By Kenneth Horsfall

As you already know the world of marketing is ever-evolving, the ways we use to market our products and services have changed.

We are living in a content-driven world and one of those fast-paced growing content is video marketing; video marketing content helps businesses a lot for so many reasons and one of those reasons is the fact that Videos help your company improve the relationship with customers and build trust with potential clients not just only that alone, Videos evoke emotions online better than any other medium. You can use the tone of voice, music, and facial expressions to your advantage. This marketing tool can help humanize your brand.

According to a recent Aberdeen report, marketers who use video see much faster revenue growth (49 per cent) than those who do not. However, video has become more than just a marketing tool. With their capability to visually explain and demonstrate things and concepts, videos can help businesses not only showcase their products and services, attracting new customers, but they can help companies attract new employees and even make workers more productive.

If you’re a business owner or marketer, then you probably have a specific strategy in place for marketing your business.

Wait, you don’t?

Well, then it looks like (unfortunately) you’re in the majority.

In fact, 70% of marketers lack a clear or consistent marketing strategy. Ouch.

Luckily, it’s never too late to implement some marketing tactics that will help give your business a boost.

You see, there are countless ways to market your business, but not every method is equally effective.

You can try creating traditional advertisements, email marketing, social media marketing, knocking on people’s doors, etc.

But there’s one extremely powerful strategy that can help your business: Video Marketing.

Video marketing is so powerful that it can generate up to 1200% more shares than text and images combined!

That is a ton of engagement (and potential sales) that you’re missing out on by simply not implementing a video marketing strategy.

With that in mind, let’s go over a few videos marketing tips that can help engage your target audience while helping you grow your business.

1. Start With A Plan Of Action

Before you create an effective marketing video, you need to have a clear idea of what you want your video to accomplish.

Do you want it to help sell a particular product or service? Or are you trying to show off your amazing company culture?

Whatever your objective is with this video, it’s important to develop and write down a marketing strategy.

How important is a marketing strategy?

According to one study, 33% more goals are accomplished by those who create and write down a clear plan of action.

Once you have a strategy, it’s important to give your customers something memorable so they’ll want to support your business.

Now that you’ve got a strategy, it’s time to…

2. Craft A Great Story

So maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I’ll just pull out the old iPhone, record a few shots of people talking about my business, and then call it a day.”

Well, that’s certainly one way to start your video marketing process…

…down a very, very dark and difficult road.

You see, creating a video is one thing, but creating a video that attracts customers and makes them want to buy from you is a whole different animal.

And as we’ve mentioned before, even a 30-second commercial requires a ton of time and careful planning.

So, one of the first things to keep in mind when creating a video is: the story.

The story is, in a sense, the engine of your video. Without it, your video is going nowhere.

When Developing A Good Story For Your Video You Want To Make Sure To:

1. Be honest and personal. Your content needs to be a reflection of your company. Make sure you are genuine with your audience; don’t be afraid to get a little personal.

Honest can really resonate with your customers, and it can help you build a bond that will also promote brand loyalty—a factor that will give you a leg up over your competition.

2. Have a beginning, middle, and end. Like every good story, your story needs to feature these three stages or else the message could get a bit muddled.

You don’t need to get Shakespearean by any means, but a story that goes through a beginning, middle, and end has power.

How so, you might wonder?

With this kind of structure, you can build up the emotions of an audience, keep them enthralled, and set them up for a resolution (or a good call to action).

3. Get creative and stay true to your brand. Have you noticed any trends in commercials or advertisements lately?

Perhaps you’ve seen a lot of them that feature random quirky characters or talking animals spouting off cheeky one-liners?

This style of commercial is usually good at grabbing the attention of viewers because of the humour and creativity involved.

And if you want to craft a video that will effectively market your business, you’ll need to get a little creative as well.

The best way to start this process is to develop a central theme around what your video is marketing (maybe a specific product/service), and then infuse your company’s personality into it.

Whether your company has more of a slapstick culture or a more serious-minded one, it’s important to stay true to your brand.

That way, your audience will instantly recognize you, and you can develop the ever-important brand loyalty we mentioned earlier.

Are you lacking some much-needed inspiration? Check out these 40 creative video ideas that can help spark your imagination!

Now that you have a great story to share, you want to make sure that you…

3. Keep Your Videos Short

With blogging, long-form writing can help with SEO and give a writer enough space to provide a lot of valuable content.

With video, however, you should keep it short and sweet.

Why is that?

Because with the many advances in technology, people now have shorter attention spans than goldfish!

A good tip for creating an effective video that will hold the attention of your audience is to keep the duration of the video to around (or less than) one minute.

With the proper video length set, now you want to…

4. Promote Your Video Everywhere

After you’ve created a quick and compelling marketing video, it’s time to share it with the world.

One of the first places you want to share your video is on your company’s website.

This will help you drive customer traffic and create engagement with your site.

Next, you should add your video to landing pages and emails. By simply including a video on your landing pages, you can increase conversions by 80%.

And by including videos in your email campaigns you can increase click-through rates by 50%!

After that, you should post your video on your social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (etc.), to help increase your reach as well as your conversions.

Looking to share your video with an even wider audience?

Here’s a list of 28 video sharing sites that will allow you to promote your new video to even more viewers.

Conclusion

Does it sound like there’s a lot that goes into creating a marketing video?

Well, there is!

Not only do you have to plan out an effective strategy, craft a compelling and concise story, and promote it like crazy, you also have to consider the time and financial investment involved in doing all these things.

It may seem like a lot, but the investment in cost and time for a well-produced video is definitely worth the ability to:

• Connect with your target audience
• Generate more leads
• Increase sales
• Grow your overall business

Kenneth Horsfall is the creative director and founder of K.S. Kennysoft Studios Production Ltd, fondly called Kennysoft STUDIOs, a Nigerian Video and Animation Production Studio. He is also the founder and lead instructor at Kennysoft Film Academy and can be reached via [email protected]