Video Rules the Digital Marketing Landscape

Digital marketing has dramatically shifted the way marketers think, and it’s not slowing down. Integrating video into your content marketing strategy is a powerful tool that boosts engagement, generates marketing leads, and showcases your brand and products like never before. These video marketing statistics (LearnHub) speak for themselves:

• Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined.
• 55% of people pay close attention when consuming video—more than all other types of content.
• Including video on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.

Even better, there are many types of video content to consider as part of your marketing strategy. Vlogs, video interviews, tutorial videos, recorded presentations, product demos, customer reviews, testimonials, advertisements, and live streams are just a few where businesses are finding significant success with their video marketing.

Integrating video into your plan is relatively simple. What’s important is that your video strategy needs to complement what you already have in place. Careful planning and execution will ensure video content gets you the ROI you want. Here are a few steps to think about:

Step 1: Get Planning

Think strategically before integrating video content into your marketing plan and set key goals to track success.

• Do some digging into the marketplace, solidify your audience target, and know exactly what your competitors are doing
• Deploy a survey with customers/prospects to better understand how they consume video content
• Determine the type of video content you want to create (as noted above)
• Ensure your key messaging supports other marketing channel messaging or campaigns—be consistent
• Think about your marketing budget and what you need to shift for video creative, production, and media
• Assess where video in your plan will achieve the highest ROI

You should also decide what quality level of video content will align with your marketing needs; how often you plan on creating video content and at what level of style/sophistication you want to achieve (base this decision on your brand strategy, personality, and value). Video creation can simply be done with a video camera or smartphone or if the objective is a higher level of production quality, tap an agency expert with a full suite of creative and production services.

Step 2: Execute Wisely

Videos put a personality and a face to your brand. It gives your brand a personal connection with your audience which can be a significant competitive advantage. Begin with video content that will suit the largest audience and keep your video short, clear, and concise so viewers reach the call-to-action. Also, consider creating different video lengths; both 15 and 30 seconds. This allows flexibility when deciding which digital platforms and social media channels best suit your marketing goals.

There are numerous distribution channels where your video content can be deployed and add value to who you are, provide relevant information for your audience to engage with, and demonstrate your leadership position in the marketplace.

• Website Landing Page: adding a video to your home page can strike the right chord on what your brand is about and what it stands for
• Social Media and Video Platforms: be sure to choose the right media (LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) that maps to your business strategy and audience. Brand authenticity is paramount here.
• Email Marketing: adding video into your email campaigns can increase click-through rates, conversions, brand awareness, and help educate
• Enewsletters: while you can’t always embed a video into your newsletter, you can insert a screenshot with a link to the video

Step 3: Track Everything

Video provides significant value when it comes to measuring against your marketing goals. The data tells you what’s working, what to optimize and/or reassess and generally speaking will help you evaluate how video content is impacting your bottom line.

• View Count: a great indicator of impressions and reach. The more widely shared your video is, the higher the view count and the more diverse your audience will be.
• Engagement: an indicator of how good the user experience is. Was the content useful and informative and if so, how long did he/she watch (entire video or just a few seconds)?
• Play Rate: the percent of visitors who clicked play and actually started watching the video.
• Page Time: typically used to gauge your content flow, and, ultimately, how captivated your users are with your videos and page.
• Click-Through Rate: the viewer has taken interest in your message and clicked on the video to find out more information on your website or landing page. This is also an indicator of how effective or engaging your video is, as the viewer takes the next step to learn more.
• Conversion Rate: demonstrates how many leads, prospects, or customers were generated from your video content or video marketing campaign. 

While video platforms and social media channels will provide excellent insights into the overall success of your video, Google Analytics is your best bet for analyzing how your video performs on your website. It’s one of the most robust tools for analytics and can track clicks, referral data, conversions, revenue data, demographics, and more.

A successful video marketing campaign is an essential portfolio piece for marketers, as well as an effective way to get high-potential leads to engage with your brand and begin their journey through the sales funnel.

Are you staying competitive with your video content strategy? AMF Media Group can help. Email us at [email protected] and let’s get started.