Video has become the most commonly utilised medium for content marketing since 2020, overtaking infographics and blogs according to Hubspot. This isn’t surprising: videos are much more visually appealing, entertaining, and invites engagement more so than any other channel. What was previously considered a medium with budding potential is now a must-have in any brand’s content strategy which is why the demand for Singapore video production services are steadily increasing. However, there is a difference between hopping on the video bandwagon and taking charge of it—you want to make sure your endeavours are actually effective. Below, we share eight must-dos to ensure that your video marketing efforts don’t go to waste!
1. Understand your audience
Before you even hit record or plan our your video content strategy, it’s crucial to know what exactly they want to begin with. For this knowledge, you need to conduct in-depth audience research to develop insightful user personas. This has to go beyond their habits and preferences — you need to know them inside out. What time of day are they most likely to watch videos more attentively? Which social media channels would they prefer viewing video content on? What makes them tick? What type of marketing videos would they prefer watching? Knowing their preferences and pain points would be an invaluable tool in creating your content and strategy. Most social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok also provide analytics for you to understand your followers better.
2. Create a content calendar
One of the key reasons for posting videos on social media, and content as a whole, is to establish an online presence to attract and build connections with your target audience. As such, you’d want to be regularly posting content to maintain your position in the minds of your consumers.
A content calendar ensures a high degree of organisation. Consistency aside, it’s important for you to keep a macro perspective with regards to your content strategy so that your content stays fresh and non-repetitive. Moreover, you could line up a series of videos and posts to complement an upcoming launch, event, or any other happenings you want to bring attention to.
3. Tell a story, not a hard sell
With every coming year, it seems like more and more people hate ads. As it turns out, there is an important distinction to make: consumer surveys have revealed that social media users hate bad ads in particular. Viewers aggressive advertising like pop-ups or minute long lectures interrupting their YouTube videos. To get around this, it’s important for your videos to have a story to tell. Think about the message you want to get across and the narrative that can cushion it. Not only does this make brand videos more palatable, but can even be entertaining to the general audience.
4. Humanise your brand
Along the same lines of storytelling, most consumers have a preference for brands exuding a more personal touch. It would be of great benefit to utilise videos for this end. Through video formats like behind-the-scenes videos, Q&As, and even live streaming, you could pull back the curtain for your following — often, this enables them to sympathise with and connect with your brand more strongly.
5. Keep track of video trends
How-to and tutorial videos have been on the uptake lately. After all,it’s much more likely that you’d look for a how-to video nowadays before searching for a user manual when trying to solve a problem. Similarly, you’d want to keep a look-out for video trends your brand could make use of to keep your content fresh and updated. This could take shape with trendy challenge Tiktoks to storytelling trends in the corporate video scene!
6. Remember your call to action
It’s pretty easy to get swept up in all the excitement of producing a video and forgetting what it was supposed to achieve in the first place. Brands have to keep in mind that all videos have an objective to achieve, and should always be the priority throughout the video-production process. From the script itself to the editing, ensure that your call to action, whether it's to encourage sign-ups or sales, is clear to your audience and effective enough for them to want to do it.
7. Revise your strategy
Creating your video marketing strategy is an iterative process. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different types of video content, because the possibilities are endless! There’ll definitely be some hits and misses, but what’s essential is the ability to pivot and adapt to feedback and change. Because of this, don’t neglect performance metrics as analysing your previous videos can often advise you on what tweaks you can make to improve for your next.
8. Optimise videos on Google
If you’ve got an incredible video but no one can find it online, is it really that incredible? You can increase the visibility of your video by a staggering amount through optimising them with SEO content. Since Google indexes videos, ranking them higher on the search engine results pages will greatly increase the chances of potential consumers coming across it.
You can include popular keywords in your video and description to achieve this, though you have to be mindful that they remain attractive and clickable rather than a mess of keywords. Custom thumbnails and embedded videos usually rank higher as well.
Conclusion
Now that most brands understand the need for the inclusion of videos in their marketing strategies, how well you pull it off is what can set you apart from your competition. These tips and tricks should get you on the right track!
