The right video marketing strategy can be the difference between your brand cutting through the noise to reach maximum ROI…and finding yourself struggling to engage and convert your audience.
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, visuals have become the most powerful form of communication–and nothing captures attention better than engaging and well-crafted video content. With the right video marketing strategy, businesses can create captivating narratives, deliver complex information in an easy-to-grasp manner, and make an emotional impact on their audience.
Whether you're a large corporation, a small enterprise, or a budding start-up, this guide will walk you through the process of developing a winning video marketing strategy–one that communicates your messaging in a way that resonates with your target audience.
The Importance of Video Marketing
Video marketing isn’t just a trending buzzword; it plays a crucial role in improving brand awareness, stimulating conversions, and growing customer relationships. It's set to become even more important in the future, with digital ad spending predicted to jump from approximately $80 billion in 2023 to $120 billion by 2024.
Consumer Demand for Videos
Recent shifts in consumer behavior favor video content due to its entertaining, digestible, and engaging nature. Over 90% of people say they want to see more online videos from brands and video consumption is actually outperforming projections.
A winning video marketing strategy isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s a need-to-have.
Video Marketing Benefits
In addition to meeting consumer expectations, the right video marketing strategy can lead to:
- Higher Engagement: Compared to content pages without video, people spend 2.6x longer on content that includes videos. Videos, providing both visual and auditory information simultaneously, increase dwell times on your website or social media platform.
- Improved Conversions: Eye-catching videos can motivate viewers and encourage them to take action. Nearly 9 in 10 individuals have purchased as a result of effective video marketing.
- Better Retention: Videos are excellent at delivering complex information in an easy-to-understand manner, ensuring retention.
- Personalization Opportunities: Personalized videos are video experiences customized to individual customers. With the right personalized video software, they can lead to 250% higher CTR rates than generic videos and can boost conversions by 500%.
- Brand Building: Videos add authenticity to your brand's communications, helping to foster deeper relationships with customers.
- Boosted ROI: When strategically implemented, video marketing can deliver a strong return on investment. More than 90% of marketers boast good ROI on video content—with 51% saying that video has the best ROI of all their content.
How to Create a Video Marketing Strategy
Developing a video marketing strategy involves defined steps. However, as we'll illustrate, platforms like Tavus can simplify this process immensely and expedite ROI.
1. Determine Video Goals
Every successful strategy starts with clearly defined goals. What do you want to achieve with your video marketing campaign?
Your objectives could range from increasing brand awareness to promoting a specific product. These may correlate with the reported high returns of video marketing: 92% of marketers report that video gives them a positive ROI.
Be as specific as possible with your goals. This will guide your subsequent actions and help you measure your campaign's performance effectively.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
Your target audience's preferences should drive your video marketing strategy. Get to know your audience to craft video content that resonates. Research their preferences and content consumption patterns closely. Some questions that will help you understand your audience are:
- Who are they?
- What do they value?
- What problems do they encounter?
Your video content should provide solutions to their problems and add value to their lives, and understanding your audience will also help you determine the appropriate tone, style, and platform for your video content.
3. Make a Realistic Budget
When planning a video marketing strategy budget, several factors come into play.
First is defining the types and quality of videos you want to create, as different styles, from live-action to animation, have varied costs. The comprehensive costs of video production, encompassing pre-production, production, and post-production tasks, are a significant component.
Clearly, traditional video production is an expensive endeavor. Luckily, there are AI video marketing software options that make video production affordable.
Tavus is a groundbreaking video personalization platform leveraging advanced AI technology to create customized videos at scale. With just a single video recording, the innovative AI capabilities of Tavus can utilize voice cloning and HD lip-syncing to produce thousands of distinctive, personalized videos.
Tavus doesn’t require a big budget, but still delivers a big ROI.
4. Develop Your Video Marketing Team
Depending on the extent of your video marketing strategy, you might need a team to meet your objectives. This could include scriptwriters, video producers, editors, and marketing strategists.
But if you're using Tavus, the need for an elaborate team fades as AI takes over most of the work. With customizable templates, real media blending, and automation integrations, producing videos that inspire engagement and drive conversions is now at your fingertips.
Craft personalized videos for a diverse array of marketing channels, including LinkedIn, email, and SMS. Or, use it to create follow-up videos for employees, respond to job applications, or commemorate customer milestones. Integrating Tavus into your workflows can turn common interactions into remarkable experiences.
5. Plan Your Content & Timeline
Developing a video marketing content calendar involves several thoughtful steps:
- Plan for Key Dates & Events: Identify important dates, events, or milestones related to your brand or industry. These could include product launches, promotional events, holidays, or industry-specific occasions.
- Determine Frequency & Timing: Decide how often you will release videos. This could be daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your resources, goals, and audience preferences.
- Brainstorm Content Ideas: Think about a range of video topics that would appeal to your audience and align with your brand's messaging. These could include tutorials, interviews, product highlights, testimonials, behind-the-scenes footage, etc.
