Video Marketing Strategy: The Complete Guide to Leveraging Video to Grow Your Business
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Video marketing strategy isn't always the easiest thing to master.
If you're struggling to connect with customers, you're not alone.
Your prospective customers are so overwhelmed with content, it can be tough for businesses to cut through.
To compete, your business needs to adapt your marketing strategy to ensure you're producing engaging content.
And that means video.
Your customers are craving video content.
Branded video views saw a year-over-year increase of 258% on Facebook and 99% on YouTube.
But how can your B2B business fit video content into your overall marketing strategy?
In this article, we'll cover everything you'll need to know to plan and execute an impactful video marketing strategy.
This is a comprehensive resource. To navigate to the topics which interest you most, click the links below:
- What is Video Marketing?
- Content Comparison: How Does Video Marketing Perform
- The Benefits of Video Marketing
- Developing Your Video Marketing Strategy
- Executing Your Video Marketing Strategy
- Analyzing Your Video Marketing Strategy
What is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is the integration of video and visual content into your marketing plan to engage, educate, and convert prospects into customers.
Video content began flourishing with the introduction of video publishing capability on various social media networks. Especially, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Marketers are turning to video content to engage customers. There has been a 14% increase of marketers using video in their marketing strategy over the last five years.
To accommodate the growing interest, marketers are increasing video content production and introducing new distribution channels.
YouTube and Facebook are two of the top distribution channels marketers have been capitalizing on in recent years.
But how does video perform compared to other content?
Content Comparison: How Does Video Perform?
Video is king in your social media marketing strategy.
On Facebook, video had the highest engagement rates compared to images, links, and status posts.
Video posts' engagement rate was 6.09%, which is 1.67% more than image posts.
But it doesn't stop there; video performs well on all other social media sites, too!
On Twitter, posts with video content will see up to 10X more engagement than posts without.
On Instagram, video content performs the best, typically resulting in a 47% increase in comments.
Video content also outperforms other forms of content marketing assets like infographics, articles, and "how-to" lists with the most shares on social media.
Marketers agree on video marketing's effectiveness, too. Research shows that 93% of marketers said they've acquired a new customer from a video posted online.
Now that you know why video performs better than other content, let's uncover the benefits of integrating it in your marketing strategy.
The Benefits of Video Marketing
Video marketing can help you grow your business in a variety of ways. Some of the most common benefits of an effective video marketing strategy include:
- Increased Web Traffic. If you aren't adding video content regularly, you're not reaching a chunk of web traffic. In fact, 82% of all consumer internet traffic will come from video by 2020.
- More Qualified Leads. Struggling to get your prospects to convert? Research shows that B2B video marketing results in 66% more qualified leads.
- Improved Search Ranking. As a potential customer browses your site, he or she will stay longer if a video is on the page. In fact, users spend 88% more time on websites with videos. This impacts the users' "dwell time," which is a factor for search engine ranking.
- Increased Revenue. Companies using video increase sales faster than those that don't. Video users had a 13.3% increase in year-over-year revenue compared to an 8.9% increase by the non-video users.
Convinced, yet? All these benefits are waiting if you execute an effective video marketing strategy.
Developing Your Video Marketing Strategy
The planning phase of your video marketing strategy consists of two parts: setting goals and selecting your format.
Setting Your Video Marketing Goals
When integrating video into your marketing strategy, think about the end result you're trying to accomplish.
Outlining the goals you're seeking will help measure the success of your campaign once it's complete. Common goals include:
- Attracting New Customers. Videos serve as a great connecting point between a company's brand, mission, and customers.
- Converting Prospects. Perhaps you've already built an audience, but want to convert them into buyers. Educational "how-to" videos can help qualify prospects.
- Closing Prospects. If you need to nudge prospects, produce videos that give them confidence in your business like testimonials or demos.
- Delighting Customers. If you want to engage prospects, consider an entertaining or inspirational mission-focused video.
Multiple videos can be threaded together in your video marketing strategy to nurture a prospect until he or she is ready to buy.
Understanding how a video marketing funnel works can help you strategically develop the right marketing videos for your intended outcomes.
The top of the video marketing funnel focuses on new audiences that might not be familiar with your brand. Videos towards the bottom focus on generating sales and retaining customers.
