Best Practices in Video-Based Marketing
Steve Kahan
Advisor for Insight Partners, Best Selling Author, 2x Tedx speaker, and 2023 ISU Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year
Effectively marketing your videos starts with a coherent strategy and goals.
1. Choose your target audience and find out where they spend their time.
The popularity of video and user-generated video content means that you need to target a specific audience with each video. If you don’t already have strong buyer personas, start creating them.
2. Set clear objectives
it’s important to establish a clear set of goals. Is your video marketing to increase brand awareness? More pipeline/revenue? Launch a new product? What do you want your audience to do after watching the video?
3. Choose the best platform to distribute your video.
Before you start making your video, think about where you’re going to broadcast it. YouTube SEO is becoming as important as website SEO. source Think about what people on that platform are looking for. You’ll also want to consider:
While videos are often used for advertising, a video doesn’t just promote itself. Some platforms have built-in vehicles for promotion, while others will need you to put in some time and effort to get more eyes on your video content.
4. Develop messaging and choose the right types of video for your personas.
It’s important to communicate a message with your videos Align your message to the stage in the buyers’ journey that the video was built for.
5. Decide which metrics you want to track and how you will measure success.
Before you dive into production, you need to define your video goals and find the best metrics to help you understand whether you've accomplished those goals. Metrics typically include things like:
Your Video Marketing Guide Through the Buyer’s Journey
Too often, companies jump at the opportunity to create their first video.
They spend the whole budget on an explainer video for their homepage, but as soon as the project is complete, all future video plans screech to a halt.
Other businesses churn out a slew of social videos. But they often just copy fads they've seen, so their videos don’t connect to their audience's challenges or habits.
Each video you create should address your audience's challenges and provide a solution.
Don't forget to include call-to-actions to help lead your audience through their purchase journey and into the role of "promoter." Over time, you can improve based on conversion rates and the content gaps you discover.
Attract
When you attract, you’re turning strangers into visitors. Consumers at this stage are identifying their challenges and deciding whether they should seek out a solution.
So, the videos you create should empathize with their problems and introduce a possible solution with your product or service.
The goal of this kind of video is to expand reach and build trust. Because you are looking to garner shares for your video, you may want to focus on entertaining and evoking emotion. It’s also important to provide enough information to establish authority on the topic.
Examples of videos in the "attract" stage include:
As you attract a new audience, avoid speaking too much about your product. Instead, let your brand values and personality take center stage.
Because these videos can live on a variety of channels, keep the strategies of each platform in mind.
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Convert
Once you've attracted video viewers and website visitors, it’s time to convert these visitors into leads. With most inbound marketing content, this means collecting contact information with a form.
Video can aid this process by offering a solution to the buyer's problem. The goal of videos in the convert stage is to educate and excite.
"Convert" videos may include:
Other important critical success factors include:
Prioritize Viewability
Viewability is defined as the video being viewable to the users at least 50% of the time and should be playing for at least 2 seconds. As far as monetization is concerned, better viewability equates to higher revenue. A lot of advertiser campaigns will not even choose to bid on unviewable opportunities.
Pay Attention to the Tech Part
Keep a close watch on the loading time of your page as well as your video player. You can directly increase your viewability if you can decrease the loading time of your page and the chances of viewers actually being able to view it increase exponentially.
The same purpose is served by responsive websites and video players, which are optimized for mobile devices. Especially the mobile optimization factor becomes all the more important because of, the smaller screen size in comparison with desktops and laptops.
It’s All About the Content
It is important to know your audience and the type of content they will find interest in. This is the most important way of keeping your viewers engaged and, at the same time, creating viewable opportunities for serving ads. You should also remember to keep the videos short and precise, as it has been proved time and again that the attention span of viewers is super short.
Use of Captions
It has been found in surveys that videos which have captions tend to receive 40% more views, and viewers are 80% more likely to watch them till the very end. This also makes the ads all-inclusive as it would cater to the audience who are hard of hearing or deaf. Irrespective of the channel, accessibility is the key for video advertising to be successful.
Importance of Placement
Find out which of your web pages have the most traffic and test by placing dedicated video placements on these pages. Best practices will always be there but do your own testing and optimization as per your placements.
Place your videos in a central position of the most trafficked area of your website and you will be able to make them viewable to more and more viewers.
Size Does Matter
The size of the video player is also another important factor. Increasing the size of your video player may increase the rate of viewability by approx. 15% and in turn, increase the CPM rate by 25%.
Bidding of Video Headers
Once you have established the relationship with your demand partners, bidding on video headers will become your best way to grow as well as monetize the revenue you can make with them.
Header Bidding increases the overall revenue by giving the option for bidding to lower tier as well as higher tier partners, as a result of which the CPM reaches a very high level. This will also help you find out small but quality partners who will generate stable revenue for you. Also, for every opportunity, header bidding will generate higher fill rates considering all your partners will be competing, generating higher demand coverage.
Be it waterfall or header bidding, whichever approach you use, you should constantly be pruning the demand sources. What you have to do here is take a look at your metrics and deprioritize the demand sources which have high time-out or opt-out rates.
Strategies for Success: Creative Best Practices
Like all things in digital advertising, video has seen recent advancements that mean new creative best practices will need to be considered, to ensure the highest results for your 2019 campaigns. Let’s take a look at some of the most important tips and tricks to follow: