Image by Ron Hoekstra from libertyondemand.biz
Effective Social Media Video Marketing Plan
There was a shift that took place between 2013 and 2018. Whereas before that time, people enjoyed online videos, of course, and they were used to some effect in marketing, by the time 2018 came about, the time people spent watching these videos had increased by 32 percent.
Although the reason for this shift is unclear, the fact is that videos became much more than just a ‘nice to have’. They became a tool that, if used correctly, could ensure that a business would be able to rise well above its competitors and offer something new and exciting to its prospects. It could give them what they wanted.
The trend didn’t stop there. By 2020, online videos have been shown to have targeted 92 percent of online users. Imagine that. Imagine being able to show your video to almost the entire internet community. Would your sales increase? Would your profits be higher? Would you have a chance to become a well-known brand? The answer is yes. Read on to find out more.
Where To Place Your Videos
It makes sense that if you want to market your business, you’ll create a series of videos to promote your products, services, and the company itself. It’s clear that these videos have a massage reach and that if you ignore the numbers, you’ll be limiting your own success.
Yet the question is, once the video is made, where should you put it? Placing it on your website might seem to be the optimum spot, but if no one can find your website (or it’s still growing, and your SEO isn’t yet giving you results – if this is the case, professionals such as Click Intelligence will be able to help you, and it’s certainly a good idea to speak to them to see what options you have. After all, if you want to make money, you need to be seen). No one will see your video. It won’t matter how well-crafted, professional, or entertaining it is. If no one watches it, your efforts will be in vain.
So you might think the video should be placed on a specialist platform such as YouTube. This is not the worst idea. After all, YouTube offers not just a place to host your video but options when it comes to sharing too. It can give you all the statistics you need to know to understand whether your video is working – who is watching, when, whether they liked it or not, and so on.
However, as with the point above, it’s often hard to market a YouTube channel. You might get lucky; YouTube’s algorithm might recommend the channel to a variety of people. However, even if that does happen, are they actually the people you want to watch your video? Are they the ones who are going to buy from you? If not, it’s a waste of time.
So what next? The answer is, as it often is these days, social media. When you use social media, you can much more easily target your ideal audience, whether that’s through location, their hobbies, their age, or anything else. This will help stretch your marketing budget. Plus, social media is where so many people spend their time; in January 2022, it was estimated that 4.62 billion people were using some form of social media.
Some of these billions of people are going to want to hear from you. They’ll want to watch your videos. They’ll be hooked on what you say if you market what you’re saying in the right way.
Whether you opt for a perfectly polished and edited final result or you prefer live streaming and the authenticity that comes with it, there’s no denying that social media has a place for your business and your videos.
Social Media Is Not Limited – Neither Are You
When we say that social media is not limited, we don’t mean there are no rules because there definitely are. This is not the Wild West of the internet, and if you don’t abide by the various platforms’ guidelines, you won’t be able to keep posting. Not only that, but you’ll have wasted your time and money creating your video. So always check the rules and make sure you don’t fall foul of them. That’s an important lesson to learn, but once you have learned it, you have a lot of power in your hands.
With an online video, you can make people feel the way you want them to. You can show them what you need them to see. You can craft a persona, and you can tell a story. Storytelling is crucial in advertising, and there is no better medium to do it in the 21st century than video.
According to studies, in the year 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. That may not seem a lot, but it was certainly enough for print advertising, which was king at the time. However, by 2015, the average attention span had shrunk drastically, coming in at 8.25 seconds. This could account for why videos started to come out on top. If you could tell your story in less than eight seconds, you could hook someone. A short, sharp advertisement on a social media platform that caught the attention was worth its weight in gold, and the trend has continued.
To get your video marketing right, you will need to invest. In the past, it was possible to cobble together something, and people would like it. Today, thanks to the proliferation of cheap – even free – editing apps, the ability to make videos is literally in everyone’s hands. This is why you’ll need to go further if you want to stand out, and speaking to a professional agency could be the ideal option. In this way, your story will be heard, and you will be able to generate the brand awareness you need to. This will bring traffic to your website and, ultimately, sales, which is the whole point of marketing in the first place.
Yet before you can get to that point, you’ll need to have a strategy in place. Here are some tips to help you create one.
Set Goals For Video Marketing
Before you can start coming up with a video marketing campaign for your social media channels, and certainly before you start creating anything, you’ll need to set some goals. If you don’t know what you want your video to achieve, you’ll have a hard time creating any kind of message that points people in the right direction.
To come up with your goals, you should ask yourself some questions. To begin with, what outcome do you want from your video? What should it do for you? How does it need to speak to your intended audience? At what point in your sales funnel does the video need to be placed (in other words, is it the first thing your prospects will see, is it the final push to persuade them to click the buy button or does it fall somewhere in between, perhaps as a reminder of who you are and that you can help them?)?
There are many goals you could set for each video. However, setting too many is often a mistake. It can become overwhelming, and when you try to reach each goal through a single video, that video will become tangled and messy, and your story will be unclear. Instead, consider two or three goals at the very most and focus on them. This will help you stay more focused, but it will also mean your final video is clear and concise, which is exactly what your audience, no matter who they are, will appreciate.
Which Platforms Will You Use?
Once you have your video marketing goals in place, you still aren’t going to be quite ready to create your video and start sharing it in the hopes that it will become viral. There is another step, and it’s a crucial one; where are you going to post your videos?
