If you have yet to incorporate video marketing into your mix, now is the time.

Have you been holding out on video marketing for your brand? Not quite sure how to go about it? How-to plan for video marketing can appear to be a daunting task to accomplish. But with a solid game plan, the right know-how, a little creativity, a boost in brand awareness is merely the tip of the iceberg of opportunities brands open up when they incorporate video into their marketing.

The effectiveness of traditional marketing has been dwindling for some time thanks to the popularity of video marketing and developing distribution channels.

Today we have better technology with faster data transfer speeds which allow us to stream high definition quality video on all of our devices. Video is quick, engaging and easily digestible content the majority of us can process easier. It can be both entertaining as well as informative with a little creativity and a pinch of both.

In an effort to keep up with the growing demand other networks such as Instagram, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. have all adopted "video-first" to their platforms. Some have even added video-friendly placements such as stories & live feeds. This has allowed these platforms to experience exponential growth and new channels such as snapchat, tik tok appear to be popping up everyday.

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Video marketing incorporated into landing pages have shown conversion improvements up to 80%, that is powerful and should be another marketing method we hold in our tool-box.

Video marketing can also give boost to your current SEO. By incorporating video into your homepage and landing pages brands are 50 times more likely to have their content show up on the first page of search results. If you haven't given it much thought yet, you can begin by thinking of ways a video could help enhance your existing content.

The first step in any campaign is always to define your goals and determine how you will measure success. Discovering places where video can benefit your brand within your existing funnels is a great place to start. If you are not sure how to measure success, video analytics or properly configured GA accounts are great ways to see where your visitors are coming from, total views, viewer duration, 3-second views and events that take place after the video is viewed.

Top of funnel video marketing:

Using video marketing to boost brand awareness
Building an effective video marketing campaign that begins your long-term relationship with your customer and can serve as a great way to grow your audience. It's best to forget the sale and focus on the discovery of your brand. Using videos to market your products or services is particularly good if you have a high value per sale or contract.

Middle of funnel video marketing:

Often called consideration content, its video that creates interest in your brand, product or service. Video marketing is worth doing especially if you are in competitive markets and your strategy is not based on discount prices. Well produced video content can build brand authority by positioning yourself as the expert in your field and is typically based around your market or industry. Growing your subscriber count and following is now attainable with the use of video content creation and can be a really great way to deepen your current relationships with potential customers.

When tracking consideration content the most important metric should be the click-through rate (CTR), followed then by view length. The click through rates can highlight the amount of visitors that engaged with your content, jumping to your website or online store and view length helps you validate the level of engagement with your viewers.

Bottom of video marketing funnel

If your brand sells a product or service then ultimately your goal is conversions. The smallest end of the marketing funnel, these customers have made it to decision time and what better way to improve those numbers then incorporating some closing content video marketing. Using video to showcase your unique selling points, potential benefits or other reasons for making the purchase can be used directly on product pages and help service based operations boost their new-client rolls everyday. If you are currently using video at the bottom of your funnels and you find people are clicking but not making the purchase, you may have a slight disconnect between your marketing and your actual product.

Regardless of your objectives it is important, and we cannot stress it enough, it is important to define your target audience and then track your success as time goes on. Discover what works for your brand and then double down on that type of content. Video marketing can get costly and time consuming for in-house efforts. Its important to be able to quickly discover what doesn't work and alter course.

Knowing your audiences well and understanding who you are talking to is key to successful video marketing campaigns. Know what they are interested and how they engage online will better help you to define your video marketing plan. An easy way to approach this is to define single or multi-personas of your ideal customers. Customers who best fit your product or service are more likely to convert so it is important to do a little digging and define who they are.

We get it, sometimes it is difficult to correctly define an audience, especially when your products or service cover a wide range of people. A great way to discover who your customers are is to trawl existing data to uncover clues and better understand their patterns. Gender, age and location will be the easiest info to discover and is a good starting point, online habits and interests are important when defining your online marketing strategies.

If you don't have existing customer data a little imagination and common sense evaluations can get you a pretty decent starting point. If you have adequate tracking currently in place then finding out more a bout them will just take a little more drilling into the data discovering things like interests, role and industry affiliations. An easy way to begin documenting personas is to outline them as real people.

Here are a few data points that can be built around personas, they include Names, Ages, Gender, Location, Interests, Social media channels and groups, Industry, Role and Preferred video content

One useful feature of customers from social media is that it can be easier to discover what their interests are and what motivates them to engage. A little research and you can find out industry wide themes that perform the best. This will help develop the "style" of your video marketing on the platforms. Developing video marketing content specifically for your target personas will reflect better performance rankings than simply putting out a video for the sake of a video.

When it comes to the success of video marketing on social media it boils down to your ability to target directly, plan accordingly and post consistently for awareness and growth. For conversions its addressing existing customer problems and your ability to quickly and clearly present the solution.

Styles of video marketing videos

There are plenty of examples to go around but most types of video marketing can be segmented into a few categories.

The explainer video marketing

Creating explainer videos continues to be one of the largest methods and really focuses on the conversion. They are versatile and can readily be made to explain every important detail about your company, from sourcing, production, the why and the how of your business. Explainer videos can be chock full of useful information and a great way to spread awareness at well. Most commonly explainer videos are located within key landing pages to help provide information and push the conversion.

Promotional video and brand advertising

We've all seen promotional video for products before, they're everywhere and can take on many forms throughout the marketing funnel. Most commonly used at the top of funnels they can grow interested, increase awareness and work well for new product launches and updates. These style of videos almost always talk directly about an individual product, business, service or brand.

When used lower in the funnel high-performing video marketing will be very clear about value and contain strong call to actions like shop now or call to make an appointment. Another type of video marketing could focus around sales, discounts or holiday promotions and for brand authority and trust the use of social proof, case studies and real customer testimonials can really help to set a strong foundation for brands.