Predictions suggest that by 2024, adults will devote 85 minutes daily to digital video viewing. For marketers, this is a golden opportunity to strengthen their video marketing strategy on various social media platforms.
This article will guide you through a seven-step process to develop a successful social media video marketing strategy.
1. Define your Video Marketing Objectives
Any fresh marketing strategy begins with the setting of objectives. What do you aim to achieve with your videos?
For beginners, it’s recommended to start with a few goals to avoid feeling overwhelmed. For instance, your initial objective could be to build brand awareness.
With a thoughtfully crafted script and a dose of creativity, your video marketing strategy can not only enhance brand awareness but also guide prospects through their purchasing journey, educate them about your brand, and fuel brand advocacy plans.
Five stages constitute a typical marketing funnel, and videos can be tailored to each of these stages with a properly designed social media video marketing strategy.
As you contemplate your video marketing goals, think about how they fit into each stage of the buyer’s journey. This will inform your social media video ideas and enable you to craft effective calls to action in your video content.
Here are examples of goals for each stage:
Stage 1
Awareness: Reach a Broader Audience
If you’re like most social marketers, expanding brand awareness is your primary objective. In the initial stage of the buyer’s journey, brands attempt to grab consumers’ attention and introduce themselves. Video marketing on social media platforms provides an ideal way for reaching new customers and introducing your brand.
Stage 2
Consideration: Stimulate Demand
When consumers reach the consideration stage, they are familiar with your brand and its offerings, but it’s your job to create a demand for your products or services. Various approaches can be used to achieve this objective via social media video marketing.
Stage 3
Decision: Facilitate Conversion
At the decision stage, you aim to convert prospects into customers. Here, customer testimonials can be incredibly persuasive, demonstrating the real value of your products and services.
Stage 4
Adoption: Empower Customers
Once a prospect converts into a customer, it’s crucial to educate them on how they can maximize the value of your products and services. This step is where educational videos, webinars, and live streams come into play.
Stage 5
Advocacy: Promote Brand Loyalty
The advocacy stage is all about having satisfied customers who will praise your brand and promote it. It’s at this stage where advocacy videos play a crucial role. Not every advocacy video will go viral or come straight from your fans, but employee advocacy content can strengthen your brand’s reputation. Showcasing your team members and their experiences can provide insight into your company’s culture and why they love being a part of it.
2. Select your social media platforms
Every leading social media network offers its unique video features, presenting ample opportunity to integrate video into your marketing strategy. If you are new to video content, start with platforms where you already have an engaged audience.
Researches reveals that Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are the favored platforms that consumers and brands are expected to utilize the most in the coming year.
Selecting any of these five platforms to kick-start your video marketing strategy is a good beginning. However, it would be negligent not to emphasize the potential advantages of using TikTok and YouTube for your video marketing initiatives.
When should you use TikTok for video marketing?
TikTok has undoubtedly played a significant role in promoting the appeal of short-form videos and has rapidly grown into one of the most loved apps on the internet.
According to researches, short-form videos are 2.5 times more engaging to consumers than their long-form counterparts, making them the most engaging type of in-feed content, followed by images and live video.
TikTok’s collaborative elements like Duets, combined with its unique culture influenced by TikTok trends and sounds, provide brands with fresh ways to innovate their video marketing.
The app is a strong driver of brand awareness, and trends like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt demonstrate that short-form videos can also transition consumers into customers.
When should you use YouTube for video marketing?
With more than 2.5 billion active users every month, YouTube continues to be one of the most popular video platforms among consumers and marketers. However, the large user base is not the only reason to consider YouTube for marketing.
As one of the world’s most used search engines, videos on YouTube also appear in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, marketers can enhance their brand’s visibility by creating content around popular search topics.
With YouTube video marketing, you can address all stages of the marketing funnel, enabling you to achieve your strategic goals regardless of what they are.
