In today's digital landscape, where attention spans are shorter than ever, businesses are constantly seeking innovative ways to engage their target audience and drive sales. Among the myriad of marketing strategies available, video marketing has emerged as a powerful tool to captivate consumers, boost conversions, and enhance brand visibility. As a head of Digital Marketing and E-commerce, understanding the importance of video marketing and knowing which types of videos to produce can significantly impact your company's success. In this blog, we will explore the significance of video marketing, the types of videos that drive conversions, and how to measure success effectively.
The Importance of Video Marketing
Enhanced Engagement. Videos have a unique ability to engage viewers emotionally, making them more likely to resonate with your brand's message and remember it. By leveraging visuals, audio, and storytelling, videos create a captivating experience, leading to increased engagement with your brand.
Improved Conversion Rates. Studies have consistently shown that incorporating videos on landing pages, product pages, and email campaigns can significantly increase conversion rates. Videos allow potential customers to visualise the benefits and features of products, thereby building trust and confidence, and ultimately influencing purchase decisions.
Increased Brand Awareness. Sharing videos across social media platforms and video-sharing websites can exponentially increase your brand's reach. Engaging videos have a higher likelihood of being shared, creating a viral effect that expands your brand's visibility and attracts new customers.
Audience demand for e-commerce video marketing content is significant and continues to grow. To meet the demand for ecommerce video marketing content, brands are investing in high-quality video production, optimising videos for various platforms, and leveraging user-generated content. By understanding the audience's preferences and aligning your video content with their needs, you can effectively engage customers, drive conversions, and enhance brand loyalty. Implementing a well-rounded video marketing strategy that leverages different types of videos throughout the marketing funnel, can effectively help you achieve your marketing objectives.
There are 3 things you need to implement a successful video marketing strategy in your business:
The strategy, based on your business objectives and target market
Professional video production company that can execute on your strategy, evolve video production based on metrics and scale as your business grows
Centralised video platform for hosting, distribution and analytics to manage your video content and provide the critical data to feed back into video production to optimise based on viewer metrics and results.
Getting started can seem daunting at first, however by keeping it simple and focussing on the most effective type of video content at each stage you can get your video marketing strategy up and running relatively quickly and cost effectively. Start with one vertical in your business and build out from there. Once you have the first phase up and running you’ll be able to start gathering and analysing viewer data, get an understanding of your audience’s preferences and then start optimising your content to maximise results.
Which videos to produce first?
Attract with a Brand Video • One video that tells your brand’s story, the objective of this piece of content is to create brand awareness and communicate your brands personality, vision and values in a a succinct, visually engaging video. This piece of content typically takes more time to get right and has the highest production cost to produce, however if you plan for cutdowns and message variations during the pre-production stages you’ll get a suite of evergreen brand video content from one production project that can be optimised for multiple channels effectively.
Educate with an Explainer or How To’s . This content provides value to potential customers and can be either live action or animation. Simply put, it explains your product or service, how it works, why it works, what problems it solves and demonstrates why your products are the best fit for the customers needs. Don’t underestimate the power of this type of video content, research shows that How To videos are the most watched type of video by Australian consumers when making purchase decisions. A How To video is one of the first things consumers search for, making your How To videos the ones they watch is the quickest way to get ahead of the pack.
Convert with Customer Testimonials. Customer testimonials and case studies are a simple but very effective way to build trust and credibility. Let your customers tell your story through their successes. From a video production point of view, keeping it simple and doing the basic well will give you a quality, yet cost effective piece of content. A short piece to camera interview, with good audio and lighting is all you need to do. If you have a bit more time and budget consider filming b-roll footage to overlay for visual interest, and make sure you include a call to action at the end.
Measuring Success in Video Marketing.
Once you’ve produced and distributed your video content, it’s important to monitor and analyse results on an individual video basis so you get a good understanding of not only what content your audience is engaging with, but what action your video is driving your audience to take and any resulting conversions. Armed with this information you can adjust your video production to optimise based on viewer metrics to improve results.
View Count: Monitoring the number of views your videos receive provides a basic indication of their reach and initial engagement. However, it's important to remember that view count alone doesn't guarantee success, as it doesn't necessarily translate into conversions.
Engagement Metrics: Analysing engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and shares helps gauge the level of interest and interaction your videos generate. Higher engagement rates indicate that your content resonates with your target audience and has the potential to drive conversions. Note, depending on how you are targeting your video distribution higher engagement rates don’t necessarily mean higher conversion rates. A highly targeted video with less engagement may have higher conversion rates overall than a broadly distributed video with higher view count.
Conversion Rate: Tracking the conversion rate specific to each video allows you to determine which videos are most effective in driving sales. Connect video views with subsequent actions, such as form submissions or purchases, to gain insights into their impact on the bottom line. What type of video are customers watching before converting? What other video content of yours have they watched prior to this? What is the key messaging, format and call to action on the higher converting videos?
Retention and Drop-off Rates: Monitoring the average watch time and drop-off points in your videos provides insights into audience engagement. Understanding where viewers lose interest or abandon the video can help you optimise future content for better results. For example, if people drop off in the first half of the video, make sure your key messaging is up front in the first 15 seconds. If a particular video drives an action which leads to a conversion, look at the messaging, where it is in the video and the call to action and replicate it across additional video content.
Tracking and analysing this data ultimately gives you an understanding of your audience's preferences. By producing video content that aligns with with their needs, brands can effectively engage customers, drive conversions, and enhance brand loyalty. Working with a video production company that understands this process and can take the insights from your analysis and translate them into video content is important. They need to have the creative flexibility to work with you to evolve your video content alongside your video marketing strategy.
In conjunction with working with a video production company that understands the video marketing process, it’s also worth considering a platform to host, distribute and analyse your video content. Video platforms such as Brightcove offer several benefits for hosting, distributing and analysing marketing videos including:
Centralised video management, one place for everything.
Seamless video distribution across multiple channels and marketing platforms.
Enhanced viewer engagement with interactive elements that can be overlaid on your video, giving the viewer a richer viewing experience and providing you with richer data.
Detailed video analytics giving you a deeper understanding of viewer preferences and behaviour.
Data-driven optimisation empowers you to optimise your strategy, streamline your video production and further segment and target your audience based on their preferences. This data-driven approach ensures that your video production efforts are optimised to deliver the highest impact and return on investment.
In summary, by implementing a well-rounded video marketing strategy, leveraging different types of videos throughout the marketing funnel, and working with the right providers to produce, manage and optimise your video content your business can effectively engage customers, drive conversions, and ultimately impact the bottom line.
If you’d like to find out more about how YourFilm, in conjunction with it’s partners, can support you in implementing your video marketing strategy contact the experienced video production team today.
YourFilm have video production packages to suit your requirements, an experienced video production team, a wide network of +1,000 crew across Australia & NZ and partnerships with hosting and analytics providers such as Brightcove to provide you with a complete video solution.