Video marketing is the use of photos uniquely and distinctively to market or promotes your services, products, company, or business on digital media, channels, etc. The main purpose of video marketing is to educate your potential customers, consumers, and existing customers about the benefits and best practices of your product. It is a trendy medium to reach a wide base of audience, easily.
Importance of video marketing
Video marketing has become a powerful source to market your product. In fact, more than 63% of businesses(1) have started using video marketing.
Video content influences the targeted audience way more than textual blog posts and pitches – making it a great addition to your product promotions. It holds great importance in the digital world, not because everyone is so invested in it but because it is one of the most versatile ways to promote your product.
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Increase in sales and conversions
Video marketing helps content creators to make serious money. In fact, adding video content on your business website could increase sales by 80%(2). All you have to do is craft amazing videos.
Many people are watching videos every day and the number is increasing
This era is all about digital platforms and mobile phones. As the use of mobile phones is increasing, video viewers are increasing simultaneously. A lot of people love to watch videos on their phones. The more the phones, the more the viewers.
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Videos are the best way to brand your business
Videos are one of the best ways to ensure brand recalls. To get your customers hooked to your brand, you need to build consistency and build. Video content enhances these two factors. If the video is engaging, the customers would think twice before going to another vendor.
Types of marketing videos
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Brand videos
Brand videos, or otherwise known as promotion videos are part of a large marketing campaign. It showcases the businesses’ vision, mission, customer service, objectives, the deliverance of quality, etc.
The main purpose is to build brand awareness and target audience.
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Event videos
If your business is hosting a seminar, webinar, conference, fundraiser, or any type of event, creating an event video might help increase the number of attendees.
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Expert interview videos
Conducting recorded interviews with thought leaders and business tycoons in the industry might help your business grow.
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How-to videos
The purpose of educational or how-to videos is to teach your audience something beneficial. As a matter of fact, these videos can also be based on your product.
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Explainer videos
Explainer videos help potential customers to make decisions. It helps them to understand why they should invest in your product or service.
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Animated videos
Animated videos(3) are a great way to demonstrate something hard to get for a layman.
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Testimonial videos
Testimonial videos are like general feedback from your existing customers. It includes the experience of your customers with your company, product, or service. It is like a testimony to promote trust.
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Live videos
Live videos increase brand engagement dramatically. Live-stream conferences, events, presentations, and interviews help the audience to know your business from close.
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Webinars
Web conferences are like regular seminars except they are online. Businesses host them to provide useful information to the attendees. The main purpose is to establish a large network of customers across the globe.
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Product demonstration videos
You must have watched a product video once in your lifetime. They are videos that demonstrate the product well. You can know how to use, it, its benefits, its do’s and don’ts in the video.
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Virtual reality and 360 degrees video
360 degrees videos help the customers to see any real estate property or any site area from every angle. It is like standing physically withing the content or location.
These virtual reality videos help you to experience the content better. However, these videos are used using gadgets like Google Cardboard.
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Augmented reality videos
Augmented reality covers reality with a digital layer. For example, if you want an IKEA table in your living lounge, an augmented reality video will help you know how it will look there.
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Educational videos
Educational videos are somewhat like how-to videos. The main purpose of this video content is not a promotion but passing generic knowledge to the target audience.
( Also Read: Best Video Marketing Tools to Boost your Business )
The Benefits of Video Marketing
The marketing tactic- video promotion has a lot of scope and tons of benefits in the business industry. Businesses need to reflect their objectives, mission, products’ quality to their customers. The best way is to showcase their views on leadership, customer service, and offerings using videos.
Video can not only trigger emotions but also influence people to relate your services or products to their lives.
Here are some, but not all, benefits of video marketing:
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Videos are more sustainable and do not expire in the long-term
Branded videos are 2-4 minutes long. Not only do they promote the product, but they also provide useful information to the viewers. Moreover, viewers also circulate them across social media platforms. So, it is less likely to die out.
The video content you will produce will stay lively for years to come.
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It builds trust
Trust is the foundation for any successful business. The concept of creating content to promote products is based on the idea of customers’ trust. Instead of promoting the product, the main idea of video marketing is to aware people of the benefits and uses of your product.
Videos ignite emotions in potential customers. Most buyers are skeptical about the products and fear fraud or cheating. However, video marketing could help tone down their trust issues.
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Great ROI
83% of businesses claim that video marketing has increased their ROI. Even though creating video content is not an easy task but it benefits the companies in the long run.
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Search engine loves video content
Video content allows you to increase traffic to your website. Moovly(4) suggests that you are 53% more likely to make it to the first page of Google if you have the video on your website.
It increases mobile traffic 90% of internet users(5) watch videos on their phones. Since the use of mobile is growing at a fast rate, you will eventually get a bigger audience at the end of every year.
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It engages doubtful and lazy buyers
Video is a tool to provide useful information to your customers. It is very hard to read long product descriptions, especially if you have a busy schedule.
However, the video explains everything inflow. Video referencing is important to engage the toughest of the toughest buyers.
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Videos are searchable and compatible than text content
Video content gets more features on social media platforms and online forums as compared to text content. Different social media platforms have different editing and creating tools for videos. Other than that, internet users are very keen on sharing videos. In fact, 76% of the users show branded videos to their family and friends if they find it entertaining.
