It’s no secret that video is vital to becoming a valuable contributor to today’s digital marketing world. With exponential growth year-over-year of consumption across digital streaming devices, (and more than ever before through mobile, tablets, laptop/desktops, connected TVs., etc.) it presents a golden opportunity for supporting various business goals and valuable engagement with today’s content-hungry audiences in both organic content building and paid media strategy.

Streaming Services

As a marketer piecing together your Paid Media Plan, video content could provide an efficient path to an extensive reach of fine-tuned targeted audiences across a multitude of ad supported streaming services and OTT options, vast social media platforms, website and app networks, programmatic providers…the list goes on. Not to mention the format and placement options have the potential to be as effective as possible in delivering the right message and visual to key buyers of the product/brand or service. Like most ads, you also have the ability to control the customer journey with the clickable factor leading a viewer closer to a conversion point.

2020 provided us with the derailment of normal life for the majority of the year due to the pandemic Covid-19, and the stay-at-home lock downs during Q1 and most of Q2 accelerated the viewership and streaming of video content. Nielsen recently reported some amazing streaming consumption stats, indicating viewership is up 74% compared to 2019. And the stats aren’t just coming from the top-of-mind, larger streaming sites such as Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. The data also reports that almost 25% of total consumption is beyond the core, top 5 platforms. Take note marketers: this is a power moment for video strategy at all budget-levels in a highly engaged landscape.

Content Marketing

While putting dollars behind a video ad campaign is one option, it may not be feasible for all advertisers. However, content marketing on organic levels can be just as effective. There are benefits to producing and uploading video content designed strategically to support important KPIs that measure towards overall brand growth and sustained engagement objectives. Moreover, sprinkle some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) magic to help boost the optimal opportunity for discoverability and it becomes a truly powerful marketing asset.

Video Marketing Strategy

So where to start? We rounded out the top three main tips below on how to organize and position your video content strategy:

1. “Why?” What is your video content’s purpose?
2. “Who?” Know your audience as well as you know your product or service.
3. “Where?” Tailor your content to the intended platform, whether it’s your owned website or social pages.

Data, data, data. Content creation is balanced on the capability of strong creativity and, more importantly, understanding insights or analytics. Ultimately, same as every other consumer touch-point, it should be optimized to effectively catch the attention, keep the audience engaged, and deliver a purpose. Being able to answer a “why” behind it to avoid falling short on desired outcome, and resources used, is key.

One example: say you are a small business service provider looking to build a credibility footprint in your industry area and raise one up against competitors, you may want to target producing education-focused videos that provide evergreen value for consumers while establishing the expertise needed to drive consideration towards further engagement. Testimonials, or even case study, videos that provide benchmark comparisons all serve a purpose and support the sales funnel. Ask: where does your brand or service fall short and could benefit from optimized video content?

Data research platforms used heavily in SEO practices, such as SemRush can also help identify top keywords and search queries for an industry, or even to gain competitor insights. These tools are especially useful in discovering new ideas for video content targeting highly searched topics.

Know Your Audience

The intended audience is just as important. Having a purpose, but not customizing the content to the style and needs of your potentially new and existing customers would not be doing any favors to capture the attention or retention. If access to audience data research platforms and/or providers are not an option, there are other, simple ways to gather intel:

• Leverage your own brand or service website analytics. What are the sitemap pages, specific blog content (if applicable), popular products, FAQ searches mostly clicked on, number of users visited, time spent on site telling you? These types of data points could ignite the spark to opportunities to create specific videos to address certain support areas (think: “how to”).
• Owned social media pages and profiles are your best options for testing and optimizing what best resonates with followers and customers. What does the engagement look like with traditional posts or even current videos? Are the view-through rates high or drop off early? What do the comments, or questions asked, indicate about your content? Is a video post-reaction consistently better versus others?
• Are competitors building up a massive library of brand videos? What are the identifiable strategies in their video content? (I.e. how are they targeting tone? What are they specifically communicating? Are any video types noticeably higher engaged with on social?) Build a set of key questions that can serve as benchmark to finding opportunities of differentiation or improvement.

Another general rule-of-thumb is mindfulness of the varying platform formats and intended consumption. A purposeful visitor with an intent to solve a specific inquiry from a website may stay longer, viewing a video of greater length than a minute. For example: a demo or educational video or perhaps a particularly high piece of brand entertainment. However, it is less likely for that same person to consume the same video on Twitter. Formats also play a large role in how to plan for visual/audio edits, like Instagram’s Carousel (1-minute length per card), and Instagram Stories (15 seconds each) which has potential for highly engaging short form story telling. Sprout Social provides a continuous updated consolidation to social media specs here which could come in handy for production.

For a full, deep dive into SEO services and content marketing strategy, contact us at Anvil to discuss how we can support!