Individual marketing videos that accomplish those goals collectively can form a comprehensive video marketing strategy that drives sales for your company.
To accomplish this, you'll need a mix of different video formats to engage prospects or customers at every stage of the funnel.
Selecting Your Video Format
Before you begin, take a look at some of the most common video formats businesses use to drive revenue.
Brand Story Videos
Brand story videos generate brand awareness for people who might not be familiar with your company.
These videos are aspirational to lure the viewer and pique their interest. Over 30% of mobile shoppers choose video as their preferred medium for product discovery.
One example of a brand story video is from Airbnb. The video is shot from the point of view of a train that takes the viewer into different types of settings.
The video is whimsical and on-brand. It effectively showcases what Airbnb is and gives the viewer an idea of Airbnb's mission.
Testimonial Videos
Testimonial videos help users gain confidence in a company's product or service. In them, customers share their unfiltered experience with the company in an authentic way.
These videos don't have to be flashy. In fact, they can be simple. All you need to do is reach out to a customer and see if they'll participate.
The end result can drive more leads for your business and grow consumer confidence.
Not only do they help generate sales, but testimonials drive 62% more revenue from each potential customer.
A great example is the below testimonial video from Explainify (a video animation agency) that they recorded with their client, Plated.
In this video, Josh Lite, Director of Performance Marketing at Plated, talks about the detailed focus and personalized service he received when working with Explainify.
This video helps prospective customers consider how they can integrate Explainify into their tech stack.
In addition, it adds faces to the company, providing an emotional tie and human feel to the business relationship.
Commercials
Sometimes, businesses need a promo video to showcase their products.
These don't always focus on products. In fact, the main goal is often to entertain and educate the consumer about the company.
Microsoft Teams produced a commercial that showcased how their product helps people "be there when they are not."
The commercial featured intimate group meetings in different settings and highlighted how those who weren't in the meetings wouldn't be "in the know."
This relayed the problem that Microsoft Teams is solving.
Case Studies
Case studies showcase products in an authentic setting. They help prospects understand the potential of what your company can do for them.
Greencopper, a mobile app software company for live events, has a whole page of video case studies that showcase the apps they've created for clients.
The case study showcases the finished product and a use case. In this example, you'll see the app Greencopper created for Life is Beautiful music festival.
Case studies often include a quote from the client who purchased the product. It isn't essential, but it's a nice way to improve the authenticity of the use case.
Product Demos
Product demos showcase the breadth of features built into your product.
Monday.com, a team management tool, included product demo videos on their landing pages that outlined specific use cases.
This video on their "Remote Work" landing page highlights how the customer can use Monday.com as a remote work solution.
Product demos don't have to go in-depth. A two-minute video that shows a specific use case and the software's functionality can go far.
These are just some of the different formats of videos to include in your video strategy.
Once you've selected one, it's time to execute!
Executing Your Video Marketing Strategy
There are four steps for creating your first video: story planning, shooting, editing, and distributing.
Planning your Video's Story
Now that you know your goal and format, it's time to plan your story.
No matter what type of personalized video you're creating — testimonials, commercials, instructional — it's good to keep the format of a story arc in mind.
Your video should use a story arc to achieve the desired outcome. With a story arc, you need to plan your video with four elements:
- Characters. Who is your target audience?
- Conflict. What problems are your prospects facing?
- Resolution. How does your product or service solve the problem?
- CTA. What do you want the viewer to do next?
Story arcs can be applied to all types of videos including commercials, testimonials, case studies, and more.
Take a look at this case study example from MailChimp. The 17th Street Athletic Club's story follows a story arc.
The client explains that marketing has always been their "Achilles heel" and MailChimp saved the day with their omnichannel marketing solution.
There is no CTA in the video, but there was one right below it on the landing page. After the viewer finishes, they can click on "Start with a Landing Page" to sign up.
Once you're done with story planning, you're ready to start shooting!
Shooting your Video
It's the most important task: getting it all on film.
Poorly shot videos can be detrimental to your video marketing efforts. If you don't feel confident with video production, you should outsource this part.
