to enhance the performance of your content.

Storytelling Tips For Effective Video Marketing 

As a business owner, you might be faced with some questions, such as:

• What stories can I tell using videos?
• Will my stories even appeal to my audience?
• How will I consistently tell stories using video content?
• Can I sustain this journey of video marketing?

Let’s get real for a moment.

Video storytelling is not a simple task. It requires dedication, commitment, and relentless focus from the creator.

Here are some storytelling tips for every business owner who is building their video strategy:

• Be authentic: Authentic stories are more likely to strike a chord with your audience – so try to keep your content original and depict a true-t0-life representation of your brand.
• Be consistent: Video marketing, like any other marketing tactic, will demand consistency more than anything else. Be consistent with your video content and stay on course.
• Experiment: Always be experimenting with your video content. As new formats appear regularly, you should be agile to test them and find what resonates with your target audience.
• Be customer-centric: Customer-centricity will be a critical element for the success of your video marketing strategy. Align your content to your customer, their challenges, and how you will solve them for the best results.
• Be thick-skinned: With highly visual content like video, you will always run into feedback and criticism. Make sure to take constructive notes on board, but also develop the resilience to ignore the rest and keep at it.

Tools To Support Your Video Marketing

Many tools are available to help you execute an effective video marketing program.

Here are some cost-effective and user-friendly options for every business owner:

• Animoto: A video creation software that provides readymade templates to help you create various videos for social media and other marketing purposes.
• Canva: A graphic design and video platform with the largest collection of templates to support your video marketing.
• TubeBuddy: Your go-to tool for managing and growing your YouTube video marketing.
• StreamYard: A tool that helps you schedule and run live streams and webinars for your business.
• Lumen5: Enables faster video creation for business owners from blogs and written content.
• Loom: Powerful screen recording software for creating educational and promotional videos on the go.
• InVideo: A video creation platform with handy templates to suit your video content needs.
• YouTube: The perfect platform to upload your video content for your target audience.
• Speechelo: An easy-to-use tool for creating professional voice-overs for your videos.
• Vyond: A video platform for creating impactful animated and whiteboard explainer videos.

Some Content Ideas For Kickstarting Your Video Marketing 

To help you kickstart your video marketing, here are some content ideas for you to test, depending on your appetite and resources:

• An intro video for your business: Create a video explaining your business, the unique value it provides, and who it serves.
• An animated video for your product/service: Develop an animated video explaining your product and highlighting its top features.
• A live streaming show with stakeholders: If you’re feeling brave, try launching a live streaming show for social media with guests like influencers and your customers.
• Behind-the-scenes live content: Similarly, you could use tools like Instagram Stories to broadcast ad-hoc live sessions that showcase the behind-the-scenes of your business and team.
• Demo videos for your product: Prepare screen recording videos of your product and its features for your customers.

In Conclusion

To conclude, video marketing can be a game-changer for your business in 2023.

All you need to do is understand your customers and their challenges and plan video content that focuses on the solutions to those challenges.

Dedicate time and resources to create video content per your strategy – and keep it consistent.

And as James Wedmore says,

“Stop thinking of video marketing as this separate entity that is optional for your business.

Videos are an effective form of communication that needs to be integrated into each and every aspect of your existing marketing efforts.”

Happy video marketing!

More resources: 

• Local Video Marketing: 4 Ways To Win With Video 
• 6 Video Marketing Tips for Smarter Strategy
• YouTube for Beginners: How to Set up Your Channel

Featured Image: vichie81/Shutterstock