Moving into 2023, Digital video marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry globally. Videos have become an inseparable part of marketing as they have much greater impact on the audience than other forms of content.

Video marketing is an excellent way to promote your products/services, educate, entertain, attract, and engage the audiences. Moreover, it can help in generating leads and converting customers too.

But to be successful at video marketing, you need to be knowledgeable about making captivating video campaigns powered by great content, engaging storytelling, and well-defined marketing plan.

Brands can no longer rely solely on written content and images as their marketing content. Brands nowadays need a video marketing strategy as the digital channels are becoming more and more visual content driven.

Let’s explore this complete guide about video marketing..

What is Video Marketing?

The definition of video marketing is the use of video content by brands to promote their products or services or business mainly across digital channels. The aim of video marketing is to attract the audience instantly, engage them, inform them, and inspire them to take favorable action.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words then you can imagine what’s the worth of a video. You can think of video marketing as a marketing strategy that can convey promotional information in a visually appealing manner that allows the audience to connect and understand better.

More than 50% of consumers now want to see a video from a brand. A whopping 90% of consumers claim videos help them decide on buying a product. And the conversion rate saw an 80% surge just by using video on the landing page. So, videos can be used throughout the sales funnel to your advantage.

Benefits of Video Marketing

Here we have listed some of the key benefits of marketing using videos that you can leverage for your brand in 2023.

1. Boost Your Reach and Awareness

The first and foremost video marketing benefit is that it helps you reach a wider set of audiences through an organic approach driven by users. Video content enables higher social sharing possibilities across the channels.

The boost is organic social sharing enables you to reach a wide audience and magnify your brand awareness. Moreover, digital platforms’ algorithm also promotes engaging video content to a broader audience as compared to traditional content.

2. Results in SEO & Engagement Growth

Marketers globally state that video marketing help in adding value to their SEO by improve the SERP visibility. Adding video to pages and blogs can help in better user engagement and longer session duration for the users.

Users can capture information easily with much less effort about any brand through video. Adding video on pages and blogs allows users to consume information through visual medium and more efficiently.

Better engagement on webpages leads to better performance, user retention, reduced bounce rate, and funnel optimization resulting in better SEO performance and user engagement.

3. Generate More Leads & Conversions

More than 80% of the marketers believe that video marketing helps them in generating leads. Even customers prefer video content over other forms of content as a source of their information and entertainment.

Videos help the consumers in building a visual imagination about the products or services and helps in showcasing the aesthetics in a much more appealing and descriptive way.

Moreover, the sales teams are now also leveraging video marketing to attract leads and drive conversions. Videos enable the sales team to be more engaging, interactive and delightful. Prospects are able to connect with the brand better and follow the conversion funnel through video marketing.

4. Better Appeal To Mobile Users

Nowadays, most of the global users consume content on their mobile devices. Social media platforms are also designed primarily for mobile devices and with the access to limitless connectivity, users are consuming video content heavily.

Thus, video marketing provides better appeal to billions of mobile users globally as compared to other devices. This allows the brands to leverage video marketing for mobile users to attract, engage and convert them.

5. Enhances Social Proof & Awareness

Video marketing enables users to see and experience the products and services in a more authentic and credible manner as they are able to explore the realistic visuals of a product or service.

Brands are using onboarding videos, product videos, customer testimonials, meeting sessions, and so on to build a more real, engaging, and immersive marketing experience that enables a sense of social proof and enhanced brand awareness among the customers.

How To Create Your Video Marketing Strategy?

Before we dive into recording, editing and sharing any videos - we need to have a complete video marketing strategy.

Building a video marketing strategy is crucial as it will help in defining your video scripts, video creation, marketing channels, target audience and much more. Without a clear video strategy, you may end up in complete chaos and non-performing video campaigns.

So, let’s get started with building the best video marketing strategy…

1. Choose the Right Channel & Audience

Like all other marketing strategies, it is essential that your video campaign has a clearly defined audience set and the right channel mix so that you are able to reach the right audience through right channels to garner maximum exposure and engagement.

Every video content marketing campaign needs to have a specific audience. Platforms like Instagram enable a mix of both long and short video campaigns where Twitter is usually short form and YouTube is majorly for long-form content.

Moreover, the audience should be in synchronization with your campaign objective like you can explore various demographic and psychographic factors based on your campaign.

2. Defining Video Campaign Objectives & Goals

The first and most important part of the video marketing strategy is to define what is the objective of your campaign and what are the goals of your campaign. You may have different video campaigns for different goals.

Therefore, it is essential to define what you want to achieve. What are your key objectives, is the campaign meant for top of the funnel or bottom of the funnel objectives? Defining the goals and objectives will help you guide your video marketing efforts efficiently and effectively.

3. Set a Timeline and Budget

A video timeline is an action plan from start to finish of a video campaign. You can set a timeline, checkpoints, and deadline for video recording, editing, distribution, etc. Setting up a timeline will help you manage your budget as well as timely completion of video campaign creation.

There are various phases and elements of video marketing campaign:

Production

This phase majorly revolves around creative video planning, pre-production, and actual video production. The process can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on the scale of your video marketing campaign.

Where the creative planning is generally about video visualization, scripts, sourcing material, location, etc. Pre-production can include getting the artists, video equipment, assets, etc. followed by the actual video creation or shooting.

Editing & Customizations

The next step in the process is to edit and customize the video as per the brand theme using a video editor tool as per the brand theme. Editing could include additions of brand logos, banners, messaging, CTAs, or maybe filtering the content to make the video more precise and crisp.

For this phase you can use tools like StoryXpress which comes with a brilliant editor tool; hassle-free editing designed for purpose-driven video editing and integrations of interactive elements to make the campaign more interesting and influential.

Distribution

Finally, the last phase is video distribution where you publish you video campaigns across your chosen channels be it on social media platforms or the website or ad campaigns or email marketing service or any other channel.

Herein you can also use tools like StoryXpress for hosting your videos. They offer ad-free video hosting platform and you can share the video or embed it on other channels using StoryXpress. The tool also offers complete video analytics for an insightful performance measurement.

Budget

Setting a budget for your video marketing campaign can be a tricky task. Your budget can vary immensely depending upon the scale of your campaign and timeline. But nowadays, there are multiple tools available that can get the work done at minimal cost.

You can use digital tools for video recording, video creation, video editing, video hosting, sharing, and analytics. Tools like StoryXpress and Camtasia are great for all-in-one video marketing solutions. These tools are pocket-friendly and can be used for your video marketing campaigns.

4. Choose Video Type & Create The Perfect Messaging

When we are talking about types of video marketing, there are numerous options at your disposal. For example you may have a campaign for explainer videos for dark chocolates to give a brief idea of business or its products in a short time.

You may be leveraging customer case studies and testimonials for building social proof, credibility, and sense of authenticity among the audience through your video marketing campaigns. Once you decide the video type, you must also define the messaging. The messaging can vary depending on what stage your audience is on like the awareness stage or engagement stage or bottom of the funnel.

5. Define KPIs and Success Metrics

Tracking and measuring the performance of your video marketing campaign is highly important. If you are aware about the key performance indicators, gaps, and necessary optimizations then you can easily refine your video marketing to drive better results.

You should define certain KPIs and success metrics for your videos like average viewing duration, percentage of video watched, CTA clicks, engagement, CTR, etc. These metrics will help you compare the actual video campaign performance with the expected performance.

Types of videos for video marketing

In total, there are many types of videos being used currently by different brands. And, to increase user footprint on these videos marketers worldwide are working constantly on creating excellent video marketing strategies. No wonder. Statistics state that people will spend over 100 minutes a day watching online videos in 2021.

Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are typically a brief 60-90 seconds video that explains your product or a feature of your product. Businesses widely use these videos in forms of animated explainers or live-action explainers. The main idea behind creating these videos is to explain the complicated technical processes and features in a simple and understandable language. These videos are used on website landing pages, product pages, and social media channels.

Expert interviews

Expert interviews with industry experts and leaders work as a masterstroke in gaining trust for your brand. These videos are based on sharing and discussing ideas on a particular niche. The discussions usually revolve around top-of-the-funnel content with expert tips and advice. It is also one of the most successful video marketing tactics to engage viewers on social media channels. It builds an authority around your brand and makes you stand out as an industry leader.

Event videos

Event videos are the most engaging types of videos you can capture for email marketing. These videos typically include interviews, presentations, and speaker clips as well. Businesses use these types of videos especially while a product launch or major brand collaboration to increase brand awareness. These videos can also be used as highlights on your website and social media campaigns. You can also leverage video podcast as part of event videos.

Animated videos

Animated videos are one of the easiest ways to explain complicated features and technicalities of a product. Generally categorized as lower-funnel content, such videos are more inclined towards educating the viewers with in-depth expertise.

360° videos

The most fun type of videos are 360° videos, in these videos the viewers slide through the entire video, to see it from every angle. These videos look as if the viewer is physically experiencing the visuals of the content. Check out this video example for 360° videos.

Augmented Reality videos

Augmented reality videos are one of the emerging video techniques used by businesses to provide a unique experience to the audience. These videos present themselves with just a tap on your mobile device while using the camera. Check out this great example for AR videos.

Testimonials or case studies

You can produce Testimonial videos to share happy customer stories with your audience. These videos are easily documented with the help of real users. Video testimonials on how your product helped these folks solve their problems can work like magic for boosting your sales.

Personalized videos(Screen Recorded Videos)

Personalized videos are unique ways of communication with prospects and also works great for internal team communications. You can use the StoryXpress Recorder to record your recommendations and solve queries while communicating with your prospects.

You can also use these videos to communicate feedback within teams. These types of videos create a unique and interactive experience for your potential customers during their purchase journey.

Video Storytelling

Storytelling is a popular video tactic marketers use to promote their brand. It is a way to tell a story, which is documented according to themes and portrayed with emotions.

It is entirely focused on building a connection through narration.Many of the best marketing campaigns of all time have relied on powerful storytelling to resonate with audiences, creating lasting emotional connections.

A good storytelling video can easily convey the brand’s vision in a matter of 2-3 minutes and can be highly persuasive.

Brands nowadays are more inclined towards selling their approach and visions through storytelling videos that are not directly product-focused. Some of the best approaches to use whilst incorporating storytelling into your video marketing strategies are:

  • Get that creative mind to work and play with visuals to keep the viewer engaged.
  • Keep it short, so divide your story into 3 parts- the beginning-the middle-the end (you obviously don't want to start with a "once upon a time" fairy-tale)
  • Keep the narrative clear, short and crisp, and make sure your story does the work.
  • Add an attractive video thumbnail

Time To Get Started With Video Marketing

Now that you have gone through the complete guide about what video marketing is, what are the benefits of video marketing, and how to create a video marketing strategy; it is time to now get started with your video marketing campaign.

Consumers are now engaging more and more with video content and all the digital channels are incorporating video content possibilities into their platforms, so you must create and execute a video campaign for your brand growth.

Platforms are prioritizing video content as we move into 2023 and this gives positive signs for you to leverage video marketing to boost brand awareness, attract audiences, engage them with your campaign, generate leads, and drive conversions.