How to Get Started with Video Marketing: Tips, Tricks, and How-Tos

Business video marketing is a hot and trendy way to promote your company online. Creating a video for marketing is one of the best options to grab the attention of your prospective users, get your core message delivered using the power of visual means, evoke the necessary emotional response among the viewers, leave a strong impression of your brand, and of course, persuade the audience to make the target action.

Let’s achieve all these goals at once by creating a thoughtful video marketing plan step by step, leveraging all the power animated videos can promise to your business.  

 

Why Video Marketing – Facts And Numbers

 

The set of opportunities digital marketing opens up for modern businesses is pretty diverse. Getting started with video marketing is one of the most promising decisions you can make to promote your business better, and here is why:

 

 

So, online marketing videos can actually drive your ROI. What’s more, creating a video marketing strategy always has a lot of spare space for creativity, experiments, and reusability since a marketing video is a versatile tool you can ongoingly leverage across different marketing channels and campaigns.

 

 

Still, an effective video marketing strategy always keeps the sales funnel in mind, so let’s find out how to create video content depending on the sales funnel stage and the corresponding foal. 

 

Sales Funnel Stage – The Foundation of Your Video Marketing Strategy

 

How to make a marketing video? The first and the most essential task is to match the video you would like to create with the sales funnel stage. Being one of the core marketing concepts, the sales funnel largely determines what type of video you have to create to grab users’ attention and what kind of value should you deliver to them, depending on the sales funnel stage.

Below, I will match the sales funnel stages with types of videos you can create to better communicate your message to your views on each of them. 

 

 

Awareness

This is the first stage of the sales funnel, and at this point, the users are likely to know nothing about your brand and value proposition. That’s why the videos for marketing at this stage should be short, bright, memorable, and strongly branded so that you can grab users’ attention, engage them but not make them bored, plus make a strong first impression.

At the stage of awareness, creating short promo videos that come with bold marketing messages is often the best way to go.

 

Consideration

At the stage of consideration, the users are already better aware of your brand, so it’s time to tell them more about your company and the ways you can help them solve their problems. the users’ attention span, at this stage, also becomes a little longer so you can create an explainer video to visually explain to the prospective leads your core concept, idea, and value proposition. 

As one more idea to create a marketing video for the consideration stage, a product demo video may be highly effective. With its help, you can better showcase both features and benefits of your product, encouraging the users to move to the main stage of the sales funnel – purchase. 

 

Post-purchase

While the ultimate goal of any video marketing strategy is to make the users buy from you, you still can proceed with creating marketing online videos, engaging your users with them at the post-purchase stage. As a rule, at this stage, brands create educational videos to teach the customers to use their product or service in the most effective way. They also develop corporate videos for better brand recognition and for building an emotional connection. Some companies also like to entertain users with humorous cartoons, which, nevertheless, come with strong branding.

 

How to Do Video Marketing  Step by Step

How to create a video marketing strategy that will work for your business and drive ROI? Follow the next tips step by step. 

 

1. Decide on the sales funnel stage you want to reinforce with a video

The first step towards creating an effective plan of marketing with video is deciding on the sales funnel stage you would like to empower with the help of this tool. Logically, it should be that stage where you lose most leads or customers. For example, if you want your level of repeated purchase to be higher, consider engaging your users with educational videos, and success stories, and add videos to your email newsletters. 

 

2. Find a type of video that matches it

While a promo video is the most appropriate video type for the awareness stage, the choice opportunities are larger for other sales funnel stages. For instance, to speed up the consideration stage, you can create both a product demo and an explainer video. To make the right choice with the video type, try to align it not only with the sales funnel stage but also with your goal, taking both points into account. 

For example, if the goal is to make the users subscribe to your app, showing them an explainer video on the website, and then sending a product demo by email may work. 

 

3. Start creating a video

This is the most creative and still the most responsible part of your video marketing strategy since at this stage, you have to create a video itself  – a tool that will help you achieve your goal. Here is how to do it right. 

• Develop a core message. Depending on the sales funnel stage and the type of video you have chosen according to it and your goal, come up with a clear message you would like to deliver.
• Decide on a length. Next, decide on a video length following the rule according to which it should become longer as the user moves to the bottom of the sales funnel. Promo videos are usually up to 30 seconds, the length of an explainer video can be 1-2 minutes, while corporate and educational videos can be as long as you need.
• Consider animation over live-action. Animation is a better fit for companies that are just getting started with video marketing but still want to stand out from the competition. In most cases, they are more affordable and can be better tailored to the company’s specifics, marketing goal, and message.
• Choose your style. If you have decided to go with animation for your video content marketing, at this step you will have to choose between 2D and 3D. Both of the types allow for creating awesome videos, still, 3D is more suitable when there is a need to showcase an object in three dimensions. For instance, the producers of innovative devices often advertise them with 3D videos to showcase the tool from all angles. 2D, in turn, can be a good choice for explainer videos, for example, when explaining the idea or concept visually yet simply is more important than using complex graphics.
• Write down some ideas for a storyboard and script. Creating a storyboard and script is a part of the online video marketing services you will get when hiring an animation production studio. But if you feel like having some interesting ideas you want to implement, you are welcome to share them with your vendor.
• Get in touch with an animation studio. After you are ready with the tasks above, ask an animation studio to make a marketing video for your business. It is always better to partner with a studio that already has experience in creating videos for businesses from your niche since they will be able to suggest and reuse some of the best practices applicable for your project as well.

 

4. Distribute a video

After your video is ready, distribute it across different marketing channels but make sure to do it with a clear tactic in mind. For instance:

• Promo videos are good for social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
• Explainer videos can also be shared via the social media above, plus YouTube
• Product videos are good for website’s product pages and YouTube as well
• Sending corporate videos to your loyal customers via email makes the most sense
• Educational videos will work well when shared in the newsletter and via YouTube

 

5. Analyze the performance

Analyzing your online video marketing success is essential for finding out the actual ROI and developing new video marketing ideas, being inspired by those that worked out. Depending on the initial goal, you may analyze the following metrics:

• click-through-rate – this figure shows how many users have clicked on the CTA at the end of the video
• conversion rate – how many users purchased/subscribed after watching a video, clicking on CTA, and begin redirected to a website
• views, comments, and shares – these are the core engagement metrics that are relevant when the goal was to improve your brand awareness and recognition
• traffic sources – when you distribute your video across several social media, for instance, finding out which one drives the most traffic to your website can be game-changing for developing the specific video strategies for each of the platforms.

 

Conclusion

Video marketing is teaming up with beneficial opportunities for your business. With its help, you can achieve any of the core marketing goals – boost sales, build loyalty and credibility, improve awareness, generate more leads and much more but make sure to have an outstanding video of high quality regardless of the purpose. 

Wow-How Studio is right here to create marketing videos for your business, perfectly tailoring them to your goals, aligning them with your branding, and meeting your customers’ expectations.