What is video marketing and why should I use it?

Connecting with your audience on social media and various digital platforms through video marketing is super helpful for engaging your audience. The purpose of video marketing is to promote your products or services through visual storytelling. Successful video marketing converts the wide audience reach into business sales.

Types of Video Marketing

It is important not to mistake video marketing platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter for types of video marketing. These platforms represent spaces where you can upload your videos but are not types of video marketing. Here are different types of video marketing.

Informational Videos
Informational videos remove content focus from the brand, business, products, or services. These types of videos aim to educate the audience and provide solutions to problems that the audience may experience. The content however should be delivered in a style that subtly markets your products or services as the goal is to increase sales.
For example, if you own a traveling agency, you can create an informational video titled ‘5 handy tips when traveling with toddlers.’ The title already targets an audience that travels with children in tow in the expectation that your video will solve certain traveling problems and discomforts. Subtly marketing the agency’s products and services as solutions, is the art of creating successful, engaging video content that leads to high conversion rates. For example, the agency’s booking system saves parents time to coordinate transport and accommodation logistics meaning they can focus on their daily responsibilities in confidence that travel arrangements are cared for.

Service/Product Marketing
Service or product marketing is curating content that is directed at informing your audience what you offer. A business that sells coffee, for instance, can show a barista making a cappuccino while a catchy tune accompanies it in the background. The success of such videos relies on video quality and a distinct art of coffee-making that the ordinary person may not be able to achieve by himself or herself.

Live Videos
Live videos are real-time content presented to audiences on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. An events company, for example, would benefit from a live video showing at one of its gatherings. Showcasing company products such as the decor and setting may appeal to viewers who wish to plan an event. The audience can envision how their event space may turn out having seen the live setting on video.

Customer Testimonials
An audience relates to quality customer testimonials by expecting to experience the same positive outcomes as the consumer on video. Successful testimonials highlight the problems that the consumer experienced before purchasing the product or service. The marketing of the product or service is in the solutions that the customer appreciates to encourage viewers to purchase the products or sign up for the service.

Company Marketing
Company marketing provides the audience into your business and brand. The goal is for the viewers to positively associate with your company. Company marketing may be in the form of engaging staff interviews, or a tour, or the company space. For the content to ignite with the audience, it needs to be eloquently scripted, colorful, impactful, and be accompanied by engaging visuals.

How to set up your video marketing

Setting up video marketing requires careful planning which includes:

Research Quality Equipment
The choice of video equipment is vast from iPhones to lens cameras. The type of equipment you decide on depends on your budget, video-taking skills as well as intended types of videos. If uncertain of the type of equipment to purchase, expert opinion and advice are recommended.
Familiarize With Equipment
Once you have the equipment, exploring the different functions and outcomes is important. You can familiarize yourself with the guide that comes with the equipment, watch video tutorials on how to use the equipment for the best effect on platforms such as YouTube and Pinterest, or observe how an expert uses your equipment.
Practice
Having grasped how to use the equipment, you can practice taking videos. Practicing helps to familiarize with both the video marketing equipment and the art required for quality video shoots.

How to implement video marketing

There are steps required before pressing the start and publish buttons:

Research Your Audience
Researching your audience is an integral initial stage of video marketing. Understanding your target market’s preferred content tone, style, linguistics, and visuals, for instance, guides you into creating target-market-driven art. A common mistake is to produce videos that the creative team enjoys as opposed to videos that speak to your audience. Researching your audience also helps to determine the type of videos to focus on producing again depending on trends and preferences.
Research Competition
Researching your competition helps you identify the video styles and audience engagement styles. The goal is to create a unique video marketing strategy so that the shared audience is swayed to engage your content and eventually become loyal business customers.
Create a Strategy
The next step is to create a strategy based on the initial research findings. A strategy can include information such as the visuals included in the video marketing, video scripts, music or text included, marketing frequency, and the brand’s video signature for example.
Take Action
Taking action means flighting your first video on the chosen platforms. It is important to manage your expectations regarding the initial stages of video marketing or any form thereof. It is possible to go viral depending on various favorable conditions, however, more often than not, the videos you see that go viral would have other videos behind that hardly received reactions. Consistency, authenticity, and constant analysis are required to eventually make a mark in video marketing as a business.

Expanding your video marketing

Video marketing is a craft that is enhanced over time. Expert marketers create masterpiece videos by understanding your business brand and goal, as well as appreciating your target market and competitors. Various research methods are utilized to paint an accurate picture that is used to strategize a video marketing campaign.

Experts understand that consumers are emotional buyers. Once videos constantly appeal to viewers’ sense of smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste depending on the products or services marketed; the conversion rates may increase which is the ultimate goal.

Video marketing goes beyond sharing quality videos. Successful video marketing is branding infused with marketing in a way that forms authentic relationships with your audience and this is what it means to expand your video marketing. If expanding your video marketing is the route you decide to take, hiring reputable video marketing content creators is the beginning.

‍