- Organize Your Calendar: An effective way to visualize your calendar might be to use a spreadsheet or a project management tool. Include details such as dates, video topics, platforms for distribution, video format/types, assigned team members, deadlines for each production stage, and any notes or ideas related to each piece of content.
- Align with Marketing Campaigns: Make sure your video content aligns with other marketing campaigns you’re running. Coordinating across different marketing channels can increase the impact of your messages.
- Regular Review and Adjustments: Periodically analyze the performance of your videos and adjust your content calendar accordingly.
Implementing these steps will assist you in developing a consistent and strategic video marketing content calendar that effectively meets your business goals and resonates with your target audience.
6. Use the Right Video Marketing Software
There are various types of video marketing software designed to meet different needs and goals, like video creation software, animation software, screencasting software, video hosting platforms, video marketing platforms, interactive video software, and video personalization platforms.
What platform you need will depend on your marketing goals: are you making a TV commercial or are you trying to scale your marketing outreach?
With Tavus, you can start seeing ROI incredibly quickly. The platform’s market-leading AI clones your face and voice to generate top-quality videos personalized for each customer. The only time and investment you need to put into it is recording your video template and choosing what dynamic variables you want to change.
Thanks to the power of AI video generation, you don’t need a large budget, specialized marketing team, or huge production to scale your video marketing strategy.
7. Measure Metrics & Improve
Determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your video marketing strategy. These could include video views, shares, comments, likes, watch time, and conversion rate. Regularly measure and analyze these metrics to understand the performance of your videos and adjust your strategy as needed.
Remember, your video marketing strategy should be flexible and adaptable. Trends change, and what resonates with your audience might shift over time, so always be ready to refine and adjust your strategy as necessary.
Video Marketing Types
Marketing videos come in many forms - each serves unique purposes and targets specific audience members.
Commercials
Commercials play a vital role in influencing consumer behavior and aim to reach a large audience, typically through broadcast on television or digital platforms. They’re often short and require high-quality production. Everything from scriptwriting and casting to filming and editing needs to be polished.
This makes production expensive. The average cost to produce a 30-second commercial that airs on prime time is over 100 thousand dollars. It’s a big investment from which businesses hope they’ll see a return.
Explainer Videos
An explainer video is a short, engaging piece of video content that clearly and concisely explains a product, service, or concept. It's often used by businesses to convey their brand message or explain complex ideas in a visually compelling and easy-to-understand manner. They typically live on a website or dedicated landing page.
Explainer videos can take many forms, from animated graphics, motion graphics, whiteboard-style drawings to live-action demonstrations. The style is usually suited to the brand personality and the complexity of the concept being explained.
The cost of producing an explainer video can vary significantly based on several factors including the video's complexity, the selected animation style, the experience of the production team, the video length, and the addition of custom features like voiceovers or special effects.
If you're creating an explainer video yourself using online tools, your budget might range from free to around $50 per month, depending on the software you choose. A freelance or small studio production ranges from $500 to $5,000 per minute. Professional studios cost up to $50,000 per minute, and premium production studios exceed that.
Thankfully, with the rise of artificial intelligence in video production, services like Tavus allow you to produce high-quality explainer videos without the traditionally associated costs and complexities.
And–they’re completely personalized to each user. Instead of generic “how-tos,” imagine addressing every potential customer by name as you explain how to use your product. This immersive experience means prospects can connect emotionally with you–and convert like crazy.
Personalized Videos
Personalized videos are powerful marketing tools that tailor content to individual viewers by incorporating personal details into the video, such as the viewer's name, location, past purchases, and more.
They increase engagement, boost conversions, and build stronger relationships with customers. For example, Tavus users enjoy a 10x higher engagement, a 3x jump in response rates, an 85% increase in viewers’ decision to purchase, a 250% boost in email click-through rates, and a mind-blowing 500% ROI.
Personalized videos significantly increase user engagement with their tailored approach. But what does it cost to produce personalized videos?
Well, it’s relatively simple and inexpensive to film yourself with your smartphone or webcam and then send the video through email. But what if you have 50 customer videos to personalize? 500? 5,000+? Suddenly, that quick personalized video becomes a full-time job for an army of marketers, and you’ve blown out your budget.
Fortunately, Tavus’ AI video generator helps marketers make high-quality videos at scale. Here’s how it works:
- Record one video on the Tavus platform with a message you want to share with your selected audience. This video becomes a template for the rest of your videos.
- Choose the dynamic variables in your template that will change for each viewer.
- Based on your original video and selected data, Tavus uses best-in-class AI lip-syncing and voice cloning to make as many individualized videos as you need.
- Send your videos via nearly any tool or communication channel you use, including LinkedIn, e-mail, SMS, social media platforms, or within your product.
- Or, automate videos within product workflows. Tavus automatically sends out videos to recipients based on a predetermined event–without any additional input required from you. It works directly with 100+ top marketing, sales, ecommerce, and communication platforms so you can just keep scaling.
Customer Testimonials
The main objective of customer testimonial videos is to build credibility and trust for your brand or business. The fact that these messages are coming directly from satisfied customers adds an element of authenticity and social proof that can significantly influence potential customers' perceptions and decisions.
