How to create a great video marketing strategy for your business
By
Larry Mutenda
Without a video marketing strategy, you’re winging it. That scattershot approach can result in wasted efforts. Instead, smart brand marketers adopt a thoughtful strategy and document it.
A written strategy helps you precisely pinpoint your focus, hone your efforts, and increase your odds of achieving your goals. We’ve written this guide to help you do the same for your business in 10 easy steps — and if you’d rather have a video marketing production partner build and execute the strategy alongside you, that’s exactly what our team at Creamy Animation does every day.
Your Strategy Needs a Production Partner
Identify your brand values, your mission, your company’s unique selling proposition (USP), and your business’s needs. Keep in mind that more than 50% of consumers prefer to see video from brands over other content types, and that preference keeps climbing as attention spans shrink.
It’s essential to set specific goals for your videos before you write a single word of script. Are you trying to shorten your sales cycle, pre-qualify leads, or reduce the number of “can you explain this again” emails your team fields every week? Each of those goals points to a different video — a different length, a different tone, a different call to action.
Determine how you’ll measure whether you’ve met those goals: watch-through rate, demo requests, or a specific increase in qualified leads. If you want to increase sales, decide by what percentage. If you want to sell more of a particular product or service package, pick a specific number so you know a year from now whether the strategy worked.
What kind of people do you want to reach with your videos? The more specifically you can define these people, the better able you’ll be to reach and persuade them. If you haven’t created buyer personas yet, start by jotting down the demographics and psychological traits of your prospective customers.
Then flesh them out into personas to reflect broad “types” of people you want to reach. The key here is to figure out what problems they have that you can solve, and what makes them want to buy what you sell.
Then, you can devise targeted video content that addresses those needs and wants. Incorporate this information into your video marketing strategy.
Testimonials, how-tos, explainer videos, product demos, whiteboard videos — there are many different kinds of videos you can produce for your brand. What kind will your prospects respond to most positively? Aim for the sweet spot between what your prospects crave and what you actually do, sell, or provide.
Motion graphics tends to be the workhorse format for B2B and SaaS brands specifically because it can explain a dashboard, a workflow, or a pricing model without needing a single actor or filming day. Our motion graphics explainer for CoPilot AI (46K+ views on YouTube) is a good reference point for what that looks like when it’s done for a LinkedIn automation platform — a fairly abstract, technical product made instantly understandable in about a minute.
Find out what your audience wants by exploring their posts on social media, questions asked on Reddit and Quora, and conversations in industry forums. You can also talk directly to your existing customers, or run a quick survey with your social media followers.
Many of these formats can be produced with 2D animation, which keeps costs predictable and revisions easy.
Once you’ve got a finished video, you’ll need to host it somewhere. Video websites like YouTube are a popular choice, but it’s not the only option available. In addition to competitor video hosts such as Vimeo, you can also host it on your own website.
Or you can upload it directly to a social media site. In most cases you’ll also want to provide a transcript or closed captioning file. Remember that many people watch videos without the sound on, so you’ll want to be mindful of that and make it easier on your viewers.
You have another critical decision at this stage. Do you want to handle all the myriad tasks in video production yourself? Or would you prefer to outsource some or all of the process to experienced video professionals?
You can shoot perfectly serviceable videos on any halfway-decent smartphone camera. And there are plenty of free and premium video editing tools available on the web to assemble and refine videos. For an increasingly popular medium, it’s hard to earn your audience’s attention. Experienced professionals can help you seize that attention and keep it.
A professionally produced animated video doesn’t have to break the budget. It may even pay for itself by attracting new prospects and customers who share the videos with their own followers. This is exactly where a dedicated marketing video production partner like Creamy Animation earns its keep — we handle strategy, script, storyboard, and animation so your team can stay focused on the campaign.
Learn how we craft SaaS videos that drive product signups.
Examine your competitors and their use of video. What kinds of videos are they publishing? How are viewers reacting? To learn the answers, look at comments on their social posts and blog entries where the videos have been shared or promoted.
Then think about where your competitors are succeeding with video — and more importantly, where they’re not. The idea is to audit the general state of video in your direct niche and identify entry points where a sharper, better-produced video marketing strategy can distinguish your brand.
This is also where a production partner earns its keep: we’ve built marketing videos for brands ranging from blockchain infrastructure platforms to LinkedIn automation tools, so we tend to already know what’s been overdone in a given category and where there’s still white space.
Generally, no matter what you’re selling, your customers and clients will take the same “path” or process to make a final purchasing decision. For the most part, prospects will move from:
By targeting your content to a specific relevant stage, you’ll more successfully communicate with and persuade those viewers. In other words, the content that works with someone who’s starting to research options won’t work as well with someone who’s ready to purchase. You’ll need a collection of video content that’s targeted to prospects at each stage of that buying journey.
Now that you have a clearer idea of what kind of videos you’ll be creating, create a brand voice or style guide for your business. This document should tell future content creators exactly what that content should look, sound, and “feel” like.
Your videos’ tone should match your brand’s personality and values. Structure and length matter, too. Of course, length is also related to where you’re hosting videos. Shorter videos are best on Twitter, while longer ones do best on YouTube. List any consistent branding elements here, too, including color schemes, logos, taglines, intros/outros, and specific music. Finally, you’ll also want to create calls to action to include at the end of each video to tell your viewers where they should go next.
Once it’s ready for publication, you’ll need to promote your video in order to increase views and shares. Where you’ll normally pick a single platform to host your video (see step # 4 above), you’ll want to promote your video on as many channels as possible.
Multiply your efforts by spreading promotional content across all available platforms, including:
Whatever channels you’d like to use, write down a short workflow to describe your promotional strategy for your videos.
Your video marketing strategy isn’t carved in stone; rather it’s a fluid, living document. If any part of your strategy turns out to be less effective than you’d hoped, change it! Try a different strategy or tactic for a while, and see if that works better for your plan.
Bottom line: never think of yourself as constrained by your video marketing strategy. It’s there solely to help you achieve your goals. If you need a partner who can turn this strategy into videos that actually convert, that’s what we do.
Ready When You Are