Video Marketing Advice For Beginners Made Simple
If you’re a business owner, then it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that you need to invest time and money into online marketing in order to succeed. One of the most popular forms of advertising online includes video marketing, and with good reason!
People have less time to read and respond to content, therefore, videos allow them to get the gist of your message through visual cues. With that being said, for every successful video made for marketing purposes, there is a handful that will simply flop and do nothing for the average consumer.
Before you start launching your next marketing campaign, it’s important to understand exactly what you should be doing in terms of video marketing– the more you know about something, the better! Miracles aren’t going to happen overnight, but if you keep the following advice in mind, you’re going to be off to a great head start.
Use Resources Wisely
The biggest elephant in the room when it comes to video marketing is, of course, the budget. Companies are always trying to cut costs where they can, and unfortunately for them, it usually comes straight out of the advertising budget. However, you don’t need to break the bank or spend thousands of dollars on a good marketing video as hiring a videographer for all of your company‘s needs can indeed be affordable.
On the other hand, if you’re going to skip the videographer, at the very least, invest in decent quality equipment. You don’t need to purchase top-of-the-line tools, but make sure that you select a camera that can shoot HD quality footage.
In addition, you don’t need a dedicated studio as you’re looking to take an authentic approach to your marketing, therefore, it should be shot in your office. By choosing to appear more down-to-earth and approachable, watchers will be more focused on your personality and what you have to say as opposed to your videography equipment.
What Are You Trying To Say?
Every video you create should be trying to tell a complete story to your viewers. Your first video should always be one that allows potential customers to get to know your brand and its creator. Once you get introductions out of the way, there’s truly no limit to the possibilities for your content.
You can humanize your brand by allowing viewers to relate to the aches and pains of everyday life. Another approach you can take is to create videos for each of your products and demonstrate how they can fit the needs of the average consumer.
The last approach you can take is to do interviews with customers that highly recommend your brand. By bringing in other individuals, your videos will speak more to your viewers and lend that extra human feeling to your content by allowing consumers to build trust with your brand.
Don’t Just Focus On Products
We all know that at the end of the day, you’re making videos to sell your products. However, you shouldn’t make your videos just about pushing products as that can be a major turn-off for many people. What’s a better alternative? Include people in your videos that are members of your company or past customers that were satisfied with your products.
Remember, a video is more than just visual content. A great video is able to capture the essence of human emotion and build a foundation of trust with its viewers.
Check The Time
Though it’s tempting to make long videos about your company, try to keep your content under a minute. We all feel proud of our accomplishments and you deserve your bragging rights, but take into consideration that most viewers have short attention spans and not a lot of time on their hands, therefore, a short and sweet video is a lot more beneficial than a long one.
With that being said, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a time or a place for longer videos. You need to be smart about the length of your videos and use statistics and viewership data to determine which types of content may interest viewers in depth, therefore, allowing you to create a video that’s at least a few minutes long.
Be Brutal With Your Editing
We all like to stroke our egos and even if all of the footage you’ve shot looks great, it’s important to know where to edit. Since the above point mentioned that the length of your videos is an integral part of viewership interest, you need to double your efforts to be brutal with your editing. If something doesn’t look like it belongs to your video or it just appears to be taking up space in the frame, get rid of it.
Since you want your videos to appear to be high quality, you need to ensure there’s good lighting and no blurry footage. Anything that is on the border of being bad or you’re not sure about is better to cut from your final product. You should always keep a backup of your videos and if you happen to change your mind about certain things you’ve edited, you can still revert back to the original.
Place A Call To Action In The End
You need to use every opportunity to get people to purchase a product from you, but if you’re letting the screen fade to black when your video is over, that’s something we could all consider a missed opportunity. At the end of your video, place a call to action that prompts the viewer to do something. For example, you could choose to advertise a certain product that was featured in your video or your viewers may find relevant. If that’s not the route you want to take, you may also provide statistics and research data to support your claims.
Other ideas may include promoting a webinar or an ebook you’ve just written. At the very least, leave some contact information so that your viewers can get in touch with you should they have any questions. You may even want to place a few call to action features throughout the actual content of your video. For example, if you want to learn more about your average viewer, create a poll that prompts people to respond.
Spread Your Content Throughout The Web
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to placing your videos online. The unfortunate fact is that many business owners either place their videos on YouTube or their websites, but never both at the same time. Keep in mind that the more places your video is visible, the more people that will have the opportunity to see your content. Spread your videos around by placing them on all social media websites including your website and your blog, if you happen to have one dedicated to your business.
YouTube is, of course, a great place to start showing your efforts since videos from YouTube rank high in Google’s results and the website also happens to be free. On the other hand, with YouTube, there’s an issue of losing control over your video. Once your video is finished, YouTube may refer viewers to irrelevant content or worse, to videos made by your competitors.
Using free channels is a good idea, but make sure that you combine these efforts by hosting the same videos on your website. By doing so, you can control where people go a lot better and you can measure the interests of your viewership, which is integral to statistical data analysis.
Measure Your Success With Analytics
You don’t want to make the same mistake twice and it’s wise not to invest more money into a certain type of video if the viewership simply isn’t there. Measure the performance of your videos and not just the number of views. The number of people that have seen your video is never going to be solid data as that doesn’t actually determine how many sat through it, how they responded to the content, and what percentage actually x-ed out in the middle.
When you’re collecting data in regards to your videos, make sure that you’re being thorough. You need to figure out the drop-off rate, the duration of the views, and whether or not there were repeat viewers. In addition, you need to figure out how people are able to interact with your content and whether it keeps their interests or not.
Once you’ve collected the right data, track down your viewers based on your statistics. A person that has sat through all of your videos is one that’s likely to become a customer!
Video marketing is on the verge of taking off, and though it’s not as popular as social media marketing, just think where your videos could be ten years from now! Business owners were skeptical about the use of social media when it first came out, but as we can all see, interest in online marketing is definitely on the rise. If you’re looking to beat your competitors, there’s no better way to do so than using video marketing.