Video Marketing: What it is, Best Practices & More

Video is all the rage right now. 

Consumers want more video content, and marketing teams are eager to meet this demand. But there’s a lot more to successful video marketing than just creating videos.

You also need to identify the right content for your videos and the best channels to promote them on. Some video marketing efforts are more sustainable than others, so it’s important to plan your campaigns for long-term success.

And that’s why we put this guide together; to help you learn how to get the most out of your video marketing.

What is Video Marketing?

Video marketing is the use of video for promoting your brand, products, or services on digital platforms.

Video is one of the most engaging content formats; it makes it easy for customers to digest important information about your offering. Video marketing is also effective for generating leads and increasing conversions. 

How Video Marketing Fits Into The Customer Journey

You can leverage videos to help customers at each stage of their journey. However, the video's type and content should depend on your buyer's stage.

Awareness

At this stage, it's essential to avoid promoting your product or service directly. Instead, focus on creating educational videos that address your buyer's pain points.

Remember, your buyer is not actively searching for a solution in the awareness stage. But they do have a need. So although you should create relevant content, don't try to push the customer towards a conversion. They're at low commitment.

Consideration

At this stage, your buyer realizes they need a solution. But they're not yet convinced that you're the perfect option. They likely have their eyes on your competition, too.

So how can video marketing help you make your case?

At this stage, explainer videos help show customers how your product can solve their problems. The best explainer videos are typically short, concise, and tailored to your customer's needs.

You won't have your prospect's attention for long, especially since so much content is competing for their time. So it would be best if you made your pitch solid and fast. And don't forget to include a clear CTA at the end – this will help you track lead generation.

Conversion

Your customers have learned everything they need to know about your solution and how it can benefit them. But they're not entirely sold on you – and your competitors are still looking pretty good.

So it's time to bring out your most vital video assets; customer testimonials, case studies, and demos. Leverage video storytelling to show prospects how your product improved your customers' lives. 

How To Come Up With Video Ideas

Video is excellent for engaging your audience, but coming up with fresh ideas isn't easy. Here are some ways to help you develop engaging video content ideas. 

Survey your customers

The best way to discover video ideas relevant to your audience is to ask them. But don't ask them to share video ideas outright – you won't get any responses. 

Instead, try conducting surveys to collect information about:

• What problems your customers are facing
• What features do your customers like
• What feature requests do your customers have
• Why do your customers prefer you over competitors

Collecting this information will help your marketing brainstorm and create relevant video content that speaks to your buyer's needs. 

Perform keyword research

Keyword research helps you learn what your target audience is already searching for. You can identify their problems, questions they need answers to, and what competitors they're considering.

So, keyword research helps fuel your video marketing efforts by tailoring your content to what your prospects are searching for. You can also perform keyword research on YouTube to see what type of video content your audience is actively seeking out.

YouTube is rolling its keyword research tool out to the public, and Ahrefs has a free YouTube keyword tool. You can use either of these tools for YT keyword research.

Research your competitors

Keeping tabs on your competitors gives you a better idea of what video content works and doesn't. 

Check your competitors' video content out on the website, social media, and YouTube (if they have a company channel). You can then check engagement metrics to see how users responded to the content. 

You don't need to limit yourself to competitors' video content. You can take things a step further by:

• Checking out competitors' reviews to identify customer pain points (and create video content addressing them).
• Analyzing your competitors' popular written content and seeing if you can make a high-value video addressing similar topics.

If your customers are the best source of video content ideas, your competitors are the second best.  

The Limits of Relying on Social Media for Video Marketing

Third-party platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube hold a monopoly over video content. This is because it's easy to publish content on these platforms and reach your target audience. 

But should you limit yourself to these platforms? Social media sites and YouTube offer limited performance data, so it isn't easy to calculate ROI on these platforms. 

Platforms like Instagram can increase your brand awareness and move customers towards conversions, but you won't know unless they make precise actions (e.g., clicking on your business ad). This makes it difficult to calculate ROI because much of the video's benefits are locked behind intangible metrics. 

Another big blow for brands is the video's limitations on these platforms. You can't create shoppable videos which increase engagement and conversions. It's also easier to calculate ROI with shoppable videos because you can directly monitor conversions.

We've also found that brands dislike video marketing on third-party platforms because of the limited control and shared territory. Customers could be viewing your content one minute, only to be hit by a competitor's video ad in the next. And there's not much you can do about users leaving bad reviews that can harm conversions. 

How You Benefit From Video Marketing

Videos are becoming more common in the customer journey

Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing report highlighted the rising importance of video in the customer journey. Since 2018, the number of online videos people watch has almost doubled. And marketers are observing an increase in engagement and conversions thanks to video marketing.

