Want to become a video marketing expert?
In an earlier post of mine, I spoke about the famous quote “a picture says more than a thousand words”.
I then threw out there the idea that if a picture says more than a thousand words, what does a video that is filmed in 30 or 60 fps say?
In theory, it’d say quite a lot, right?
This would mean that video is tremendously powerful, and it seems like my theory isn’t far from the truth, because the statistics about video marketing speaks quite clearly.
An equation could look like this:
- 1 picture = 1,000 words
- Video shoots at 30 frames per second
- 1 second of video = 30,000 words
- 30,000 words x 60 seconds = 1.8 million.
And all of that makes sense, with the fact that humans are visual creatures, in mind.
Just look at these statistics about how the human brain resonates with visual content:
Humans process visual content 60,0000 times faster than text!
That’s crazy.
Moreover, 60% of the population are visual learners, so this means that if you want people to learn about your brand (which you should), you have to present them with visual content. And with video being the most powerful of them all, you’d be missing out if you didn’t create it.
Not only does a lot of people learn through visual content, but they also tend to remember things better through visual content. This does of course, also include the 40% who aren’t primary visual learners.
And when you’re promoting your brand and educating your audience about it, you don’t want to teach them and have them forget. You want to impact your audience deeply, and leave a long-lasting impression.
The good news is that with video marketing, you can.
With all of this in mind, you’d expect the usage of video content in marketing to skyrocket, and more and more brands implementing it into their marketing strategies.
And the truth is, they do.
In fact, every day, Facebook generates an average of 8 billion video views. Furthermore, YouTube has reported that mobile video consumption rises 100% every year.
Additionally, a study found that 48 percent of marketers plan to incorporate YouTube into their marketing strategies in 2018.
Safe to say, visual content is tremendously powerful, and it is also playing a bigger and bigger role in today’s online landscape. But as a marketer, you don’t leave it at that thought, do you?
You are probably wondering how you can implement video marketing in your marketing strategy, and that’s exactly what I’ll go through in this complete guide.
Understanding the power of video marketing
We now know that the human brain resonates very well with visual content.
This leads us to believe that video marketing would, therefore, be able to perform extremely well, help us reach out to our customers, and ultimately impact them at a much greater level, compared to the use of text, for instance.
But the good news is that we don’t have to guess about the power of video marketing, because tons of studies have been made on this exact topic that have researched what benefits video has in marketing. And trust me, there aren’t just a few.
First off, brands that implement video in their marketing have been found to receive 41% more web traffic search engines than brands that don’t leverage it. A new era of internet of search is clearly evolving. While search engines are only able to crawl and read videos and images themselves, the main benefits of implementing videos on your website for search traffic is that they grab your audience’s attention, keeps them glued to the video, and thus decreasing your bounce rate.
And with search engines, their goal is to present the most relevant and high-quality search result that answers the searcher’s questions, but if the visitors instantly click back once they land on the website, it tells search engines that they didn’t find what they were looking for. Luckily, with videos, you can increase the time visitors spend on your site, and thus show search engines that your page is relevant and helpful, improving your search engine ranking, which in turn leads to more traffic, and more new prospects for your brand.
A staggering 80% of people recall a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days. This further proves the impact videos have on us. While things like banner blindness has been more and more spoken about in recent years, the power and impact video has only kept on growing. When we watch videos, we activate several senses, making it easier for us to bring with us the knowledge, but also leads to us to become more impacted and thus also more likely to be affected by the message you’re trying to convey with your video.
This is also a result of videos being a form of visual content, which, based on the visual that I presented above, is incredible powerful. With that in mind, it isn’t that strange that 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online after seeing a video. If the content you produce doesn’t make an impact on your audience, there isn’t much point in creating it, right?
A study also found that videos on social media generate 1200% more shares than text and images combined. And that’s because we are intrigued by videos. They allow us to passively consume them, without having to waste any efforts, for example by reading a text, yet, at the same time, they impact us much more, both emotionally and physically, which also means we are more likely to share it with our peers.
And this is something that is rooted in human psychology, especially when it comes to videos that makes us laugh or smile, because humans want to share positive and funny things with their friends. You probably know the saying happiness is best when shared, and that’s perfectly true.
We laugh a lot more when we are in a group than when we are alone, right?
Essentially, this is me hinting that you might want to consider creating funny/positive/joyful videos if you want a lot of shares, and want to have your audience spread the word about your brand for you.
90% of customers also say that product videos are helpful in the decision process, and that too, isn’t that strange, either, since videos help you convey your message a lot better than with photos or text.
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
Now, before we dig into how you can leverage video marketing more practically, and how you can make it worthwhile let’s just look at this for a second:
Global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic by By 2019.
80. Whole. Percent.
This essentially means that if you haven’t made video marketing a part of your marketing strategy so far, now is definitely the time, because the interest in video will only be getting greater and greater.
According to HubSpot Research, 54% of consumers want to see videos from brands they support.
In other words, your customers expect you to create video content, so give it to them!
What type of video content should you create for your video marketing?
Video marketing is a large word. And the truth is that within that word lies a ton of different types of videos that you can create, but how do you know what’s right for your brand?
How do you know which type generates the best results?
Let’s look at the most popular types of videos you can create for your video marketing:
1. Live video
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you know that live video has skyrocketed in popularity. And the main reason for this is that a handful of different apps and sites have been created that are solely devoted to live video. Moreover, many of the top social media platforms have also launched the ability to broadcast live video on the platform, something that has lead to live video being right at the fingertips of each individual, making live video very close at hand when thinking about creating video content.
Video has skyrocketed in popularity and is continuing to do so, and therefore, implementing live video into your video marketing strategy isn’t a bad idea, because your audience wants it from you.
In fact, 80% of people say they would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog. Moreover, 82% say they prefer live video from a brand to social posts.
There are tons of benefits of making live video part of your video marketing. Firstly, live video means that you are broadcasting in real-time. The benefit is that you are able to make your audience a part of the video rather than having them be the bystanders. With most social platforms, your audience is able to ask you questions live, which you can then answer, and doing so allows you to engage them, show them that you care and value them, and ultimately make them a part of the creative. This, as you can expect, will lead to greater customer loyalty, and better customer relationships.