If you feel up to video production, take a look at these three important items:
- Camera. Consider the Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K — Digital Trend's highest-rated video camera on the market for a cost-friendly price.
- Microphone. Check out the Rode smartLav+ Omnidirectional Lavalier Microphone, a low-cost lavalier microphone that you can quickly clip on and start recording.
- Lighting. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you can choose from clamp or studio lighting. Clamp lights are cost-efficient, while studio lights help control brightness, flash, and exposure.
You'll probably save money with us rather than purchasing all the equipment you'll need to shoot a high-quality brand video.
We know how expensive video equipment can be, and once you get it, the cut might not look how you want it. That's why sometimes it's best to leave it to the pros.
Testimonial Hero can create high-quality videos for your business with full-scale production, no travel fees, and fast turnaround.
Editing the Video
Footage that isn't edited is just like a steak that's waiting to be put on the grill.
You don't have to be Spielberg to assemble a polished final cut. Online video editing software can help, including:
- Adobe Premiere Pro - the standard in high-quality video editing software. It allows the user to edit any type of footage, integrates with all Adobe projects, and can work on any device.
- Magisto - this "smart video" maker promises that customers can "make a video in minutes." Upload your footage, choose a style, and use their built-in AI software to analyze and edit the video for you.
- Biteable - for a quick, low-cost option, consider Biteable to "create stunning videos in minutes." Enjoy templates, stock footage, and an easy way to edit and share your videos to bring your digital marketing and video marketing efforts to life.
These editing tools are easy to learn and put you in control of the success of your spot.
Distributing your Video
Lastly, with a final cut in hand, you need to begin executing your promotional strategy. How will people see your work?
Let's focus on three of the most popular distribution channels: social media, email, and the web.
Social Media
Send it out! Share it with your followers across all your social media platforms.
Social media is a great way to get additional exposure and attract new customers who might see your video appear in their feed.
However, each social media network has different dimensions for social video posts. It's important to cut your video to ensure optimal sizing and upload directly to each platform.
Consumers are seeking more video content. More than 67% of consumers prefer video posts as the "most transparent" compared to other types of posts on social media.
Include your new video in your newsletter and other nurture emails.
Umbel, a data management platform, leverages its newsletter subscriber base to promote pre-recorded webinars featuring clients.
This gets your video delivered directly to your prospects and customers. By including it in an email campaign, you'll learn more about their video preferences and tastes.
Your Website
Hosting a video on your website can have meaningful effects on your business.
Adding video to a landing page increases conversion rates by 80%.
Many companies including Constant Contact prominently feature a product demo video on their email landing page.
If your video is a resource, consider locking or “gating” it on your site as a lead magnet.
Services like Vidyard can help you gate your video, so the user must provide their email in order to watch.
Once you have their email, you can reach out to them and nurture them if they are a qualified lead.
Analyzing Your Video Marketing Strategy
So, did your video marketing campaign work?
The answer lies in reviewing your initial goals that you set at the start of the campaign.
However, no matter the purpose of your video, there are three types of metrics to evaluate: awareness, consideration, and action metrics.
Awareness Metrics
Awareness metrics focus on how many people watched the videos. These include views, impressions, unique users, awareness lift, and ad recall lift.
These metrics help you get a surface-level understanding of how your video resonated with your audience.
However, it sometimes isn’t enough just to focus on views. You need to go beyond that to understand how long users viewed the video and what they absorbed from it.
Consideration Metrics
Moving beyond standard video engagements, it’s important to evaluate a video’s watch time.
What good is it if someone just engaged with the video, but didn’t fully watch it?
Consideration metrics include view-through rate, watch time, favorability lift, consideration lift, and brand interest lift.
Action Metrics
Action metrics are the KPIs that quantify how many viewers took a deliberate action after watching the movie. These are often the most important metrics to measure.
Action metrics include clicks, calls, signups, sales, and purchase intent lift.
By analyzing who viewed your video and eventually made a purchase, you can discover the return on investment (ROI) for your video marketing efforts.
Final Thoughts
A properly planned and executed video marketing strategy can increase sales and grow your business.
Marketers who aren’t deploying videos as a component of their marketing strategy are leaving money on the table.
A worthwhile video marketing strategy begins with setting your marketing goals and selecting your video format.
