What You Need In Your Video Marketing Strategy

By 2020, online video content will make up more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic. This makes video look like a terrific channel through which to increase your return on investment!

And with 59% of executives saying they prefer video over text, it makes you want to jump onto the video ship before it sails away.

But, anything without a plan of action behind it will not give you the results you originally set out for. How can you delegate what you want out of video marketing without a strategy behind it?

What do you want to achieve?

To create a successful video marketing strategy, you first need to map out what you want to achieve in order to determine your target audience.

A good video marketing strategy coincides with a brand’s inbound marketing strategy to help tailor content for your buyer personas. This decision will influence the brand voice, personality and the production.

For example, you may want a video for advertising, in which case you will need to produce video content that is creative and informative, but not so sales intensive that it scares your audience away. After all, this targeted audience is most likely not even aware of your business yet.

When creating videos for people who are further down their decision making journey, you want to target your message and strategically position your content.

Your strategy could focus on repurposing blogs, which will increase your engagements at the right time in the buyer journey.

Budget

It’s important to have a budget dedicated to video within the overall marketing strategy. 73% of marketers say that if they had the budget, they would have created video content or more of it. So to be ahead of the rest, it’s best to arrange a realistic budget before your marketing strategy gets underway.

Depending on what you wish to achieve, your budget can either manipulate or be manipulated to align with these goals. You don’t want to be changing your plans last minute because they don’t align with your budget.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Ask yourself: What’s the purpose of your video content? Once you’ve decided what your content will look like, you need to formulate a plan to monitor its progress.

Video content can be used for a number of different strategies, so you need to really understand your strategy and how video content contributes to these specific set of KPIs.

Where will it go?  

What would be the point of producing a video if it’s just going to sit idly on your hard drive? Get your video content out there!

The best platform for your video content depends on your target audience and what your content contains. If you’re repurposing blogs, you’ll find that these videos sit well on your webpage in a similar location to your blog content.

If you’re creating video with the intent of using it on social platforms to complement your social media strategy, you need to optimise your videos to fit the typical viewing time, which is typically making your video 120 seconds in length.

Strategically placed video content can enhance your inbound marketing strategy efficiency – using the word ‘video’ in an email subject line actually increases open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates increase by an incredible 65%. Including a video in your emails can enhance the effectiveness of lead generation by acting as another metric to determine campaign success.

Video content is making an impact now; don’t just look at it as something to incorporate into your future marketing strategy. However, while it seems like video may be an easy add-on to any active strategy, it takes time to get right. Don’t get hoodwinked into thinking that video will magically increase your engagement and leads overnight. Video for video’s sake may result in poor quality content.  This can hurt your brand’s image and will be detrimental to your marketing strategy, with your ROI being affected too.

What you need in your video marketing strategy is an overarching strategy in place already. In fact, you can’t create a strategy for video without a marketing strategy to guide it to marketing glory.