Another reason (and benefit) of live video is that it allows you to take your audience behind the scenes, and thus humanise your brand and make it more transparent. Because 87% of audiences, would prefer to watch online live video compared to traditional television if it gives gives them more behind-the-scenes content.
The best part about live video is that you can get your audience glued for a longer period of time. In fact, a study found that viewers spend 8X longer with live video compared to on-demand – 5.1 minutes vs 42.8 minutes, which is a huge increase.
If you want your audience’s attention in this competitive landscape, live video is the way to go.
2. Personalized video messages
Chatting with your customers through text, for instance with mail, or some other messaging service is great. It does the job, and it is also the most common form of communication.
But what if you want to stand out from your competitors, be unique, and leverage these interactions as a way for you to improve your customer relationships?
The answer is personalized video messages.
The idea of this is that you, instead of responding with regular text, record a video where you respond to their questions and continue the conversation with them.
Doing this will not only make you stand out from your competitors, but they will also humanise your brand and make it easier for your audience to resonate with you.
This is especially effective if you are dealing with customer complaints.
If you create a video where you respond to their message, and show them real humans emotions and that you understand their struggles, your customers will see that a real person has actually taken the time to read and understand their pain. For the customer, it will no longer be that they are complaining to a logo and fancy brand, but it will instead be that they are complaining to you – a real human being just like themselves.
As a result, it will keep most people from yelling at you, because they realize that you are just trying to do your job.
3. Demo videos
Demo videos are probably the most common form of video when it comes to leveraging video for marketing. Brands want to showcase their products and prove their benefits, and videos are a great way to do this.
Videos allow you to show your audience how amazing your product is, rather than just telling them. Plus, a video tells a lot more compared to just a photo. It allows you to tell a story.
A brand that is known for creating amazing demo and product videos are Apple. They realize that humans don’t make rational and logical decisions as we’d like to believe that we do, but instead, we make emotional decisions based on how we are feeling, and this is why Apple’s demo videos are greatly focused on making the viewers feel an emotional connection with the product, and thus impact them much more emotionally. While doing so, they also include the power of storytelling to further increase the video’s impact on its viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVPRkcczXCY
4. Educational videos
Chances are, your customers have a lot of questions about how they should use your products and how they work. And rather than just telling them through text, you can leverage the power of video to do so. And as you know, 60% of people are visual learners, which means they’ll prefer (and learn more) by watching a video rather than reading an article.
As a matter of fact, you might even have a ”FAQ” or ”Frequently asked questions” page on your website where you answer common questions about your products, so why not turn that information into video content as well?
As the majority of people are visual learners, more people will be intrigued to learn more about your products, and when they do, they’ll also be more engaged in your brand.
Therefore, gather all of your most asked questions and create videos where you answer common questions and educate your audience.
Dynamic audio is a brand that has embraced this and therefore created a series of videos on YouTube where they go through the basics of their products, and how their customers get the most out of them.
This is clever not only to educate your audience and make them more engaged in your brand, but it is also a great way to prevent your audience from skipping to buy from you just because it feels a bit overwhelming to learn how to use it. This is especially true if you have an advanced product such as the ones that Dynamic audio sells. With your videos, you can show that they’re not as hard to use as people might think, and thus make people more likely to buy.
5. Branded advertising videos
Branded videos are the types of videos you see on television, on ads, and brands are promoting. They’re often part of an advertising campaign, and a prime example is the advertising videos that Coca-Cola creates during christmas and then show on television. The video ad is far from the only marketing effort they have during christmas, however they play a central and a vital role.
Rather than using videos to show your audience how they use your products, or to show your audience how they work, the main goal of branded advertising videos is instead to just showcase your products and brand, and create a story around them – most often with brand awareness as the main goal. The goal of branded videos is to engage your audience and get them to remember you.
Brands have done all kinds of videos that all leverage different things, however, in terms of virality, ad videos that leverage the emotion happiness and joy have proven to be the most effective.
Think about the most famous and viral ad videos through history. The vast majority of them leverage positivity and impact the viewers emotionally, so when creating your video, this is something you want to have in mind.
6. AR (Augmented Reality) Videos
Augumented reality has increased in popularity, and it is continuing to do so as technology evolves. Creating videos that are based on augmented reality is a fun and unique way to make your videos stand out from the rest, and ultimately get some exposure in the competitive landscape that we have.
7. Create videos from your events
As a brand, everything you do to decrease the gap between your brand and audience is great, and using this type of video is a great way to do so.
If you’ve hosted an event, why not create a video from it to show your audience how it was?
Again, if we take apple as an example, every time they launch a new product, they hold a ”conference” or an event where they launch their products. They invite a bunch of people and press, and then they hold a presentation.
That presentation is also broadcasted live, and is also available to see in hindsight. This is an extremely clever marketing move by apple, because not only do they make it possible for the people who couldn’t attend to watch in real time, but they also make their audience a part of the process, thus leading to a more engaged audience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNwB2LLxB8o
Of course, Samsung has also realised the power of this, and so they’ve also made this into a part of their marketing strategy for their product launches, helping them build up hype and create a movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX6gdm5_YS0
8. Expert reviews
Experts are trusted experts in their industry, which means that what they say will be far more trusted than what the brand says.
Because everyone knows that brands only want to sell more, right?
This has in recent years also come to include social media influencers, because they’re quite similar, but when you do this, you want to invite individuals who are known to be experts in their (your) industry, because people always trust the experts to know best.
A great example of this is Bonnaire Clouet. They invited Andreas Larsson, an expert sommelier to do a blind test of their champagne, which means that what he says isn’t twisted or biased in any way, and then, they filmed him when he gave his thoughts of the champagne. This allows the brand to better convey what their champagne was like, because describing tastes is always a bit tricky. Plus, have it done by an industry expert.
If the brand itself would say that their champagne is delicious, people would be a little more skeptical, because what champagne brand would say that their champagne is disgusting, right? But when an expert says it, it becomes much more trustworthy.