There are plenty of video formats to choose including testimonials, case studies, product demos, commercials, and dozens more.
After your planning is complete, you can begin the writing, shooting, editing, and distribution of your content.
This distribution stage is critical to ensure that your work is reaching your target audience and performing in the way that it is intended.
Once those stages are complete, you can evaluate the success of your video marketing strategy by examining awareness, consideration and action KPIs.
Now that you know what it takes for an effective video marketing strategy, reach out so Testimonial Hero can create video marketing content to grow your business!
Dan shares on:
Brokers no longer need to spend hours each week tagging conversations manually and adding notes after each call—ZRA does all that for them.
During customer calls, brokers, salespeople, and customer success agents can easily see AI-generated notes from previous interactions and continue the conversation, whether it involves offering the customer more information about a particular token or solving a simple troubleshooting issue like two-factor authentication.
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After each call, ZRA will automatically create a summary and generate a list of the next steps to complete the onboarding. “Our onboarding team can now save time. When engaging with a customer, they can focus and prioritize that customer conversation.”
With automatic, AI-enabled insights into customer calls, Caleb & Brown now uses the intelligence gathered from conversations to guide business decisions. “When we want to start a new customer acquisition campaign or explore a new business line, we have insights into what matters most to our customers,” Dan says. “We can adjust our acquisition strategy and the key messages we use in our comms to match what we see.”
ZRA makes data sharing between teams easier, so brokers can share customer feedback with product and engineering teams—something they couldn’t do easily before. “In the past, it was quite clunky to pull a clip or audio file to share with other teams. Now, they can easily search through transcripts and provide those snippets as text snippets. It’s been a huge improvement to our workflow,” Dan says.
The enhanced collaboration—furthered by the adoption of Zoom Chat and Zoom Meetings—has also improved security. Teams can communicate faster and use ZRA to share data and call recordings to identify bad actors and confirm client identities quickly.
"Our teams can look at the data and make sure the voice and conversation style matches previous conversations. The auto-generated transcript that ZRA provides makes it much easier to search previous conversations." — Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
In addition to tightening security, ZRA has made it easier for Caleb & Brown to track potential compliance issues and conduct quality assurance.
Along with ZRA, Caleb & Brown adopted Zoom Phone.
As a distributed company with global teams, it was important to ensure that distance didn’t impact customer experience. According to Dan, their previous provider “had significant latency issues and delays in the conversation. It made conversations quite disjointed and felt very unnatural.”
Switching to Zoom Phone solved those issues, and with the seamless integration of ZRA, they’ve gained data analysis capabilities they didn’t have before.
Since they’ve started working with Zoom Phone and ZRA, Caleb & Brown has gathered valuable data from every single customer call. “Previously, only a fraction of those calls were analyzed and reviewed. Now it’s 100%, and our team doesn’t have to do anything—the software does it for us. It’s quite magical,” Dan says.
This analysis has led to significant time savings and given the team a deeper understanding of their customers.
“Understanding those conversations and what topics matter most to our customers at scale has been absolutely phenomenal. We can’t put an exact number on it, but days, months, years of work have been saved.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
Caleb & Brown have gotten so much value from Zoom Phone and ZRA that they’ve expanded their Zoom ecosystem.
One such integration involves Salesforce. ZRA integrates directly with Salesforce, which means agents no longer have to spend time searching for the information they need. When a customer calls, their profile pops on the screen, allowing agents and brokers to swiftly navigate through that customer's data for additional context for a particular request. “If a customer wants to update their address, for example, the agent can click see and change that information directly in Salesforce. The useability is phenomenal,” Dan says.
Another addition is Zoom Contact Center, which provides a better way for the global support team to service customers. Rather than having support team members to have unique phone numbers, they leverage intelligent routing to streamline call volume through a single phone number. This capability makes reporting much clearer, as it's easier for leadership to understand the types of conversations being had and who is having those conversations.
With so many solutions to offer, Zoom enables Caleb & Brown to improve productivity, know their customers better, and get deeper deal insights to drive more revenue.
“One of the biggest benefits of working with Zoom is their complete product line. Having one provider that you can go to for many solutions makes things quite easy.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
