Video Marketing Strategy: Planning Your Next Year of Video Content for Your Brand and Business
Video marketing is one of the most important forms of marketing you can use to increase sales and improve customer engagement with your brand. More than 85% of marketers report that video marketing has increased their website traffic. If you want to experience similar growth, you need to develop a cohesive video marketing strategy. Here are a few things you should know about video marketing and how to plan your next year of video content.
Developing a Solid Video Marketing Strategy
The right videos can effectively engage customers and help them become more familiar with your brand, but releasing sub-par content won’t do you any favors. Your videos must be of high quality or your audience won’t waste time with them. You need content that is capable of competing with the millions of other videos out there. That’s why it’s so important to come up with a high-caliber strategy for your video marketing endeavors.
Many businesses struggle to develop a cohesive and effective video marketing strategy. To help you make your next year of video content as impactful as possible, here’s how to make a video marketing plan.
Create Your Vision for the Year
When developing your strategy for the year, begin by determining the overarching vision you want your marketing videos to support. There is no “right” answer here. It all depends on your focus for the year. Here are examples of goals you can use to develop a video marketing strategy that has the intended impact on your target audience:
- Educate: Provide useful information that educates your audience.
- Inspire: Craft videos that use relatable stories and emotion to inspire your viewers.
- Entertain: Share highly engaging content or use humor and other strategies to surprise your audience and hold their interest.
You can choose just one of these primary objectives or utilize all three when developing your video marketing vision for the year.
Solidify Your Video Objectives
Now that you have your overall vision narrowed down, it’s time to decide what primary objectives you want your video marketing strategy to achieve this year. Do you want to raise brand awareness, improve offline or online sales, generate excitement for your products, or increase customer loyalty? Once you have one or more primary objectives in mind, you’ll have an easier time creating streamlined video content that supports your goals.
Strengthen Your SEO Strategy
As with written content, video content should be created with a search engine optimization strategy in mind. This will help ensure your content ranks well in search engines so it can be viewed by the appropriate audience. Here are some things you can do to strengthen SEO in your video marketing strategy:
- Add keywords to the description of your video.
- Include a link to your website in your video description.
- Use eye-catching titles to earn the attention of your viewers.
- Create colorful and engaging thumbnails so viewers are more likely to click on your video.
- Use tags appropriately and include a variety of relevant keywords.
- Focus on internal and external link-building to guide viewers to your videos.
- Use a video sitemap to give search engines additional details about your videos and help them rank more favorably.
- Optimize your videos for mobile viewing to make sure you’re getting your content in front of a wide audience.
You may also want to transcribe your videos so that search engines can crawl your content more easily. Transcribing is another video marketing strategy that will make your video more appealing to people who like to watch videos silently or who are hard of hearing.
Review Your Annual Calendar
Carefully review your annual calendar to determine what events you have planned for the year. Are you planning any new product launches? What holidays do you want to create video content for? When you look at the entire year at once, it makes it easier to see what’s coming up so you have plenty of time to plan your video marketing strategy around important dates and events.
Determine Who You Are Trying to Reach
Before you can hone in on your video marketing campaign for you the year, you need to know what audience you’re trying to reach with your videos. What types of videos does your target demographic watch? How often do they use their mobile devices to view videos? Are they very active on social networks? Once you investigate your core audience, you’ll have an easier time creating videos that appeal to them.
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Another great way to figure out your video marketing approach for the year is to analyze what your competition is doing. What’s been working well for them and what opportunities are they missing with their video marketing approach? How can you make sure your content gets even better results than your competition? Asking yourself these types of questions will help you develop a successful video marketing strategy.
Figure Out What Success Looks Like
To determine whether your video marketing techniques are working the way you want, you need to figure out what success looks like. Set quantifiable goals and metrics that you expect your marketing video campaign to achieve this year. Your goals may involve improving user engagement or getting more overall views.
Whatever success looks like for you, you’ll need to track metrics related to your video campaigns to make sure you’re on the right track. Examples of key metrics you may want to follow include:
- Number of views
- Percent of earned views, paid views and organic views
- Paid and organic watch time
- Number of views multiplied by the average view time
- Number of shares
If your videos aren’t performing as expected, figure out why and make changes to future videos so you can continue moving toward your goals.
Get Help With Your Video Marketing Strategy
Developing a good video marketing strategy can be tricky. To boost your likelihood of success, let MatchPoint do the filming for you. Start a project today and begin working toward your most successful year of video marketing yet.
https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
https://www.spottedyeti.com/blog/annual-video-content-calendar
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/video/build-a-content-plan/