Video marketing thus plays a crucial role in educating your customers and moving them along their journey. 

You own your video performance data 

If you host your videos on a dedicated 3rd party hosting platform (as opposed to a social media platform/YouTube), you'll own your performance data. To determine video performance, you can measure impressions, conversions, watch time, and other crucial KPIs. 

And owning this data is vital to improving your video marketing efforts. 

Granular data about customer behavior and demographics are more available

Videos give you lots of granular data for understanding customer behavior because you can monitor different types of metrics. For example, in a traditional video, you can monitor what percentage of video customers are watching, if they're engaging with the video, and how many videos they choose to watch in a single session. 

In shoppable videos, you have even more metrics to work with. You can track 'added to cart,' conversion rates, and abandoned cart rates. If you embed your videos on your website, you can combine video metrics with demographic data to observe how different audiences engage with your videos.

How to Use Video Marketing

You can leverage video marketing to supercharge your email and SMS marketing campaigns. Or, you can use videos on your website and landing pages to directly improve engagement and conversions.

Email

There's a strong case for video marketing improving the performance of your emails. Including video content in your emails can increase click-through rates by as much as 300%, and it can reduce opt-outs by up to 75%

Here are a few ideas for how you can leverage video marketing in your emails:

• Delight customers with a special holiday video, wishing them happy holidays and offering them special discounts.
• Send personalized birthday celebration videos to improve customer loyalty.
• Include demo videos to build hype for your new product launch
• Improve your welcome emails with a video that walks new subscribers through your offering

SMS

Similar to how video marketing can improve your email campaigns, it can also help you capture more engagement for your SMS campaigns. If you're launching a new product or flash sale, a link to a short video (15-30 seconds) in your SMS campaign can help spread the message.

Text messaging boasts the highest open rates of any communication channel - hitting a solid 98% open rate on average. So you can leverage SMS to capture your customer's attention and video content to keep it. 

Tip: if you include links to videos in your text messages, consider shortening them. Since SMS has a 160 characters limit, a long URL can eat up your word count. 

3rd party sites

Are you looking to increase sales, average order values, and conversions? Then creating a shoppable video might be your best bet. But as we mentioned earlier, platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok don't offer shoppable video features. 

That's where 3rd party sites like VideoWise come in. They let you include shoppable features to your existing video content and embed the videos directly on your website. 

You'll still need to drive traffic towards these pages, but your videos will act as salespeople after you do. 

The Key KPIs For Success With Video Marketing

As with any marketing initiative, video marketing isn't like waving a magic wand. You'll have videos that do well and underperforming ones. But to get the most out of your video marketing, you need to track successes and optimize your content.

And here are the most important KPIs for measuring your success. 

Conversions

Conversions are the most important KPI for measuring your video's success. But depending on which stage of their journey your buyer is at, the conversion will vary. 

For example, you might include a CTA for buyers in the awareness stage to sign-up for your email list or watch an explainer video. But for a buyer in the conversion stage, you'd measure conversions by the products they purchase from your shoppable videos. 

Watch rate

Watch rate is an approximate percentage of how long the average viewer spends watching your video. If your watch rate is low, it could indicate that your video is either too long or not engaging enough. 

Added time on site

Added time on site is a relative metric that measures how long consumers spend on your website before and after including video content. If the added time on your site increases after adding video content, it's a positive indicator that your content is performing well.

You can calculate the added time on site by measuring the average time a user spends on your site before and after video content was added and subtracting the results. 

Videos watched

This simple metric indicates the overall quality of your video content and how integrated your video marketing strategy is. A high number of videos watched can suggest that your video content adequately addresses your buyer's needs at each journey stage. 

It can also mean that buyers are interested in multiple products in your store and that your upselling and cross-selling efforts are successful.

Since the number of videos watched can indicate different types of successes, it's essential to evaluate the kind of viewed videos, too.

How VideoWise Makes Video Marketing Easy

VideoWise is a leading shoppable video solution that helps you provide customers with a memorable, next-level shopping experience. 

Easily shareable links

VideoWise's shareable links make it easy for you to embed videos in your Shopify store or to include them in your email/SMS marketing campaigns. 

Shoppable videos

VideoWise lets you seamlessly make any video shoppable, empowering you to increase conversions and deliver a tailored customer experience. 

Powerful analytics

VideoWise comes with advanced reporting and analytics that help you measure video performance at each stage of the buyer's journey.

You can accurately measure your videos' impact with statistics like conversion rate increases, ROI, engagement rate, and added session time.

Conclusion

When consumers want more video content, video marketing lets you deliver tailored experiences in the format your customers wish.