Understanding social media video formats and features
To pick the right platform, it’s crucial to understand what each platform provides and what video dimensions are supported. This understanding is vital if you plan to repurpose your videos, as it’s beneficial to select platforms that complement one another.
Given the steady addition of new features by different social platforms, it can be challenging to keep up with what type of video content can be uploaded and where, or when additional editing may be required.
Refer to the quick guide below and visit our comprehensive social media video specs guide for the detailed information you need for each network.
Landscape and portrait feed videoFacebook Live (live streaming)Facebook Stories (temporary content)
Landscape and portrait feed videoInstagram Live (live streaming)Instagram Stories (temporary content)Instagram Reels (short-form and long-form content)
YouTube
Landscape videoPortrait video (pillar boxing may be used for some uploads)Live streamingYouTube Shorts (portrait, short-form video)
TikTok
Portrait feed videoLive streamingTikTok Stories (temporary content)
Landscape and portrait feed videoLive streaming
Landscape feed videoLive streaming
Portrait feed videoIdea Pins (a compilation of images, videos, or text similar to Stories)
Tasty’s social media content provides an excellent example of how to adapt your videos for different platforms.
Their content includes an extensive variety of videos, customized for platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Not only do the orientations differ, but the topics and series also vary across platforms.
This diverse range of content ensures that audiences will discover original content regardless of which Tasty social media page they visit.
3. Identify the types of videos you want to create
Identifying the ideal video format for your brand is a critical aspect of your marketing approach. It’s important to realize that not all videos are created equal – but that’s perfectly fine. The crucial factor is that they contribute positively towards achieving your core objectives.
Our research indicates that customers seek authenticity from brands on social media. Roughly 50% of consumers express interest in seeing brands promoting their products or services. Around 39% desire to see customer testimonials/demonstrations and 34% prefer posts that reflect the brand’s character and less professionally produced videos.
The conclusion? Authenticity is a significant factor for consumers when it comes to your content.
Here are some different categories of social media video ideas, along with their advantages, to help you resonate with the sincerity that consumers desire:
Educational:
These videos are instructive and can build brand awareness for prospective customers. They usually adopt a less informal, more professional tone to position the brand as an authority. If these videos are intended for existing customers, they might offer guides and tips for maximizing product usage.
Explainer:
Similar to educational content, explainer videos aim to educate the audience about your brand and the products or services you provide. Utilize these videos to briefly explain what your company does and how your brand can address a specific issue. Conclude with a compelling call-to-action to guide viewers further down the marketing funnel.
Behind-the-scenes:
These videos offer insight into your company’s operations and workforce. They can entertain viewers or provide a virtual backstage pass to your operations.
Interviews:
Interviews with guest speakers are an effective way to introduce your audience to a new influencer, and vice versa. Letting a guest take the virtual stage can add a touch of authenticity to your brand.
Entertaining:
This category includes humorous anecdotes, adorable pets, and even practical jokes. While their sole purpose is to entertain viewers, they can be an effective means of reinforcing your brand voice and fostering community among your audience.
Testimonials:
In the marketing realm, these videos resemble customer highlights and contribute to establishing social proof for your brand. Videos depicting customer experiences with your product or service and their satisfaction with it work on a relational level. Ideally, prospective customers should be able to identify themselves in the video and feel motivated to make a purchase.
Product:
Showcase the standout features of your brand’s most popular product or service by demonstrating it in action. Highlighting what sets your product or service apart can help customers imagine themselves utilizing your brand.
Narrative:
Wear your writer’s cap and weave a captivating story to make a lasting impact on viewers. Use animation or adopt a documentary style to narrate the origin of your brand or a customer issue you resolved—essentially, anything that unfolds a memorable narrative.
4. Strategize your content production
An effective content production plan can save you considerable time and money in the long term. Regardless of whether you prefer planning with a spreadsheet or a traditional pen-and-paper approach, it’s essential to determine how you will produce and film the videos.
Consider your possibilities for content production and post-production. Engaging a production agency or company will alleviate much of the stress. They will take care of all planning and approval processes; all you need to do is provide direction.
If you plan to handle everything in-house, you will need to consider all steps involved in producing a successful video. These steps include, but are not limited to:
determining necessary equipment and props;writing a script;editing the script;storyboarding the video;organizing the shoot for optimal filming (filming will mostly be non-linear);procuring and managing talent (individuals featured in the video);identifying filming location(s) and accounting for natural daylight when scheduling shoots;identifying where to send footage for editing;determining who will approve each stage (for instance, you want to ensure that the script aligns with your brand voice. This might require dual approval);verifying that you hold the necessary license for the music you intend to use;
As you implement your content plan, you may find areas requiring refinement or overlooked elements, especially if this is one of your first attempts at creating a comprehensive video content plan. After executing a robust plan, it’s time to shift gears toward post-production.
5. Learn the ropes of post-production
Ensure you dedicate sufficient time to post-production, particularly if your videos will be employed for advertisements or require more intensive editing. Post-production is not merely about trimming scenes and assembling them to music. It involves elements such as closed captions, text overlays, call-to-action screens, and more. The more footage you have and the more refined you want your video to be, the more time you’ll require.
Some videos may need only minor modifications post-production. For instance, with a Facebook Live broadcast, the video is published immediately after it concludes. You’ll be able to modify the caption and title, but not much beyond that.
Uploaded videos will undergo the post-production process. On a platform like YouTube, for instance, you can add tags, multilingual closed captions, detailed descriptions, and more.
It’s important to understand the effort required before you begin: formal, sophisticated YouTube videos demand much more work than a basic live stream. As YouTube is a video-centric platform, it’s crucial to optimize both your text and visuals to be noticeable.
6. Plan and publicize the videos
Now that you have your finalized video, it’s time to schedule and promote it. Some management platforms, like Sprout, provide publishing options for videos.
For example, YouTube publishing options cover aspects like tags, categories, playlists, and privacy settings. It’s the only social media management software that enables you to manage your TikTok content by scheduling your videos alongside your other social posts in the same calendar, all on a single platform.
Don’t view social media videos as a one-time affair. A single professionally produced video could be posted on multiple networks over a month, depending on your social schedule. On Twitter, for example, you could promote it multiple times. For live streams, frequent promotion is crucial to ensure a large audience at the right time.
A single filming session could yield multiple videos. Different segments could be utilized for promotion or merged to create new videos. Adopt a big-picture approach when promoting videos.
7. Understand and interpret key metrics
The final, yet most crucial step in any strategy is its evaluation. The performance of a video can only be measured by examining its associated metrics. How many views did it get? What was the duration of the watch times? What about the number of shares, likes, and comments? Each platform provides its unique set of video metrics, and understanding these before starting your production is key.
Every platform features native analytics that reports the performance of your video content. The metrics chosen for success analysis should correspond to the initial goals you set. If you were aiming for brand awareness, the relevant metrics could be impressions or video views.
In addition to scheduling, Sprout provides a range of analytics tools. For instance, you can evaluate your success by exploring TikTok analytics to determine which video posts achieved the most traction. While TikTok’s inbuilt analytics preserve your data only for 60 days, Sprout’s Reporting and Analytics tools allow indefinite access to your post-performance data. You can monitor the performance of your TikTok videos over time and even compare them with content on your other platforms.
Remember, your audience may even engage with your older videos. If the correct blend of keywords and a timeless topic is used, a video from three years ago may still hold value for your audience today.
Start your video marketing strategy just now!
Choosing the right camera for recording a solo video podcast comes down to your specific needs and budget constraints.And there you have it! You now have a comprehensive 7-step roadmap to formulate your video marketing strategy. We trust that this will stimulate your brand to orchestrate your upcoming video creations.If you still need help with your strategy, you can reserve a free consultancy strategy call to vortex.video where we can discuss your video editing needs and provide recommendations on the best approach for your project.Get a Free Consultation
