Creating a video marketing strategy in five easy steps

Before you even contemplate pressing that record button, it’s vital that you have a video marketing strategy in place. Like every good plan, it should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Lots of aspects of marketing use SMART goals, and a video marketing plan is no different. Doing so means you avoid the ‘scattergun’ approach, which often leads to poor results and your hard work getting lost in the noise of the online video world.

With 30% of people watching online videos regularly, getting in front of some of these viewers is crucial. For your videos to really work, you need a more strategic approach.

Five steps to follow for a successful video marketing strategy

Step 1: Identify your audience

Getting consumers to pay attention to your marketing efforts among a sea of advertisers and brands means creating targeted, personalised experiences. When you fully understand your target audience, you can make much better decisions about the messages you want to get across.

A targeted audience refers to the very specific group of people who are most likely to want or need your products or services. These are the people you need to be directing your video content towards. Your audience can be dictated by their interests, location, gender, age, income, or a number of other factors.

Once you’ve profiled your audience, approach your content as if you were the consumer. What are you offering? How will you enrich their lives? And so on. Think what type of video content would engage you, and apply this to the content you’re making.

A one-size-fits-all content plan is ineffective. It needs to be relevant and of value to a very specific, targeted group of people.

Step 2: Determine your goals

One of the most crucial things to consider when starting your video marketing is what you want to achieve. You’ll likely have many goals you’re hoping to reach, such as:

• raising awareness of your brand

• bringing in new leads

• improving conversion rates

Your goal for each video you create should be front and centre during the production process. Goals have a considerable bearing on what platform you upload the video to, so adapt to this.

It’s essential that your goals are well-defined, measurable, concrete and achievable, with clear deadlines. For example, reaching 10,000 views is reasonable, but it matters greatly whether you plan to achieve this in a month or a decade.

The priority of your goals may change over time, and it’s common for brands to switch and adapt consistently before finding a video production that truly thrives at achieving their aims.

Examples of SMART goals in video marketing

• Attracting a large number of views

• Obtaining many unique viewers

• Communicating with your target audience

• Gaining viewer loyalty

• Enticing viewer engagement

• Increasing your exposure through consumers sharing your content

• Generating click-throughs

• Receiving subscribers

• Improving conversion rates

Step 3: Choose the right platform for video

If you’re launching a brand-new product for existing clients to switch to, they’re not going to seek this out on YouTube. A landing page, an email campaign or a social media platform where your followers already are would be better options.

Informing your existing consumers on existing platforms can increase brand loyalty, especially if these people are the first to know of any changes to your business.

However, if you’re trying to increase your exposure, YouTube is one of the best platforms for this. In fact, it’s a platform that more than 60% of businesses are currently using.

Getting more views on YouTube

Here are my four favoured free and easy ways to get more views on YouTube:

• Create compelling content: Consistently create videos that solve a consumer’s problem or meet their needs. This is the greatest way of developing a loyal community of fans, which leads to more YouTube views.

• Encourage people to subscribe: Retaining consumers is a powerful way to grow a business. When consumers subscribe to your videos, they’re notified of your next upload and are more inclined to watch it. How do you get people to subscribe? Simply ask them to.

• Create playlists: Auto-play is a great way to keep a consumer on your channel. When great videos just keep playing, a cognitive bias called ‘loss aversion’ is at work here. Playlists also help improve search rankings, so they are effective in two ways.

• Be aware of watch time: YouTube ranks videos higher the longer they’re watched. So avoid getting straight to the point early on in the video – once consumers have the details, what’s left to keep them tuned in?

With over a billion hours of video watched daily on YouTube, there’s so much that goes into capturing an audience here. But nothing is beyond the realms of possibility.

Step 4: Decide the aim of each video

It often works much better if each video has a single aim. This could be providing information about a product or service, for example. Condense the details within the video, and they’re more likely to sink in with the viewer.

If you’re showcasing every one of your products and services, and giving tons of information for each, it’ll be too much.

You could dedicate a video series to products and make a video for each one. Titles such as ‘How to…’ and product demonstrations go down exceptionally well on most video platforms.

Step 5: Set a realistic budget

It’s so important to have a realistic budget that’s appropriate for the level of production for your brand or business. Don’t see this as a cost but an investment, and consider how much a client is worth to you and that client’s lifetime value.

There are certainly things you can do that don’t cost a lot, but also some things that are really worth investing in, such as:

• consistent branding

• filming equipment

• editing software

• many aspects of your overall marketing campaign

As well as financial resources, it’s also incredibly important to invest time in video marketing. From research and writing to shooting and editing, these are all areas in which you shouldn’t cut corners.

Final takeaways

I hope these five steps are useful. Remember, you don’t have to do this all at once – many things can come later down the line when you reprioritise your goals.

Investing time is just as important as investing money, and make sure you always see these steps as investments rather than losses.

Be prepared to adapt and change, as trends, consumer habits and the economy fluctuate. Also, don’t forget to watch my own video for more tips and tricks on video marketing strategies.

Relevant resources

• The essential checklist for new video marketers

• How to create videos to promote your small business

• Lunch and Learn: Creating videos that turn browsers into customers