We’re not breaking any new ground when we say that every brand today needs its own video marketing strategy. We all know that video is the way forward. But the emphasis you need to be putting on video in your campaign is something that has changed.

Video is so important on every platform and channel that it can’t just be one slice of your perfectly-crafted marketing pie, it needs to be the main ingredient in the filling. Video marketing needs to play a key role in your outreach and campaign efforts.

It’s been predicted by a Facebook executive that the social media platform will be made up entirely of video within five years. Video isn’t only here to stay; it’s still growing.

And although you should of course be optimising your content for Google, you shouldn’t be leaving the world’s second largest search engine – YouTube – behind. YouTube is not only one of the primary online search tools, but it’s also a really important traffic driver for corporate websites.

It’s been predicted by a Facebook executive that the social media platform will be made up entirely of video within five years. Video isn’t only here to stay; it’s still growing.

And although you should of course be optimising your content for Google, you shouldn’t be leaving the world’s second largest search engine – YouTube – behind. YouTube is not only one of the primary online search tools, but it’s also a really important traffic driver for corporate websites.

Before you even think about picking up a camera, you need to understand the different video types to be able to figure out exactly what you want to create and why. Here’s a quick rundown:

Demo Videos

Demo videos are pretty simple; you’ve got a product, and you want to show how it works. Whether it’s high-tech computer software or a pineapple peeler, demo videos can help you explain.

Brand Videos

Brand videos are a key ingredient in a company’s bigger advertising campaign to showcase their vision, mission, products or services. As well as this, brand videos give you the chance to highlight the why and the what of your brand, to attract the right audience.

Video Blog

A video blog is a great way to give a feel of your corporate identity while giving an authentic behind-the-scenes shot of your company. On top of this, a video blog can be a funny and entertaining way to get your audience engaged about your company and what you do.

Event Videos

Event videos are the perfect opportunity to show just how inspiring and awesome your company’s events are. Maybe you’ve got a conference coming up, a fundraiser, or even a summer BBQ? Event videos can help to advertise your upcoming event, and also keep people up-to-date and informed during the event itself. Plus by getting the whole thing on camera you can create a showreel that showcases your event and ethos all year round.

Expert Interviews

It never hurts to have experts, influencers or thought-leaders in your industry do short interviews on camera. Expert interviews give you the chance to get pearls of wisdom or new points of view in front of your target audience. You can use expert interviews to build trust and credibility, and educate your audience on the industry.

How-To Videos

How-to videos are a great opportunity to teach your viewers something new. How-to videos can give your audience the background they need to better understand your solution, while also helping to establish your brand as a thought leader.

Explainer Videos

Explainer videos explain your product or service in a short time and can help your audience understand why they should spend their hard-earned cash on it. Explainer videos often tell a fictional story of how a company’s solution is the answer to a problem experienced by their core buyer persona. There are two main types of explainer videos:

1. Animated Explainer Videos

Animated explainer videos are a fun way to explain what you offer and can highlight what makes your product or service unique, in a simple and effective way. Animated explainer videos are also especially useful when it comes to explaining sensitive topics, intangible ideas or complex concepts. Check out one of our best animated explainer videos here.

2. Live Explainer Videos

Live explainer videos allow you to explain your product or service in a more emotive way, human to human. Because they use footage of real people, live explainer videos help to create a connection with the audience and make your product more tangible by showing how it works in real life. Check out a great example of live explainer videos right here.

Live and Animation Videos

Combining both styles in one video can make your video game even stronger. Animation lifts a live video by adding another dimension of creativity and humor that keeps your audience hooked for even longer.

Testimonial Videos

The best tools at any company’s disposal are its loyal, happy customers. Testimonial videos give your clients the chance to talk about their experience working with you and explain how you helped them reach their goals. A few good testimonial videos on your website can really help to build trust and show your audience how well your product or service works.

Video Signatures

Video signatures let you and your colleagues give a bit more personality to your emails. A fun, snappy message in the form of video signatures not only shows the friendly face behind the name, but helps your clients feel more connected to who they’re working with.

Logo Animation Videos

Logo animation videos are a short and sweet way to instantly brighten your website and social media pages. They can help you stand out from the crowd and trigger potential clients.

Phototeaser Videos

Phototeaser videos are snackable videos that are easy for your target audience to digest. They’re short enough to keep viewers engaged until the very end and are perfect for social media sharing!

Stopmotion Video

Stopmotion video is a way of creating a video using a series of photos without the need for animation. A stopmotion video is a fun and visually appealing way to impress your audience and make sure they remember your company or product.

Loop or GIF

A loop or GIF is a very short, eye-catching video created by setting a key scene or visual on repeat. The movement and humor of a loop or GIF helps to catch the attention of the viewer and creates an easy-to-consume video that gets your key message across again and again!