9. Animations
Animations need no further explanation, but as you know, without the right expertise, creating animated videos can be quite challenging. But if you have the knowledge, and especially if you aren’t that good at creating regular videos, this is definitely an option to consider.
Over the years, a lot of different brands have created animation videos as part of their marketing, and many of them have found great success, because animations allow you to convey your point in a much more fun and engaging way compared to regular videos.
How to create a video marketing strategy
Now, with everything we’ve gone through, and the statistics we’ve looked at, in particular, it’s easy to get carried away and to want to start creating videos and starting with video marketing right here on the spot, but before you do so, hold on for a second.
Like all marketing efforts, it is important that you have a strategy for your video marketing in place before you begin. Ultimately, your strategy will allow you to know what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, and how you can measure to see the results it generates for you.
You can see your video marketing strategy as a blueprint for how you’re going to work with video marketing.
Obviously, it’s possible to build a house without a blueprint, but the outcome probably won’t be as great.
When creating your video marketing strategy, there are a number of questions you should ask yourself. This will allow you to think twice, but more importantly, it will allow you to look back at your strategy in order to know what you are going to do in any given situation, as well as be able to see if you are really following your strategy, and if what you are doing supports your overall goal with video marketing.
When developing your video marketing strategy, you don’t want to do it alone. Instead, you want to include your team in the creation of it, and most importantly, you want to include the people who will be a part of your video marketing. A great way to include them is to create a questionnaire where you present the questions I mentioned above, and have them answer. By doing so, you’ll be able to get your team’s take on things, but most importantly, see where everyone stands, so you can ultimately unite on all the decisions that have to be made, so you don’t end up pulling in different directions, keeping you from making any progress.
What is your goal with video marketing?
The first and foremost question you want to ask yourself is why you want to work with video in your marketing. Doing so will allow you to define a few main objectives that you wish to achieve with your efforts, and thus also create your videos in a way that supports those objectives.
For example, if your goal with video marketing is to engage your audience and get them to share your videos in hopes of going viral, creating regular, traditional video marketing videos might not be ideal.
Who are you trying to reach? Who is your target audience?
These questions are of great importance when developing your video marketing strategy. In fact, they are of great importance in all parts of marketing.
Why?
Because depending on who you are trying to reach, your video content creation will look differently in order to resonate with your target audience in the best possible way.
For instance, if your target audience consists of 70-year-olds, it is probably not the best idea to create an animation and cartoon video that you try to convey your message with because your target audience won’t find it interesting.
However, if your target audience does consist of people in the teenage years and younger, using animations could actually be a great idea.
It’s all about taking your target audience into consideration when creating your video content, because doing so will allow you to create and optimize your videos in a way which they resonate with, and ultimately allow you to generate the best possible results.
A great way to understand your target audience is to develop buyer personas. Doing so will allow you to get a better understanding of who you are trying to speak to on a more micro level, which means the videos you create will actually be relevant to them.
What is your objective(s)?
Before you begin creating your videos, it’s crucial that you have clearly defined your objectives for doing so.
Obviously, if my goal is to create videos to help me sell more, it might not be the best idea to create videos where I respond to frequently asked questions because these often relate to people who are already existing customers.
And if the goal of my video marketing is to improve my customer relationships and make them more engaged in my brand, it probably isn’t the best idea to create branded advertising videos. Instead, I will probably be able to reach my objectives better if I record live videos where I take my audience behind the scenes and interact with them.
In this way, it is tremendously important that you know what you are hoping to achieve with your video marketing because this will allow you to create videos that support your goal.
Another important reason that you need to define your objectives with your video marketing is so that you are able to measure results once a campaign is finished, so ultimately, you can see if your videos generated any results for you.
It’s awfully difficult to measure results of something if you don’t know what your goals were in the first place. But by having goals and objectives in place, you’ll know what to measure, and ultimately also if those goals were reached.
”It is crucial that your actions support your objectives in video marketing”
What platforms will you focus on?
This is also something that you need to think about in your video marketing strategy.
Today, there are a number of different platforms that allow you to share and showcase your marketing videos, and you need to decide which ones you’re going to focus on. When you have a marketing video, you can show it anywhere from television to YouTube, and this decision isn’t that hard, really, but having decided before you begin prevents you from standing there with a kick-ass video without knowing what to do with it, and having a strategy for how you’re going to get people to see it.
You can obviously upload your video to a number of places, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook, but the truth is that you cannot (should not) just upload it and wait for the results to roll on.
Because very seldom, you can just upload a video on social media, kick your feet up, and wait for it to go viral.
Instead, you need to have a plan for how you’re going to get that video traction.
Simply uploading it to YouTube and then waiting isn’t enough, but you need to educate yourself in the platforms that you are going to use in order to give your videos the best possible preconditions to succeed.
On YouTube, for example, things like description, subtitles, and title of your video is tremendously important for getting it to rank well, and thus helping it gain more traction, but if you have no idea on how to do it effectively when you have your video ready, you won’t get the best results possible from the platform.
This is why you not only want to define what platforms you are going to focus on in your video marketing strategy, but you also want to think about how you’re going to help that video gain traction (but more on that later).
What is your budget?
Creating videos isn’t free.
Sure, you might do it all on your own, investing nothing else than your time, but often times, paying for advertising to help your video gain traction is a good idea.
If you have a team solely devoted to creating videos for your brand that is working full-time, then the main thing you need to think about is the amount of money you are going to invest into promoting your video.
If you, on the other hand, are hiring people from outside of your company, it is a good idea to have a total budget for all things that will go into your video campaign, including the creation, advertising, and work that comes with it.
It doesn’t matter if you have the most awesome video in the world unless no-one finds out about it, and this is why leveraging ads on platforms like YouTube is a good idea to help you gain traction. When creating these ads, you just set your total budget, but if you don’t know how much you can afford to invest, it will be quite hard.
What is your timeline?
As with all of your marketing efforts, you need timelines.
Otherwise, you’ll never be finished.