Effective customer testimonial videos are not overtly promotional but focus on telling a genuine, relatable story that resonates with potential customers. They can significantly enhance your video marketing strategy by acting as powerful tools for persuasion and conversion. Showcase these videos on your website, social media channels, email newsletters, or even at the point of sale in physical retail locations.
Product Videos
A product video is a type of marketing material that showcases the benefits, features, or use of a specific product. Demonstrating how the product solves a problem or fulfills a need for potential customers is the primary goal.
Often, these videos show the product in action, demonstrating its use and functionality. Seeing the product in use helps potential customers understand if it fits their needs and how it can ease their life or work. They work so well that 90% of customers say that product videos help them make buying decisions.
Product videos can also be delivered within the product, for onboarding purposes, feature updates, cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and more!
Live Videos
Live videos, as part of a video marketing strategy, refer to real-time broadcasts that companies share with their audience over social media platforms, such as Facebook Live, Instagram Live, LinkedIn Live, or YouTube Live. This form of video content allows for direct interaction between the company and its viewers through comments, reactions, and shares.
Product launches, Q&A sessions, behind-the-scenes tours, interviews, demonstrations, events, and tutorials are common events for live videos. They foster immediate community engagement, as viewers can join in the conversation in real time.
This strategy is particularly powerful due to its authentic and unedited nature, which allows businesses to build a more personal and direct connection with their audience, enhance brand transparency, and foster trust. Live videos are also valuable for their urgency and exclusivity, encouraging viewers not to miss out on these one-time events.
Follow-up Videos
Follow-up videos refer to content created and shared with customers or prospects after a specific action or event has occurred. Their focus is maintaining engagement, fostering relationships, and driving further interactions or conversions.
A few examples of situations that might prompt a follow-up video include after a purchase, post-webinar or event, post-meeting, after a service call or installation, and cart abandonment.
But there are so many customer touchpoints…how do you make connections for all of them?
Tavus offers over 100 sales, marketing, communication, and e-commerce platform integrations to trigger the automatic production of personalized follow-up videos, tailored to each customer's experience. Generate as many videos as you need through multiple programmatic touchpoints–without any additional input on your part.
Social Media Videos
Creating successful social video content requires an understanding of your audience's preferences, the distinct characteristics of each social media platform, and the incorporation of best practices for video content on those platforms (like the optimal video length, formatting, tags, inclusion of captions, etc.).
These videos play a key role in a video marketing strategy by enhancing brand visibility, facilitating engagement, and encouraging audience interaction.
Video Marketing Strategy FAQs
Does video marketing improve SEO?
Yes, video content can significantly improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for several reasons:
- Increased dwell time: Video content can keep visitors on your webpage for longer periods of time (or "dwell time"). Search engines consider longer dwell times a signal of relevant and valuable content.
- Improves click-through rates (CTR): Including a video on your page can make it more enticing, leading to more clicks and a higher CTR.
- Encourages more backlinks: When you create valuable and engaging video content, other sites are more likely to link back to your site as a reference. Backlinks are one of the primary factors search engines use to evaluate a site's credibility and relevance.
- Enhances content quality: Videos can supplement the text content on your website, enhancing the overall quality of content.
- Video SERP features: Google frequently features video content on the first page of search results, increasing possibilities for visibility.
- Increases social sharing: Videos are more likely to be shared, especially on social media platforms. More shares increase traffic and improve rankings.
- Improved user engagement: Videos can help increase user engagement metrics, such as repeat visitors and comments.
To boost your video SEO strategy, optimize them with the right video tags, descriptions, and transcripts, to give search engines a better understanding of the video content.
What are some video marketing statistics?
If you’re not convinced of the power of video marketing, consider these stats:
- 90% of customers feel watching product videos helps with making purchasing decisions
- 75% of prospects who received a personal video message decided to purchase
- There’s a 64-85% increase in deciding to purchase after watching a product video
- 65% of executives visit an organization’s website after viewing their video
- Personalized videos record around 16x higher click-to-open rates than standard videos
- Personalized videos can boost conversions by 500%
For more insights, check out our article, 31+ Video Marketing Statistics.
What are the best video marketing tools?
We’ve done our homework and researched the best video marketing software available today. From personalized video software to content creation to animation, check out our guide to the best video marketing software.
Improve Your Video Marketing Strategy
Developing a winning video marketing strategy requires planning, collaborative effort, and the right video generator tools. However, innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning present timesaving, personalized, and cost-effective alternatives.
Platforms like Tavus are the game changers in this context. Tavus' advanced AI not only generates high-quality, personalized videos but streamlines your marketing workflow, eliminating the need for extensive budgets, large teams, and lengthy timelines.
No matter your business size or sector, now is the perfect time to embrace video marketing. And with Tavus, you step into a world of endless personalization and improved customer engagement, ensuring a quick and significant ROI. Get started with Tavus today, revolutionize your marketing approach, and experience a new trajectory of growth.
