Video — it’s everywhere. Or at least it will be soon. By 2021, Cisco estimates that video will make up 82 percent of all internet traffic. In 2016 alone, video accounted for 73 percent of all internet traffic. The video platform YouTube already has well over a billion users, and that number continues to grow. Thus, developing a video content marketing strategy is one of the most important decisions many marketers make.
It makes sense that smart content marketers have started to pay attention to creating video content marketing strategies. Such strategies involve using video content to create determined goals and reach a target audience. Creating a video content marketing strategy is very similar to creating a standard content marketing strategy. So, if you already have one of those in place, you’re a step ahead.
Before we get into the process of making a video content marketing strategy, let’s take a look at why video has become the content to beat in recent years.
Why Is Video So Popular?
The biggest reason video is popular with content marketers is audiences are likely to stay engaged when video’s involved. According to Hubspot, the top 5 percent of videos retained 77 percent of their viewers until the end.
Even videos that didn’t perform so well still kept people’s interest. For example, short videos — those under 90 seconds — retain more than half of their viewers. On average, most videos retain about 37 percent of viewers to the end.
People also tend to find value in videos. As Forrester put it, one video is worth 1.8 million words. Your message can actually reach your audience in video in ways a text-based article or blog post doesn’t do justice.
Video also has positive effects on SEO ranking and email click-through rates. One report found that putting a video in an email increased the click-through rate by up to 300 percent. A web page with a video on it is 53 times more likely to land on Google’s first page than a website without video.
How to Put Together a Video Content Marketing Strategy
The ingredients needed when putting together a video content marketing strategy include a goal, an audience, and the video content itself.
Follow these steps to create an effective, workable strategy:
Set your goals
Without a goal, there’s really no point to a strategy, as the goal is what you’re working toward. Video content marketing can help you achieve a range of goals, such as getting audience members to hang around and watch your content, improving your site’s SEO, and getting people to remember your brand’s name.
Create your audience
Who are you going to target with your video content? What do they want from life, and from you? Along with knowing the demographic details about your audience, such as their age range, interests, careers, and education level, you also want to ask what type of videos they’d be interested in watching.
Assign team roles
Your video content marketing strategy needs a team to carry it out, and that team needs to have specific, assigned roles. For example, you need someone to create the videos, but also someone to make sure quality is up to snuff, someone to handle promotion and distribution, and someone to analyze and examine the metrics of each video.
Produce the videos
Whether you decide to outsource video creation to a group of freelancers or handle it in-house, you’ll need to have an idea of the format you’ll use for each video, and an idea of the topic of each video. According to Hubspot, testimonials and videos that explain or show how to do something are among the most popular.
Develop a plan for distribution and promotion
Decide on how you’ll get the videos out to the world, or at least out in front of your intended audience. Most likely, a combination of organic posts and paid posts on social media will help your videos find the widest audience possible.
If you combine the steps above, you should end up with a workable strategy for video content marketing. Just remember that as video technology changes and the needs of your brand change, you might need to revisit your video strategy from time to time and make adjustments so that it continues to be a good fit for your brand and its video goals.
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