7 Steps to Create a Killer Video Marketing Strategy

Videos are great for generating traffic, converting visitors into customers, and increasing engagement with your audience. They can also help you build authority, increase conversions, and even make money.

But without a plan, the time and effort that you’ve spent in the video creation process would just go to waste. To be successful in your video marketing campaign, you need a proper strategy.

In this article, I’ll share 7 simple steps you can take to create a killer video marketing strategy that will help you reach your goals faster. I’ll walk you through each step and explain why it works. Then I’ll provide examples of how you can apply these tactics to grow your business.

What is Video Marketing?

Simply put, it’s the practice of using video to promote and market your products and services effectively. You can do this by reaching out to your audience, improving engagement, educating customers, and ultimately boosting conversions.

Of course, video marketing is almost as old as motion pictures. While this medium was initially limited to old-fashioned theatres and public screens, nowadays you can watch a video almost anywhere. In turn, video marketing has become a more powerful tool as it moved first to televisions, then computers, and finally mobile devices.

How Can Video Help Your Business?

It’s one thing to say that video marketing is a good way to sell more goods and services. However, part of building a good video marketing strategy is knowing how this technique can help. In addition, appreciating the value of video can help when it’s time to show boardrooms that they need to consider implementing or expanding a video marketing program.

Further Reading: Small Business Video: 8 Creative Ways Your Small Business Can Leverage Video Marketing

Boost Engagement

Generally speaking, videos have a high engagement level. Not only are people likely to watch a good-quality one all the way through, but they might even like, comment, or share. These actions increase your performance on the YouTube algorithm. If you don’t publish a video on YouTube, engagement will still boost the visibility in other ways. For instance, sharing something on Facebook makes it easy for that person’s friends to see the content.

Build Credibility and Trust

Another way a competent video marketing strategy helps with your business is by building your brand credibility. You also can build trust that your brand provides quality products or competent services. For instance, Apple has a lot of brand credibility in the field of innovation. Just look at the iPhone: it was revolutionary in its day, and it has been endlessly imitated. Still, the brand has a continued reputation for being innovative, with the latest features often appearing on Apple products first.

Improve Conversions & Drive Sales

Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase your conversion rate and overall sales. One reason for this is that you can make your case in a more engaging way. For instance, tutorials can demonstrate use cases or spark creativity, which can be helpful for both B2B and B2C brands. Likewise, you can use video to show people what something looks like in a manner that’s closer to real life. Office furniture, fashion, and other brands often find this highly effective.

Here’s the thing: a good video marketing strategy is one of the easiest ways to demonstrate value to potential customers, whether as individuals or companies. The video format lends itself to many different content types, is easy to consume, and can be fun to share. In this way, you’ll get more eyeballs for minimal effort.

Help You Rank Higher on SERPs

Finally, videos can help with your position on SERPs. This is true for video-specific search engines, for the video section of general search engines like Google, and generally. One reason for this is that the keywords you attach to your video titles and descriptions give something extra for the search engines to index. In addition, the additional traffic to your website, both directly and indirectly, helps boost the credibility of your website. Generally, highly-credible sites do better on SERPs.

7 Steps to Creating a Video Marketing Strategy

Even the best marketing videos have much lower effectiveness if they aren’t backed up by a good video marketing strategy. In other words, while you will probably get some views by simply “being creative” and putting your ideas out in the world, this probably won’t be enough. At a minimum, you won’t get the best ROI unless every video you make, your distribution strategy, and your brand message are carefully planned.

While your video marketing should always be compatible with the rest of your company’s marketing strategy, there are some special considerations for video. Luckily, these seven steps will help you and your company achieve better results.

1. Decide on a Brand Story

There’s little question that selecting a brand story for your video marketing strategy can be fun. After all,  it’s a great opportunity to brainstorm ideas and see the creativity of your team. In addition, you may need more than one brand story on some level that’s tailored to different audiences or products.

However, the most important thing here is understanding where you want to position your brand. A premium brand will market itself differently from a budget brand. In addition, if you have a particular niche like environmental friendliness, this should be part of your brand story.

Finally, brand voice is critical. No matter what else you do, your video marketing strategy should always be consistent with all your other marketing efforts. This is true for all aspects of your video campaigns, from the tone of each video to the type of humor (if any) and even how you present your products. This way, people will always associate your video with your brand.

2. Analyze the Competition

Competitive analysis is likewise critical to an adequate video marketing strategy. After all, it’s hard to counter a competitor’s message that their products and services are the best, without studying them.