Set a time for when the video is going to be finished, how long you’re going to run your ads (if you are), and what you are going to do when.
Defining these simple things will save you a lot of time, and prevent you from never being done.
What are the creative requirements?
With your budget, skills, and resources in mind, think about the creative roadblocks that might arise. Do you need a designer to create lower third graphics? Are you going to create an animated video or a live action video?
Since we are visual creatures, here’s an infographic of 13 questions to ask when doing video marketing for your brand and creating your video marketing strategy that will allow you to consume and digest the information better:
How will you measure the success of your video marketing campaign?
As a marketer, you always want to evaluate and measure the results of your marketing campaigns, right?
And the most important part of being able to do so is having set goals, which we spoke about earlier.
But then, it is also important to have defined the metrics that support your objectives.
Obviously, it’s hard to measure how much more engaged your audience became by looking at your video. But if you have clearly stated in your video marketing strategy what metrics you’re going to look at, it will be much easier, and a lot less overwhelming.
Let’s say that your goal with video marketing is to make your audience more engaged in your brand. Then, looking at the comments on your videos is obviously a great place to start. By looking at the sentiment of the comments you are receiving, you can better understand how the video has impacted them, and what that resulted in.
But let’s not forget, just because you have set an objective to achieve results within specific metrics doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t measure other metrics that are outside of your goals.
And the reason for that is that if you don’t, you won’t get the full story, and thus not be able to see the true results of your video marketing efforts. And this can create a misleading picture, as you aren’t understanding the true power of video marketing, just because you forget or neglect to measure the results within different specific metrics.
The bottom line is, have a goal, specify how you’ll be able to measure to see if you have reached those goals, and what metrics you are going to focus on to get a full understanding of how beneficial your video marketing was for your brand.
How you measure the results and ROI of your video marketing efforts is a completely different story, but I’ll go more into detail on just that at the end of this post.
To think about when creating your videos
There are a few basic practices of creating appealing and interesting videos, and this is something you want to have in mind when creating them.
Firstly, make sure each and every single one of your videos has a purpose – a message that you want them to convey. If you create a video, and then when someone has completed the video says ”I didn’t understand a single thing what this video was about”, you have failed.
Always have a purpose with your videos and make that purpose clear – before you start.
People watch your videos for a reason, whether it be to for entertainment or to learn how to do something practical, so clearly plan what you hope to do with your video (this should support your video marketing objectives, too).
It’s also important that you have in mind that people’s attention span is incredibly short, which means you have to make every single second of your video interesting and appealing. Because with all of the video content that is being put out, if you don’t, people won’t hesitate to watch something else and leave you forever.
Recent studies have found that the human attention span is only 8 seconds. That is 1 second shorter than a goldfish’s.
This is why length is super important to think about when creating videos. If your video needs to be longer in order to convey your point, then don’t limit yourself. But before you release your video, watch it through many times, and consider if every single second of the video adds any value to the viewer. Because if it doesn’t, it might be the place where people drop off.
Take a look at this visual to understand just how much of your video people watches, in general:
Because, unlike what some people believe, every single view you have doesn’t mean that the person has watched every single second of your video from start to finish. And different platforms have different ways to measure ”one view”, too, which is worth having in mind.
Moreover, you want to have intriguing and important things at the beginning of your video so that you instantly grab your audience’s attention. Another thing that is worth having in mind when creating your video is that you don’t crate your video in a way that demands your audience to watch till the very end to understand the message of your video.
Get to the point.
How should you create the videos?
(Understanding the basics of creating a great video)
This is a place where many marketers get stuck when it comes to video marketing.
A common objection we hear is ”but we don’t have thousands of dollars to buy a camera”.
The good news for brands with a limited budget is that content creation has never been as cheap as it is today.
If you wanted to create music back in the days, you’d have to have a complete studio which could cost tens of thousands of dollars – thus making it only available for a chosen few. Today, you can just download a music program and start producing music in a heartbeat. (Get it? – Beat).
The same goes for video content. Back in the days, you’d have to have a complete photo studio with cameras that cost thousands of dollars, thus making video production something for only a fortunate few.
But today, it is obviously a lot different, with people now having a camera that produce higher quality videos than people thought was possible ten years ago. And it’s called your phone.
Sure, buying a better camera than your phone is often a worthy investment when it comes to video marketing, but the truth is that you don’t have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a good camera these days.
Many times, your iPhone camera will do the job, but there are some things you want to think about no matter if you’re using a $100k camera or your iPhone which will significantly improve the quality of your videos, and that’s what we’re going to dig into now.
Basic must-follow practices of filming
- If you’re using an iPhone, make sure you film vertically
- Never use the zoom – unless you use a DSLR camera and ”zoom” using your lens. But even then, be careful as using the lens’s zoom can make the camera shake if you don’t have a sufficient stabilizer or a tripod.
- Use a tripod. Shaky videos are the number one way to make your video look unprofessional.
- Never use a low-quality camera that produces a blurry or low-quality video. It’s 2018, and no-one satisfies with watching low-quality videos.
- Don’t use flash. Instead, try to get as much natural, white, light as possible. A good idea is to get studio lights. These aren’t too expensive to buy.
- Make sure your focus is on the right object. If you have your focus on the wrong object, the video will be blurry, and thus be considered low-quality by its viewers.
Which camera should I choose?
If you have created some videos, you might feel that you want to step up your video content creation a notch and buy a DSLR camera. There are literally hundreds and hundreds to choose from, and without a lot of knowledge, choosing a camera can be a tricky thing to do to say the least.
Obviously, I can’t stand here and preach which camera you should buy, because it all depends on your budget and what you plan on using your camera for.
If you plan on recording action videos, then a GoPro camera might be all you need.
However, if you plan on creating professional, series of videos, a DSLR camera might be what you should be looking for.
No matter which camera you choose, just make sure that you choose a camera that is suited for what you plan on using it for.
Understanding your camera
When you have little filming knowledge, buying a DSLR or a somewhat ”professional” camera can be quite overwhelming. There’s a ton of buttons, and a lot to learn. Obviously, you should look at guides to understand how the camera works and how you use it, but let’s go through the basics that is valuable to know when creating videos, no matter which camera you use.