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Video content has the potential to go viral
As discussed above, social media loves videos. Facebook launches 3600 videos every month. Entertaining and inspiring videos get viral as people share them extensively.
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Connect with your customers
Video content is the most sensible way to connect with your customers and influence their buying decisions. 98% of people watch videos for an explanation. You can produce an engaging, intense, and full-of-emotions content to connect with your customers.
Spot out their vulnerabilities and bring the concepts to life for better promotion and increased engagement.
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Boost in click-throughs
Uploading a video to your business website doubles the average click-throughs and number of linking domains.
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Increase in open rates
The open rate is the percentage of people opening your emails. This metric helps to determine how many people take your emails seriously and take out time to read them. If your play rate increases in emails, the open rates will increase simultaneously.
Using the term ‘video content’ in the email increases the open rate by 19%.
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Boost information retention
Videos help customers to retain information. If a customer hears or reads, he is likely to recall 10% of the information 3 days later. However, if a person watches a video, he will retain 65% of the information 3 days later.
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Customers prefer to watch a product video
Video content is responsible for 74% of online traffic. Most of the customers prefer videos as they explain everything- starting from the product itself and ending on its benefits.
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Better ranking
Video content can get you high rankings SERPs. The amount of time a person visits the website for the video can influence your Google rankings.
According to HubSpot(6), videos increase the dwell time on business websites.
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Video marketing can explain everything
Video marketing has the power to describe everything in detail. Even if it is for your product, you can explain minor details to engage the customers.
Moreover, you can include the benefits, uses, and product descriptions in the video altogether so that customers could get the idea of how the product will improve his life.
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The video encourages social shares
60% of the content creators, according to Michael Stelzner use video content for promotion. However, it is worth noticing that people share emotions, not advertisements, and facts. So, only fun and entertaining videos increase social shares, not factual ones.
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Videos let you take real-time feedback
Recently, many social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook have launched live stories. They help you to accumulate instant feedback from the consumers.
Video Marketing Best Practices
Here are some best practices to deduce an amazing marketing video:
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Start with your marketing goals
The first step is to outline your goals. To start with, it is necessary to build a video that passes through each marketing step. However, your main focus should be on creating brand awareness, consideration, and decision.
Create awareness about the problem that most of your potential customers face. After that consider giving viable solutions to them. In the end, influence their buying decision by showcasing that your service or product is the best one in the market.
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Understanding your target audience
After sorting out the marketing goals, the next step is to find and understand your target audience. The key to understanding your target audience is to develop a buyer’s persona.
With your buyer’s persona being mapped out perfectly, you will know exactly who to target and make the video for.
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Identify where the video can strengthen your sales funnel
Before mapping the framework of your story for video, it is important to know how the video will influence your sales funnels. However, it starts with the story itself. Do you want to target resolution, conflict, or quest in your video?
Every factor will strengthen your sales funnel in different ways. For example, the resolution factor will influence the buyer’s decision, hence, convincing potential customers to buy.
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Make sure the videos are compact and of high quality
Your videos should be short and to the point. Or else, one of five viewers(7) will close it after 10 seconds or so.
Try engaging ways to hook the viewer’s attention. Your video should immediately convince the viewer into watching it.
Other than that, your video should be recorded in high resolution. Nobody wanted to see a poor-quality video in times of 4K HD resolution.
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Tell a convincing and powerful story
It is best to center your video around the story and not the sale. Make the most of your emotive power to lure customers into buying. Have an emotive approach while producing a video and use different strategies to unleash the hidden desires of your customers.
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The video message should be entertaining, informative or both
If you are into making educational or campaign-related videos, make sure to enlighten your customers. Nobody wants to watch a boring video. Everybody wants to laugh and forget about the realities for a moment. Come up with fresh ideas to entertain your audience.
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Aim to trigger emotions in viewers
We are social animals looking for good and realistic messages and stories to be shared. The more emotional the video is, the more views it will get.
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Always use a CTA
A call-to-action at the end of the video does not only increase traffic but brand awareness as well. A call-to-action at the end of your video will help your business to grow or at least, your video to be shared. It encourages people to do something worthwhile.
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Keep your videos simple
The simpler the video is, the more it is possible for viewers to understand it. most compelling videos are simple. Even if the topic is difficult, content creators use animation to make it simple. Simple videos are short and not dragged too long. That is why, they get more views in general, as compared to long videos.
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Optimize your video for YouTube SEO
There are plenty of ways to get your videos ranked first on search engines. The first thing to make it SEO optimized is to host it on your domain. Other than that, descriptions work well to rank the videos.
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Use video tools
You need to allocate resources, like video tools for compelling and engaging videos. Some of the best software tools are:
- Adobe Spark.
- Biteable
- Ripl.
- Lumen5
Difference Between Video Marketing and Video Advertising
| Video Marketing | Video Advertising |
|---|---|
| Video marketing is using videos to promote products using generic knowledge and values, beliefs, and mission of the business itself. | Video advertising is the paid component or part of video marketing. |
| It mainly defines the brand. | It defines the services or products offered by the brand. |
| Might or might not include a call-to-action. | Always includes a call-to-action. |
Final Thoughts
Video marketing and the processes within it, such as video advertising, video editing, etc. might seem daunting at first, but with a little practice, high-quality content and skills, you can be the winner in the market.