Cinemagraph Video

A cinemagraph video gives a bit of sparkle to a regular image by adding a hint of motion. High-quality photos are given the magic touch to produce beautiful results that offer something different.

Mini Course Videos

Some topics are complex or lengthy enough that they need a series of explanations – or mini course videos – to really get the point across. Mini course videos are handy for delving deep into a topic while showing expertise and claiming thought leadership.

Video Articles

Video articles let you jazz up those old texts and make the information more visually appealing. Plus by transforming your text into a video that grabs your audience’s attention, video articles can help to drive more traffic to your website.

YouTube Ads

With only 5 seconds to grab a viewer’s attention and convince them not to skip, creating YouTube ads is an art. But when done right, YouTube ads can increase sales or brand awareness, and trigger your audience while they’re on YouTube.

TV Ads

Unique TV ads can get your audience talking. By incorporating sound, images and movement, TV ads let you showcase your product to a wide audience in an eye-catching way.

Lifehack Videos

Everyone loves lifehack videos, whether they show the easiest way to cut a mango or a solution to stop socks getting lost in the laundry. Lifehack videos contain simple, valuable, shareable tricks about your product that can make your customer’s life easier, so why not help them out?

Livestream Videos

Showing your company’s interviews, presentations and events in real-time through livestream videos builds bonds with your audience by giving them a peek behind-the-scenes. Encourage viewers to comment on your livestream videos and ask questions for yet more engagement.

360-Degree Videos

360-degree videos give your audience a whole new experience. Viewers can scroll around to see a video from whichever angle they choose, giving them complete control over what they see. The spherical video style of 360-degree videos is best for experiencing a location or event like a music festival or diving with sharks.

Virtual Reality Videos

Virtual reality videos allow your audience to experience something in a way that might normally be difficult or impossible. Virtual reality videos give the viewer control of their environment; they have the ability to move around and interact with their surroundings, for example picking up objects, and opening and closing doors. Virtual reality videos put the viewer in the driving seat.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is an enhanced version of reality. By adding a digital layer to your video view of the world, augmented reality allows you to simulate situations and objects. The technology lets viewers experience personalized content and products in an e-commerce setting, giving them a really memorable viewing experience.

Personalised Messages

Sometimes emails are just too predictable. Recording personalised messages to send to a client to continue a conversation or sum up a meeting can be a great way to give them that moment of delight and drive them further down the purchasing funnel. Soapbox or Loom are examples of some super-simple video tools that can help.

Fundamentals of creating your video marketing strategy

So you know more about video marketing than you ever have before. You know about making videos, you know where to host them, and you’re eager to get started. But there’s one thing to think about before you start making masterpieces.

You’ve got to clearly define the goals for your video marketing strategy and find the right metrics to help you measure its success. There might be multiple goals like increasing brand awareness, improving engagement, or bumping up conversions. But it’s best to be selective and stick to one or two goals per video. If you have too many, your videos lose focus and you risk your viewers not knowing what action to take.

Defining your video marketing goals

When you’re considering what your goals are, be sure to keep your buyer persona and target audience in mind. How old are they? What do they do? What are their interests? How do they consume media? What stage of the customer journey are they in? These are all important questions in determining the type of video you should be making and where it should be posted. For example, if your target audience is unfamiliar with your company, it’s better to create a brand awareness video before making a detailed product video. And it’ll need hosting on a site with a large reach, such as YouTube.

Understanding the success of your video marketing

Now for the technics; the metrics. Metrics help you to understand the performance of your videos and measure their success. Although it’s tempting, you shouldn’t get too fixated on the view count of your video. There are a variety of different metrics that can give you valuable information for your campaign:

View Count

As the name clearly states, the view count is the number of times your video has been viewed, and is also referred to as reach. If your goal is to improve brand awareness and get your content seen by as many people as possible, view count is great to track. But don’t forget that each hosting platform measures a view differently. A view on YouTube is 30 seconds long, while a view on Facebook is only 3 seconds.

Play Rate

Play rate is the percentage of people who’ve pressed play on your video divided by the number of impressions it’s received. The play rate metric helps to determine how relevant and appealing your video is; if thousands of people are seeing your video but only a few are actually pressing play, your content might need updating.

Social shares and comments

Shares and comments on social media are good indicators of how relevant and up-to-date your content is with your target audience. If a viewer watches your video and better yet, shares it with their network, your content is most likely hitting the spot. Plus the more social shares a video gets, the more times it’ll be viewed. The social sharing and comments metric is a good one to track if you’re wanting to reach a lot of people with your video.

Video Completions

Video completions reflect the number of times your video has been watched from start to finish. Knowing how many people have taken the time to see your video in its entirety can be a more reliable metric than view count when trying to determine the success of your video.