If the immediate answer that came to mind is ‘social media’, you need to keep thinking; that’s not enough detail. It’s far too vague. You need to narrow down the answer to exactly which social media platform – or platforms – you want to post your marketing video on. Each one is different, and each one has its own set of pros and cons. It’s important to understand what they are, and it’s crucial to ensure your video is right for that specific platform because they all offer something different and have their own video marketing options.
Perhaps you are first thought when you consider what social media is would be Facebook. Certainly, Facebook is still the leading social media platform, with 2.9 billion active users a month. Plus, it is leaning more heavily on video content now than it ever has in the past, and this is likely to be a direct response to its competitors, platforms such as Tik Tok, Snapchat, and Instagram, which are all much more image and video focused. Yet the crucial point of note is that Facebook tends to be populated by millennials and older generations (Gen Y and the Baby Boomers). The Gen Z kids, who are either just about to sign up for their first taste of social media or who have been using it for just a handful of years at most, aren’t so interested in Facebook. That’s where their parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents hang out, so it’s not where they want to be.
This is Facebook’s big problem, and to some extent, Twitter has the same issue (although Twitter is not such a great choice for video marketing since it is much more text-based). Whereas Tik Tok and Instagram are full of the younger generations, and the older ones tend to stay away. Of course, there is some crossover, but in general terms, this divide across the ages is the main difference in the social media platforms.
As you can see, it’s crucial that you pick your platform correctly. You need to know who you’re marketing to and what they want to see, as well as where they will see it. Once you know this, you can start to think about the content of your video.
What Type Of Video Will You Create?
Once you know who you want to speak to and where you want to catch their attention, it’s time to think about content. A great question to get you started here is to ask yourself what kind of video you want to create. There are a number of different types, and again, a lot will depend on who you are marketing to. However, there are other factors to think about, including the type of business you run, how formal – or otherwise – it might be, and what your budget is.
One option for your video could be educational, for example. These types of videos can be highly effective in creating better brand awareness and are ideal if you want to attract new customers. These videos are usually more professional in tone because their main aim is to show the expertise of the business and those working within it in whatever sector or niche they happen to be in. Educational videos might offer tips and advice, they could be a guide about something, or perhaps you prefer to create an explainer video about one specific service or product you supply. In fact, studies suggest that 48 percent of potential customers want to see a video that explains a product or tells them why they need to buy it, so this could be a good place to start.
A behind-the-scenes video can also work well. These, as the name suggests, will offer an insight into the people behind the products and services, ensuring that customers and prospects get to know the company better. This can help foster a sense of loyalty.
Interviews are another option. Finding a guest speaker who has authority in your market sector and asking them pertinent questions is a great way to help establish your brand as an expert. This will give customers a sense of trust, knowing that you know what you’re talking about – after all, if an expert agrees to answer your questions and give useful advice, you have to be authentic.
All videos need to be entertaining, but some can be more so than others. An interview should be interesting, for example, but you can also choose to make a video that is solely for entertainment purposes. If this sounds as though it would have little value because you need to market your business, and you’re not there to make people laugh, think again. When you can entertain people, they will remember you. They will feel warm towards you. They will tell others about you and – crucially – share your video. They will also appreciate, albeit often subconsciously, that you’re not trying to sell to them, even though, of course, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re simply not being obvious about it. So by creating a video that’s supposedly purely about making people smile, you could be boosting your profits in the end.
Plan The Content Production
You might not be making a feature film, and you might not have a budget in the millions, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think of your marketing video in the same way as you would if you were making such a film and if you did have such a budget. Just pressing the record and hoping for the best is not going to get you very far, and if you do end up with a finished video, it won’t be overly helpful in terms of your marketing.
This is why you need a content production plan. You can create this in any way you’re comfortable, from a storyboard on the wall to some scribbles in a notepad to a fully-fledged and in-depth flowchart or spreadsheet. The important point is to have it in whatever form suits you.
Your plan needs to begin at the beginning and end at the end. So what does that mean? It means you need to plan everything from the first ideas of a story to the final editing and polishing. It might be that you need to hire experts to help you, and if you have a plan, you’ll know what needs to be outsourced. You can also plan your time and resources better and ensure that you have a completed video by your deadline.
If you’re unsure about exactly what is needed in this content plan, you can start with this list:
- The story
- The equipment – everything from lighting to props
- The script/script editing
- The storyboard
- Planning the filming – it may not be linear
- Finding the people to help – cast and crew
- Finding a location
- Sourcing music (and ensuring you have the correct licenses)
- Getting help with post-production (editing)
Promote Your Video
Let’s assume at this stage that your video is completed. You’ve done all you can, and you are sure it’s ready to be shown to the wider world (or at least your target audience). What now?
Now you need to promote your video. Although it’s possible to just hit publish and hope that your current followers will see what you’ve done and like it enough to share it, this is not an efficient method. It’s slow and leaves too much to chance; depending on the platform you’re using, your video might not be seen at all.
This is why promotion is crucial, and SEO is a big component of that. You might think that SEO is only about your website content, but it is actually something that can be utilized in all content, and that includes videos. Although the content of the video isn’t something that search engines can crawl, the promotions around your video are. By using the correct keywords in the post, by adding hashtags, by tagging people, and by targeting your audience, you can give your video a much better chance of being noticed, watched, and shared.
Remember, your videos will be around for as long as you keep them posted. If you can choose an evergreen topic and ensure your SEO is up to date, it could be that a video you made years ago still brings you sales today. This is why getting your video marketing right on social media is vital, as it could be what makes you.