To do this, you must first know who they are, what products they offer, and how they differ from yours. For instance, in the consumer products industry, there are at least two major conglomerates here in the US. In turn, they each make several brands of laundry soap, paper goods, and even diapers. Each of these brands has different attributes, even within the same conglomerate. You need to determine what these differences are, and how you can highlight them to your advantage.

Next, analyze their marketing strategy. While it’s easy to keep future marketing plans a secret, you can still consider what a competitor has done in the past to try and predict the future or identify a pattern. Now, think about how video is part of their strategy. For instance, do they make a lot of tutorials? Do influencer marketing videos? Show off their employees? Each of these techniques tells us a lot about how competitors market themselves.

Further Reading: The Top 42 Video Marketing Statistics for 2022

3. Identify and Understand Your Audience

Now that you understand your competitors, it’s critical to know your audience. After all, part of any sound video marketing strategy is creating a video that will appeal to your audience. If you don’t understand them, it’s very difficult or impossible to achieve this goal.

First, identify your ideal customers. Marketers call this ideal customer a “buyer persona,” and every brand should have one. If you have multiple brands or product lines, you may need more than one buyer persona. In this case, you’ll need a different video marketing strategy for each one.

To form your buyer persona, think about a basic description of that ideal customer in terms of socioeconomic status, interests, values, and similar factors. In other words, who do you want to buy your products, and who should they appeal to.

Next, identify their pain points and figure out how to answer them. For instance, Dawn dish detergent is famous for grease cutting capabilities, which is especially valuable if you have baked-on food after cooking. Likewise, a business traveler who struggles with hearing airplane noise by the hour can benefit from high-quality noise-canceling headphones or earbuds.

Once you’ve identified ways to show your products solve customer pain points, consider what type of videos they are most likely to resonate with. For example, people who have greasy dishes often resonate with soap commercials where the grease melts off of the baking pan, and the business traveler might like a dramatization of how well those headphones block noise. In the second case, an influencer can be valuable because competition is fierce in this industry and people get very skeptical about brand claims.

Finally, determine where your ideal audience hangs out. In a good video marketing strategy, this should be one of your main distribution channels. Most people in the US use Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, but they might also prefer a particular streaming service. Once you’ve made the best videos ever, start distributing your content in those places. It can spread to other locations through sharing.

4. Set Campaign Goals

Before you go further with your video marketing strategy, ask yourself what you want to achieve with your videos. Typically, you’ll have a different goal for each campaign, though you’ll run several different campaigns for each goal over time. Campaign goals for video marketing often include brand awareness, lead generation, and a sales increase. Keep in mind that sometimes a campaign will have one set goal, but achieve others as well.

Once you have completed your first campaign, it’s important to use analytics to determine overall performance. As part of this process, you and your team should compare performance with your competitors. Specifically, you should have numbers to prove that your content is resonating with your target audience at least as well as competing for content. Then, adjust as necessary to achieve greater ROI the next time.

Finally, most brands have multiple goals for marketing efforts. To give your video marketing strategy more direction, decide which goal is most important. Then, create videos that will best meet that goal. Over time, you can make more videos and address different goals with different campaigns. One of the great things about video content is that it often has a longer shelf life than many other options.

Further Reading: 10 Ways to Make Your Video Email Marketing Campaign Stand Out

5. Set the Tone for All the Videos to Stay on Brand

As with other marketing types, your video should be consistent with your brand’s tone and voice across different channels. This helps forge your brand’s personality and ensures that people recognize your brand’s video as a brand asset. Connecting your videos with brand voice helps make it more effective: some video campaigns are very memorable and reap rewards long after the campaign is over.

This technique can involve several elements. For instance, some brands produce videos with an offbeat sense of humor, while others love bright colors and quirky graphics. You should use those design elements across advertising media, such as video, print, and paid social.

6. Customize and Optimize the Videos for Different Channels

There’s no such thing as one video to rule them all. Unfortunately, a lot of brands have a video marketing strategy that involves making one video or a string of similar ones and hoping that it reaches everyone. While videos for some product types will always have similarities, they still should be formatted for the relevant channel. For instance, YouTube videos should usually be in landscape mode, while TikTok will only take portrait-orientated videos and Instagram prefers them.

Not only does making multiple versions of a video (or even different ones for different channels in the same campaign) help the video look nice, but it’s more effective that way. Just look at all the YouTube videos in portrait and you’ll often see complaints from viewers. In addition, people might skip your video if it doesn’t look nice on a certain platform.

Further Reading: Video Marketing SEO: 11 Ways to Optimize Your Video for Search

7. Make Sure to Keep the Budget Reasonable

Finally, almost everyone agrees that video marketing, and marketing in general, adds up fast. With that said, overspending is never a good idea, either for your bottom line or in terms of ROI. For this reason, when formulating your video marketing strategy you should always have a budget and stick to it. In fact, I suggest that you set your budget and then work your entire strategy around it. Video production costs don’t have to be expensive. You can also choose video distribution channels with lower costs.

Producing Your Videos

Once you have a video marketing strategy in place, it’s time to produce and distribute your videos. Distribution is similar to other content types, in that you can post it somewhere and go for organic reach, or you can pay to distribute (or both). However, production takes more effort. Here’s how to do it.

Plan Your Videos

Before you even start writing a script, you need to plan your videos. Doing so helps you have a direction for the video, which saves time and money. Therefore, you should define the purpose of each individual video before starting the production. You can create some videos for brand awareness and others with customer conversion in mind. Within these parameters, there are a lot of options, such as tutorials or including the product in everyday life.

You have to know what the end result will be or you’ll be trapped in the loop of re-shooting, re-framing, editing, and wasting a lot of time. Not to mention the cost of labor, energy, and even extras like props that can go down the drain without a clear plan.

Script Your Videos

No matter what kind of video you decide to make, most business videos need a script. About the only exception to this rule is user-generated content, including influencer campaigns. In those situations, the user will either make a script or keep organized in a different way.

For business videos, a script usually includes a lot of text. While the “theatrical” aspects of a video may be less elaborate than for a “fun” video, it’s still important for the actor(s) to know what they’re supposed to do, and how to do it. And while nearly every video on the planet has outtakes and mistake reels, you need to limit them whenever possible. Otherwise, you risk being over budget on each unscripted video. You can also easily produce a video that’s too long, though pieces often get taken out during editing.

Further Reading: How To Make an Explainer Video That Sells: Your Complete Guide

Understand Your Cameras

Even though smartphone cameras have become very good over the last few years, they still aren’t the ideal production equipment in every situation. In particular, a professional video produced by a brand will often require features that these smartphones lack. For the highest quality video, you’ll need professional-grade cameras.

That isn’t to say that you need top-of-the-line cameras, though. A series of digital video cameras can often perform well enough to start your video marketing program. However, you should always choose videos and write scripts with your equipment in mind. If you don’t have fancy cameras, you shouldn’t plan a video that needs to be produced on top-level equipment. On the other hand, simple videos don’t need fancy cameras to be effective. Choose your themes and video types based on the limitations of your equipment for the best results.

Set Up Your Studio

If you have the budget, you can set up your own studio. Usually, this will be a separate room where you can set up camera equipment and keep it set up. Then, you can use a green screen to accommodate background insertion at the editing stage. Otherwise, consider putting your equipment in a closet where your video team can easily take it out and set it up. There are plenty of inexpensive studio replacements and DIY tips.

Alternatively, if you need to produce a special or long video, you might rent a professional studio and hire expert videographers. These videos tend to be evergreen content and often tell your brand story in a compelling way. For instance, you might produce an infomercial or “big game” video this way. Competitive environments call for especially polished productions.

Prepare Your Talent 

Finally, you need to get your talent ready for production. Getting in front of the camera is scary, and not everybody feels comfortable in front of the camera. Ideally, you’ll choose people who are more comfortable with acting if a video is highly scripted or clever. However, this doesn’t work as well for tutorials or interviews, where you need someone who knows your product well.

To minimize stage fright, give your actors time to prepare by studying the script and practicing their lines. Remember that this is a work activity, so they aren’t “slacking off” by preparing for filming. Plus, practice makes perfect, so you’ll save time on filming day with fewer mistakes.

Finally, allow some improvisation – if possible – to make the takes less robotic and more human. Your viewers can see a lack of authenticity from a long way off, and as a rule, people prefer a video to be authentic. On the other hand, more human performance will draw people in and encourage them to engage with your content. Chances are that this will yield better results over time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, creating a killer video marketing strategy is not as scary as it sounds. It doesn’t always require a ton of effort or a huge budget. In fact, you can get away with using free tools like YouTube to help you distribute videos that are easy to produce and share. 

The key to success is to keep your videos short and sweet and to focus on sharing information rather than trying to sell anything. By following these simple steps, you’ll be able to create videos that are easy for viewers to watch and share. In turn, quality video will help you build a strong base of loyal followers who will want to hear from you whenever you have something new to say. Using the steps described above, you can create your own video marketing strategy. The next thing to do is to create your videos and watch your brand grow.

Hero Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash