Social media is now increasingly moving towards video marketing. Over the last few years, online video has proven to be the most engaging and compelling form of content for social media users who watch and share thousands of them every single minute. Every major social network, from Facebook to Pinterest, has recently developed their own native video services and/or promoted video ads.
Create a Video Marketing Strategy
A strategic approach to video marketing starts by identifying an objective and creating a plan for how video will attract, engage and persuade your customers. Determine what action you’d like the viewer to take after watching your video, and make it easy for the viewer to take that action.
Targeting your video to a specific persona or customer segment will provide a more meaningful and relevant experience, resulting in a much greater chance of video marketing success.
When it comes to content topics, be sure to use video to answer a common question about your brand, or to highlight a problem that your brand helps solve. Establishing an objective and actions to measure early on will make it easier to quantify the success of your video marketing campaign.
Keep Your Videos Short and Sweet
Tailor your video for short attention spans by keeping it under three minutes. The risk of creating longer videos is that they may not be watched in their entirety, meaning that viewers might miss important takeaways and calls to action in the final moments of the video.
The length of your video will also depend on the platforms that you intend to distribute it on. For instance, Instagram videos are just 15 seconds long, and Vine videos just 6 seconds. Before you script and create your video, determine which social platforms you’d like to play it on, and the time limits associated with videos on those channels.
SAP just killed it here in their video storytelling. SAP adds drama to their videos with text overlays that emphasize keywords in the storyteller’s narration. Text overlays make the narration more memorable, and help viewers understand the narrative arc of the video, even if they are watching without sound.
Use Annotations to Embed Links into your Videos
Once you’ve attracted viewers and engaged them with useful video content, guide them through the marketing funnel by encouraging them to take action. You can accomplish viewers taking action by adding interactive annotations to your videos. There are a variety of annotation tools that allow you to add notes, text bubbles, and calls to action. Annotations can drive viewers to key pages of your website, or to other videos. However, be prudent in your use of annotations to ensure that they support, instead of distract from, the objective of the video.
I hope this post had been useful in order to learn why you should set up your video marketing strategy soon…