ISO
ISO stands for International Standards Organization and is an industry scale that is standardized which refers to the measurement of a sensor’s sensitivity to light.
With many cameras, and almost all professional cameras, you can either have your ISO at automatic or, you can have your ISO manual, meaning you are the one who decide the ISO. This of course, as also means that you need to choose the ISO based on the current light that you’re shooting in. If you increase the ISO, the camera will become more sensitive in light, and this is exactly what your camera does automatically when you have your camera on automatic and shoot something when it is a little dark. And vice versa for when it’s bright of course.
But this is not all.
Because the ISO also affects the graininess of your image. When it’s dark, the camera has to compensate that by increasing the ISO. But the cost of that is that the graininess increases – thus decreasing the quality and sharpness. of your photo/video.
This makes lightning tremendously important for high-quality shots.
If you want these crisp shots, consider lots of light, and unless your scene demands it, film during daylight or at a place where you have lots of light.
Consider frame rate
The frame rate is quite important if you’re filming – especially if you plan on using slow motion. Essentially, the frame rate is, as per Wikipedia’s definition ”the frequency at which frames in a television picture, film, or video sequence are displayed.”
Your video is created by a ton of photos taken after each other and then shown to create a video. And this brings me back to what I said at the very beginning of this article:
”If an image says more than a thousand words, what does a video say?”
As you can expect, the higher the frequency of the images you have (FPS), the slower slow-motion you’ll be able to have, without it looking like image after image is shown, rather than just a flowing video.
The most common types of frame rates are 24 or 30 frames per second.
The frame rate is also something that you want to have in mind when choosing a camera. If you know that you are going to film ultra-slow motion, you need to have a camera which takes a high number of fps.
For example, this video is shot with a super advanced and expensive camera in 30,000 FPS, which, is quite a difference from 30 FPS.
Focus
Focus is tremendously important in creating high.quality videos. If you have your focus on the wrong things when filming, it will be annoying for the viewer, and your video will be perceived as low quality, while, in fact, it is capable of producing quality videos, it’s just that the focus is on the wrong place when filming.
With the vast majority of cameras, you have the option to decide where you want to put the focus. You also have the opportunity to set the focus on manual, having the camera figure out where to put the focus. This is true for filming with an iPhone, too.
Basic video equipment
If you look at a professional photographer, their setup might look like this:
But obviously, just to get started, you just need the most basic equipment to help you produce high-quality videos.
Here are the most basic equipments you need to create great videos:
Tripod
Nothing screams amateur as much as a shaky video. Having a shaky video significantly decreases the quality and overall feel of your video, and getting a tripod is a simple way to prevent that.
Microphone
If audio is an important part of your video, you need to invest in a good microphone. The built-in microphone in your camera does the job, but buying a microphone will significantly improve the quality of the audio, and thus the quality of your video.
Light
Light is incredibly important for high-quality video when filming. not to mention for a higher quality of the actual video, but also for giving a better overall feeling and an increased sense of professionalism to your videos.
You’d be shocked at how much some studio lights will do to the quality of your videos.
Where should you upload your video?
As I spoke about earlier in your video marketing strategy, you should decide where you are going to distribute the videos you are going to produce.
But this, of course, demands you to be aware of the different platforms you have at your disposal.
Obviously, there are different types of ”places” you can share your videos on.
First, you have social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo, but then, you have your very own website, and lastly, you have external places, which is most often used if you are paying for marketing of your video, for instance on television, on someone else’s website, or similar.
YouTube
The first video sharing platform that always comes to mind is YouTube. And that’s no surprise, really, because YouTube is the largest video hosting and sharing platforms in the world, boasting more than one billion users.
Just take a look at these mind-boggling YouTube statistics:
- 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!
- Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day.
- The total number of hours of video watched on YouTube each month is 3.25 billion.
YouTube is an extensively used platform by brands as well as individuals just sharing random video clips.
In fact, almost all of the most famous consumer brands are using YouTube today, including McDonald’s, Apple, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Sprite, and many, many more.
This means that there’s a place for you to upload videos, too!
YouTube generates the best marketing results if you make it a central role in your video marketing strategy, upload consistently and engage with your audience. The great thing about YouTube is that you have subscribers, and the more subscribers you have, the more views you’ll have (in theory), and this also means that by focusing on building an audience and strengthening your presence on the platform, you can give the videos you upload instant traction, compared to when uploading only one video every now and then, and then not having an audience to lean on once you do.
The catch with YouTube is that since so much content is being put out every day, as the statistics proved, it can be hard to cut through the noise. Obviously, the first step is to set up your profile, and then, most importantly, having a kick-ass video, but then, there are lots of strategies and approaches you can take to generate better results for your video.
Sharing videos on YouTube is completely free, which means that you can get free exposure and free marketing for your brand just by leveraging the platform. And you get the most out of the platform by understanding how you can optimize your videos to get more exposure.
Since YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, you can skyrocket your YouTube video views by optimizing your videos for search results.
This guide by Hubspot gives you the basics for optimizing your videos for search on YouTube:
Your website
An obvious place to showcase your videos is your website.
Think of your website as a piece of text or a post with which you convey the messages you want to make to your audience.
For instance, instead of having an FAQ page on your website, where you respond to every common question you receive through text, you can respond to each and every single one of your questions with a short video.
The best part is that one doesn’t have to exclude the other.
This means that you can both have text FAQs and video FAQS.
Moreover, videos on landing pages have proven to be incredibly helpful in boosting conversions.
In fact, unbound found that videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 80%, and this is also the reason why they have implemented them on their very own website:
Something you see quite often is product videos and ”trailers” on brands’ websites, and including these at product descriptions etc. allows you to show your audience what your product does and why it is so awesome, rather than telling them.
As you can see, there are a million different ways that you can use video on your website, and there are also a million reasons you should. Many brands use videos on their website, but based on the power of video, most brands are using far from enough.
Vimeo
After YouTube, Vimeo is often talked about when talking about video content websites. And that’s because it is the second largest video hosting platform in the world, after YouTube.
Vimeo is often forgotten and neglected in the shadow of YouTube, but that is not to say that Vimeo can’t be leveraged for great marketing results. Because the truth is that with fewer users comes less content, and with less content, means less competition and less noise.
While YouTube has close to 5 billion videos viewed every single day, Vimeo has 715 million monthly video views.
And in comparison, it might seem like very little, however, 715 million is quite a staggering number itself.
A difference from YouTube is that Vimeo has considerably fewer ads, making it more pleasant for the users by decreasing distractions. Generally, the quality of the videos uploaded on Vimeo also tends to be of higher quality, which has given the platform a label to be more professional. And that label is not that bad if you’re a brand trying to marketing yourself using video marketing, is it?
Facebook video
Facebook is always looking to steal grounds and user time from its competitors. Facebook introduced Stories, both on Facebook and Instagram in order to steal Snapchat’s audience, and now, in more recent times, Facebook’s main competitor is YouTube, and as a result, Facebook has created Facebook Video in order to compete with YouTube through video content.
More and more video content is being put out on the platform, and the demand for video is increasing on Facebook. So what does this mean for you?
It means that your audience is screaming for video content from you on Facebook, so that’s exactly what you should give them!
Facebook themselves have created this video uploading guide with things to think about when uploading content on Facebook for the best possible results.
These are some recommendations that they give:
- Use captions to engage your viewers
- Refine your strategy with Video Insights
- Focus on quality
- Showcase exclusive video content
- Provide context
Here’s where it gets interesting with Facebook video:
The Facebook algorithm of Facebook is known to have constantly decreased on the platform as more and more and more content is being put out on the platform, and this is done to help people see the most relevant content in their feeds.
But the good news is that since Facebook wants to compete with YouTube, they favor people who post videos on Facebook by pushing video content and getting it lots of exposure. And they do so so that people are going to realize the great exposure they get by posting video content on Facebook and thus start sharing video content there. Maybe even abandon YouTube in favor for Facebook, whereas some will start using both.
The punchline is that at the moment, the Facebook algorithm favors you for posting video content. So this means that posting videos on Facebook can be quite valuable to you exposure wise.
Ideas on how to use video in your marketing
Now, we’ve gone through the most common ways you can use video in your marketing, and the most common types of videos, but now, let’s look at how you can create different types of video content more practically, and how you can use them to reach your video marketing objectives.
Create a welcome video on your landing page to boost conversions
As you know by now, the conversion rate of your landing page can increase by over 80 percent, which is reason enough to implement a video on your landing page.
Remember that your landing page is most people’s first introduction to your brand, and this is why a proper personal and human welcome is in place. A great way to welcome people to your page is to create video where you personally thank them.
Plus, instead of them just coming to a page that belongs to a brand, the video humanizes your brand, makes them remember you, and shows them that you aren’t hiding behind your brand.
Use video to improve customer relationships and loyalty
Customer retention and loyalty are all about relationships.
Because relationships are built as a result of consistent engaging and interacting, and the stronger the relationship, the more trust you’ll have.
The more you interact with your audience, the stronger relationships you’ll build, and the more loyal they’ll become.
Video opens up tons of different opportunities when it comes to improving customer loyalty, but one way is to focus on presenting your brand in a good light which increases people’s love and loyalty in you.
For example, if you are deeply passionate about certain issues in the society and world, you can use video to enlighten them and show your audience what you are doing to help. This will make you humanize and ultimately lead to a better brand image.
Another way to engage your audience is to have them ask questions that you then answer in a video. Rather than replying to them by text, you make them a part of the creation. Research shows that people are much more engaged in content from brands when they themselves have been a part of creating it. So by responding to their question, you not only engage your audience and get them to interact, but you also show them that you value them.
Create instructional videos
You’ve probably received tons of questions about different things – from your products to your brand.
And one way to deal with those is by uploading them to your FAQ page. But the questions being asked aren’t just in need of short answers. Sometimes, they need clear, yet simple instructions on how to do something.
And these videos don’t only belong on your website, but there are a number of places where you can share the content, including the ones that I listed earlier.
It’s important that your instructional videos are short because people want to learn how to do something and nothing else. So give it to them so they can go on with their day. The best part about this is that short and engaging videos are perfect for social media – a place where people have an extra short attention span.
A great idea is to create a series of instructional videos on social media for your audience. Your videos help solve pain points which your audience has, and it allows them to get the most out of your products.
Moreover, these videos can also encourage your audience to take action, or buy more from you just because the video you posted was so cool, and they want to replicate it.
Share behind the scenes videos
Sharing behind the scenes content is incredibly powerful in helping you make your audience more loyal and engaged in your brand.
Live video, is, as mentioned, one of the most effective ways to give your audience behind the scene looks, because it opens up “on the spot”, instant broadcast and engagement opportunities, but live video isn’t the only way you can take your audience behind the scenes.
Once you’ve created your videos, you can distribute them wherever you desire, but the most important part is what your video is about.
Nordstrom is a brand that has embraced taking their customers behind the scenes and making the brand highly transparent. In fact, on their websites, they even present their factories, where they are located, and photos from them.
An idea is, therefore, to make a page on your website where you tell your audience about different things, for example, your team, or factory, and then, you include videos of those things.
Going behind the scenes is one of the best ways to engage your audience and feel like they’re part of your brand. People don’t like when brands are working in secret behind the curtains, but they love brands who are transparent with what they do. And they’ll reward them with their wallets.
Establish yourself (your brand) as an expert
Establishing yourself as an expert in your industry is a powerful way to market your brand. Because when people wonder something related to the industry, who will they go to to get the answer? Who will they think of? Your brand – the industry expert.
As a result, another effective way to leverage videos in marketing is to use them to showcase your expertise and knowledge. If you educate people about topics related to your industry, you’ll also start building an audience, just because of the content you put out and the expertise you show. This also means a larger audience of people which you can get to convert further on.
Nordstrom is a brand that has, apart from realizing the power of behind the scenes video, embraced informative videos where they teach their audience things that they probably are wondering. Doing this allows them to establish themselves as experts, and thus attract more customers and a larger audience of followers.
Leverage video for customer service
This is my favorite way of leveraging the power of video marketing. FAQ is one way to answer common questions asked by your audience, but a little-thought-of tactic that will show your customers that you’ve put extra thought and effort into helping them out is creating a personal video where you respond to their complaint, as well as help them solve it.
This will make your brand more human, and if your customers are complaining and being angry, that anger will soon decrease, because they realize they’re yelling at a real human being trying to do their job. Not a brand and a logo.
Plus, when doing this, you make it easier for people to connect with you. For instance, if you have a video where you talk with your audience, and then, you respond to them through text, and sign it off with your name, they’ll know exactly who you are, and thus make them resonate better with you.
Apart from having an FAQ page where you answer your customer’s video, you can create a series of customer service videos, where you respond to your more disgruntled customers. Obviously, creating a video each time someone writes to you can be a little time-consuming, however, you can make videos of the most common complaints, and then, you can record a short snippet where you say ”hi their name, sorry for the inconvenience. I’ve created this video to help you solve your problem”, and then you include the already prerecorded video into it.
Show gratitude by saying thank you
Thanking customers is something that many brands forget, but something that is immensely powerful.
By saying thank you, you show your audience that you value them for their support and trust. And as a customer, feeling valued is something that will get them to stay with your brand year over year. And with a video, you can really convey your emotions and sincerity.
Implement user-generated content
When talking about video marketing, some marketers get frightened, because they have absolutely no idea how to create videos.
But what if I told you that people are sharing video user-generated content about your brand which you can use?
Your customers are far more trusted than you because everyone knows that you as a brand only want to sell, whereas 92% of people trust peer recommendations.
Therefore, you should take advantage of the UGC that your customers are creating for your brand and cram out every drop of marketing power.
For instance, if I search ”Ford review on YouTube, I’ll get a ton of search results. More specifically, around 6,030,000 results. And this is something that Ford could leverage in their video marketing because a lot of the content here is of very high quality.
Send personalized videos
If you want to take it one step further in engaging and building relationships with your audience, personalized videos are definitely an incredible way to stand out.
For instance, if a customer emails you about something, you can record a video where you respond to them in the video, and speaks directly to them. If you want to take it up a notch further, you can even research their social media profiles in order to better tailor your message and better build your relationships with them.
The best part about this is that very few brands are actually taking the time to do this, which means that you’ll stand out from the crowd quite instantly.
Increase purchase intent
Videos have proven to have a great impact on people and to make them more likely to buy from a brand. This is why videos are great for attracting leads down your conversion funnel.
The best way to do this is to identify a problem, and then presenting a solution – your product.
Because chances are, people will search on places like YouTube if they have a question about something, and if your video then comes up as a search result, they’ll watch it, and potentially even get convinced that they need to have your product in order to solve the problem they’re having.
You’ve probably experienced this yourself sometimes, where you see a product, and are like ”nice”, but then, you realize all of the incredible features and what that product actually do, and it then becomes a completely different story.
The bottom line is that with videos, you can show your audience more in detail about how your products work, rather than trying to tell them through a piece of text.
When you are trying to sell something, getting the customer to hold and feel your product is the best way to get them to convert, but if that isn’t possible, the second best is to create an attention-grabbing and appealing video that makes them feel like they have the product right in front of them.
Have customers tell a story
Storytelling is immensely powerful in marketing, but what is even more powerful is having your customers do it.
As you know, people trust peer recommendations, and if you can leverage them in your video marketing, you will generate amazing results.
A brand that has done this is Microsoft with their ”Hearing for the first time campaign”
They leveraged both storytelling and a customer of theirs to show just how much they affect people’s lives, and how great they are for helping people hear again.
Since the initial video which their campaign video was based on was so emotional, it went viral, now having more than 27 million views.
Sometimes, the best isn’t to stand and promote your products yourself, but sometimes, just showing how positively your existing customers are affected by your products is enough.
How to measure the results of your video marketing
So you’ve developed your video marketing strategy, you’ve created a video, you’ve run your campaigns and maybe, you’ve even invested some dollars into advertising.
Now, you want to measure the results to see what your efforts generated for your brand.
Just like anything, measuring the ROI and results of your video marketing is tricky if you don’t know what to look for, but it is easy when you do.
Therefore, we’re going to dig into the most common and popular video marketing metrics – both metrics that are easily obtainable, known as vanity metrics, but we’re also going to dig into more advanced metrics that demands a little more detective work.
Having set goals is crucial to measuring results, and this is why I emphasized creating your video marketing strategy so much. Because if you haven’t set any goals, it will be difficult for you to know what results you wanted to achieve, and thus what results you are going to look at, in first hand.
If you find out you didn’t reach your goal, it might be because you didn’t specify well-enough who your target audience were, or that your video campaign didn’t reflect and back up your objectives. This is why goal-setting, creating, and evaluating, are three crucial parts of a successful video marketing campaign, and the reason is that unless you set goals, you won’t know how you’re going to set up and create your videos, if you haven’t set goals and objectives, you won’t know whether or not you’re working towards the goals you’ve set or not, and unless you evaluate the results, you won’t know if you have reached our goals, or even generated any results worthwhile.
This is why all of these three things are crucial parts of evaluating the results of your video marketing.
Now, let’s look at the different metrics of video marketing that you should be looking at.
But before you do, I just want to emphasize what I said about earlier with not getting caught up with one or two metrics.
Because as with everything, video marketing can generate results within different metrics at once, even if you’re just focusing on one metric.
And the caveat is that if you’re only looking at one metric, you won’t see the full picture -you won’t realize just how effective video marketing was for you.
The truth is that many marketers are struggling with measuring the ROI of their video marketing, and that’s because they have insufficient measuring strategies.
Measuring ROI of video marketing: vanity metrics
The most simple way to measure how well your video performed is to look at the vanity metrics. And often times, this is as far as people come with their ROI measuring because they don’t know what the next step is.
Many metrics are essentially the most basic metrics that are very easily obtainable. This includes things like views, total comments, total likes, shares, reach, and so on.
All of these metrics are easily understandable, and you don’t have to be an Einstein to evaluate them.
But what you have to do is ask yourself what these metrics actually mean. For instance, a comment doesn’t just mean that someone has commented on your video, but a comment can also mean that people have been greatly impacted by your video and decided to leave a comment on your video to tell you just that. But that takes us to the next part of measuring ROI from your videos, which is by looking at the sentiment of the comments and conversations, rather than just looking at the number of comments.
Number of views
If your goal was to increase brand awareness, this is probably the most fundamental metrics you want to look at. Because obviously, if you didn’t reach anyone, it will be hard to increase your brand awareness. Almost on all places where you can upload a video, you can see the total number of views your video has generated, which means that it is a metric that is easy to extract. You should remember, however, that different social media platforms count a view differently, as mentioned earlier.
Likes
If you’ve uploaded your video on a social platform where likes are available, for instance on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram, it might be a good idea to look at that number.
Firstly, looking at the likes you have will let you understand how much your audience likes your video, and how engaging it was, but secondly, the likes you receive will give you an indication of which types of videos your audience likes the most, and which type of videos they liked the least.
As a result, you can optimize your video creation strategy, and stop creating videos that your audience don’t like a lot, and create more of the videos that generate the highest engagement.
Bounce rate/time spent on page
As I mentioned earlier, having videos on your website can help you decrease the bounce rate and increase time on page. This can in turn lead to higher search engine rankings, because to search engines a low bounce rate is an indication that people found your site valuable and helpful.
But just because you implement a video on you site, for instance on your landing page, doesn’t mean that you’ll generate better results.
Because the reality might be that your video is terrible and boring, and makes your audience leave instead.
Therefore, you want to look at your bounce rate and time on site before you upload your video, and then look at your bounce rate and time on site after.
By doing so, you can see if your video has helped you keep your audience’s attention, and ultimately potentially also made them more engaged in your brand – maybe to the point whee they are convinced to buy, and this brings me to the next metric: conversion rate.
Conversion rate
Every brand’s end goal is to increase sales.
Sure, you might say that your goal is to improve customer relationships, increase customer loyalty, etc., but the truth is that all of those things eventually lead to more sales.
Measuring how your video marketing has affected your conversion rate might be difficult, but it might also be easy depending on where you have focused your video markeitng.
Obviously, if you have a landing page, you know the conversion rate it has. And if you then add a video to that page and see your conversion rate increase, it means that the ROI of that video is great!
If you, on the other hand, share videos on Youtube, measuring the ROI is a bit trickier. But that is not to say that it isn’t possible.
For instance, if your goal with your YouTube video marketing is to drive sales, you might include a link in your video description where you guide your followers to the page where they buy from you.
With Google analytics, for instance, you can also look at the total traffic that is coming from external websites, and by doing so, you can see how much traffic your video marketing has given you. And then, you can look at how much your sales have increased from that, and if they have increased.
Sentiment of conversation
It’s easy to get caught up in only looking at the number of comments you receive or the number of people who talk about you.
But what is even more valuable is looking at what people are actually saying, because by listening to that, you can learn quite a lot.
If people comment on your video saying ”I loved your video, I just ordered the product”, it’s a given tell that your video impacted people to the point where they bought from you. If people are commenting that your video is amazing, and how much they love it, that means the sentiment of the conversation is great, and you’ve created a conversation about your brand.
Campaign objectives
If you have created a video for a particular campaign, you can look at the metric which was the goal of your campaign.
For instance, if I am running a giveaway, and I make a video a part of my campaign, then obviously, getting people to enter my giveaway is my main goal.
If I then look at the number of people who have joined my giveaway, and the sentiment of the conversations that are happening, I can get quite a good idea of what the video resulted in.
Social shares
Social shares is a great indication of how relevant and appealing your video was. Humans tend to want to share awesome content, especially humanistic content, with their peers, so if your video received a lot of shares, it means that people liked it. The best part about social shares is that the more you have, the more exposure you’ll get, which is why if people start sharing your video, the more reach you can get.
Video completions
Video completions is a great metric to look at if you want to understand how relevant and appealing your video was to your audience. Obviously, if a large majority of people complete your video, they must have found it interesting and impacting. This is something worth having in mind when creating future videos.
Click-through-rate – CTR
If you have an objective with your video, for instance, to get your audience to take action, then looking at the CTR is a good idea.
You measure CTR by dividing the number of times your CTR is clicked with how many times it is viewed.
If your CTR is high, it means that your video impacted your audience and convinced them to click on your call to action to learn more.
If your CTR is low, it means that people weren’t that impacted by your video and thus not that convinced to click on it.
If your objective with your video is to get them to take action, then obviously, your CTR is extremely important, and you want to consider optimizing either your call to action or your video if your CTR is low.
Search engine rankings
Like I said earlier, implementing videos on your website can significantly decrease your bounce rate and increase the time spent on your site. And as a result of that, your site can get improved rankings, and thus attract more leads and prospects, which can lead to paying customers.
And the thing is, search engines are often something that is neglected, even though the benefits of them are many. And this prevents you from seeing the complete benefits of video marketing.
How long should your marketing videos be?
An infographic by the team at OneProductions
Conclusion
It’s safe to say that video has completely revolutionized the internet landscape. As the technology for recording videos has become both better and more accessible for everyone, together with an improved infrastructure for sharing videos, video can be effortlessly created and shared by virtually anyone.
As the infrastructure an quality of videos has become better, the demand for videos has also increased, and this, together with the fact that humans are visual creatures has lead to more and more marketers embracing videos in their marketing.
Videos has proven to have a huge effect on humans for that specific reason – a much deeper effect than text or photos, and this has also lead to a huge rise in the usage of video in marketing.
The bottom line is that if you haven’t made video a part of your marketing strategy yet, you’re missing out. It’s a non-debate.