Completion Rate

Completion rate of your video is the number of people who watched the entire video, divided by the number of people who have played it at all. Complete rate is important for understanding your audience’s reaction to your video. For example, a low completion rate suggests that viewers are dropping off at a certain point in the video. This could be a sign that your content isn’t engaging enough, or isn’t well-suited to your target audience.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of times your call to action (CTA) is clicked, divided by the number of times it is viewed. Click-through rate is a great way of assessing how effective your video is at convincing people to take the desired action. A low click-through rate might mean that you need to reconsider your call to action’s design or wording.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the number of times visitors completed the desired action, divided by the number of clicks on the call to action. For example, if the intention is for viewers to sign up for a free trial, the conversion rate gives an idea of the effectiveness of the video and call to action. Try adding a video to your landing page to see if it bumps up your conversion rate.

Bounce Rate and Time on Page

If you’re considering adding a video to your webpage, keep an eye on the page’s bounce rate. This is the amount of time people spend on a single-page visit before leaving again. Once you’ve added the video, check the metrics regularly to see if the video is changing your viewers’ interaction with content and encouraging them to visit more of your site.

Getting prepared for your first video

Now that you’re clued up on every kind of video on offer, you need to think about exactly what you want to achieve with your first video. It’s essential to be clear on what action you’d like your audience to complete after watching the video, as this will influence almost every decision you make during its production.

But that’s not all. Without agreeing on a clear purpose for the video, you’re likely to find yourself in an endless loop of shooting, re-shooting and editing. So set your goals straight from the start.

Use a questionnaire tool like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to make it easier for every stakeholder of the project to have their say on what the video should incorporate.

Things to consider before starting your first video

What’s your video marketing strategy?

What are you trying to do with your video? Launch a new product range? Drive more traffic to your website? Encourage people to sign up for an event? Establish your video strategy clearly from the beginning.

Who is the target audience of your video?

Which buyer persona are you trying to target with your video? This might be a particular segment of your company’s usual target audience.

What social channels are you planning to use for your video?

Will you put your video on Facebook, or on your landing page? It’s great to be able to use videos on multiple social channels, but start off with one where you’re sure your video will be discovered by your target audience.

What’s the deadline for your first video?

Make a clear timeline and keep this in mind throughout the process. Is there a particular event or launch that your video needs to be ready for? A video that needs to be finished tomorrow will have a different budget and scope than one due in three months’ time.

What’s the budget for promoting your video?

Video is an expensive thing to create. So do your research, think carefully, and be realistic about how much money you can spend on your video marketing strategy.

What are the creative needs of your video marketing strategy?

Keeping in mind the budget, timeline, and the skills and resources you already have, think about the creative requirements for your video. What and who will you need to produce the right video to kickstart your video marketing strategy

When will your video be considered successful?

Select a few key performance indicators that correspond with the goals of your video. Once your video is finished and up and running, you’ll be able to measure its success.

Why is scriptwriting for video marketing so important?

Some of the best videos come completely unscripted, such as powerful documentaries or spontaneous vlogs. But when it comes to video for business, it’s always better to start with a script; this way you can be sure you’ll end up with a structured video that has a clear message.

Key things to know about scriptwriting for video marketing

Start off with an outline for your story. List your key points in a logical order and think of what you really can’t afford to miss.

It helps to draft your script in Google Docs as this allows you to work together with colleagues and get real-time feedback. Use the “Insert > Table” trick to get a two-column script layout, putting your voiceover text on the left and visual ideas on the right.

Writing a script for a business video isn’t about building up a dramatic story over the course of the video. You’ve got to hook the viewer early on so you don’t lose their attention. Get them interested by establishing the purpose of the video in the first few sentences, especially when it’s an educational or explainer video.

How to write for video marketing

Once you’ve got a few videos on the production line, you’ll notice a key difference in the language used for a video marketing script compared to a business blog post. Language should be clear, informal and conversational, and is often best written in first person. Stay away from complex sentence structures or overly-sophisticated wording. The trick of a video marketing script is to keep the language concise, while also avoiding jargon and buzzwords. Visuals can be a big part of telling a story, so attempt to use fewer words and rely more on what you see on-screen.

The length of a video script

The length of a video marketing script is surprisingly short. We’re talking a maximum of 150 words for a one-minute video. Online script timers can calculate video script length based on word count, so keep one handy as you write and edit.

Testing your video script

Once you think your video script is ready, it’s time to test it. A table read is the best way to see how the words sound out loud rather than just on paper, and to smooth out any lumps or bumps in the story. Gather a few people- both writers and non-writers- and read through the script multiple times. If you find yourself reading a line differently to what you’ve got on paper, ask yourself why and consider adapting the script accordingly.

YouTube as a video hosting platform

If you ask anyone what their most commonly-used online video platform is, they’ll probably say Youtube. This isn’t a surprise. YouTube is the largest video hosting platform, the second largest search platform after Google, and the third most visited website in the world. 5 billion videos are watched on it every single day. Plus, it’s totally free to upload and optimise your video content. It’s a no brainer.