How to improve your video content marketing strategy

Summary

Producing valuable content is the first step that leads to sales. This is what content marketing is all about. In this article we will talk about of video content marketing strategy.

What does it mean doing content marketing?

Before targeting sales, companies need to know how to build narratives: narratives around the brand and around their products or services. 

Narratives aimed at winning potential customers, retaining actual customers but also engaging employees. 

Narrations that are consistent, attention-grabbing, engaging, interesting, and effective.  

Here, in a nutshell, is the very broad scope of content marketing, which is a type of approach that is focused on creating, sharing, and distributing valuable content.  

According to a study by Mashable, the main goals of content marketing are as follows: 

• In 69% of cases it is brand awareness. 
• In 68% of cases, it’s the acquisition of new customers. 
• In 67% of cases it’s lead generation. 
• In 62% of cases, it’s an improvement in retention and loyalty. 

Now let’s ask a decisive question: what is the most important and effective type of media for a campaign that wants to focus on valuable content? 

The answer is very clear: video. 

Why? Let’s look at the data:

• 55% of people pay more attention when approaching videos than any other type of content (source: omnikick.com).  
• When viewing a video, the average user retains 95% of the message it contains; when it comes to text, it dips to 10% (source: covideo.com). 
• 85% of marketers say video is the best way to get attention online (source: animoto.com). 
• 94% of marketers say that video has consistently helped with what customers understand about their products or services (source: hubspot.com). 

Now we want to share some tips that you can use to improve your video content marketing strategy. 

We will do this by bringing together these tips and best practices into 5 key points, which we will focus on below: 

1. The optics must be omnichannel 

Let’s start with a fundamental and unavoidable technical aspect. First and foremost, every video content marketing strategy must be designed in an omnichannel manner. 

So, optimized for all kinds of platforms and devices. And where do you start? 

Certainly from mobile, because by far, it’s the smartphone that most of us use to watch videos. But it’s not just about devices. 

You also have to optimize your videos based on the platforms on which they are distributed: social networks (we will come back to this in the next point) have their own technical rules and best practices. Such rules and best practices are different for video marketing via email, or via dedicated apps, or even when you use your corporate website or ads on YouTube.  

A final important specification: while it is imperative to adapt the format, style, and your message depending on the channel, it’s also crucial not to lose the unity and consistency of the brand voice. It’s a question of balance. 

2. Social networks and user-generated content 

You can’t talk about video content marketing strategy without considering social media. For a very simple reason: the vast majority of the audience is here, and they are spending more and more time there. 

We have already talked about why share video on social media and the 7 tips for improving your social media videos. 

However, we would like to focus on two decisive points here: 

1) A video content marketing strategy must adapt to the characteristics of different social networks: Facebook is different from Instagram, which in turn is different from TikTok. At the same time, publishing a video in a reel format is very different from doing it in a classic post or in a story, etc. 

2) The real breakthrough of video marketing on social media is the ability to trigger the production of so-called “user generated content”, i.e., content produced spontaneously by users. This is the type of content that is perceived as more authentic and disinterested. Not surprisingly, it’s also the content that shows the best results in terms of coverage, engagement, and possible virality. 

3. Entertain, inform, be useful 

Before selling, you need to know how to create narratives, as we mentioned in the opening of this post. 

But that’s not enough. Narratives must have value, a value to one’s customers. And, often, this value comes in three ways: entertainment, information, and usefulness. 

These three pillars, of course, must be utilized depending on your positioning and the type of product at the center of your video content marketing strategy. 

If you’re a company in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, you may want to create videos about prevention, even before promoting your products. 

If you’re in the Travel & Tourism business, you could produce videos about the beauty of a destination before offering accommodation options. And so on. 

In short, it’s about creating an interesting, fun, and consistent path. Putting in the right mix….and, most importantly, learning about your target audience. And that brings us directly to the next point. 

4. The ultimate breakthrough of personalized videos

An article on Forbes referred to personalized videos as “the marketing breakthrough that brands need” (source: forbes.com). So what are personalized videos? 

Personalized videos are videos built automatically based on the characteristics of each person viewing them. 

In short, companies create a single video marketing campaign that is simultaneously multifaceted and tailored to each individual recipient. 

It’s no longer a one-to-many communication, but a truly one-to-one dialog. And that’s not all.  

Personalized videos adapt in real time to users’ browsing choices, breaking another traditional barrier of brand-customer communication. In fact, we are moving from a mono-directional dynamic (the company launches a message that is passively received by its target audience) to a bi-directional dynamic (the message becomes interactive and turns into a real opportunity for exchange and dialog). 

How do you “know” all the people who make up your audience? Through data analysis. 

In short, it’s a matter of reconstructing individual profiles from the digital traces that we all continuously disseminate in the online world. These traces say so much about who we are (biographical and social information), where we are and how we move (geolocations), what we like and what we don’t like, our choices, our ideas, and how we relate to brands. 

Having this knowledge is the starting point for anticipating the needs and desires of one’s audience, and then to be ready in the right place, at the right time….with the right video. 

What are the positive spin-offs of putting a data-driven and personalized video content marketing strategy on track? First, it’s a surge in engagement and conversion rates. A dramatic decrease in the rate of disruption of views. Also: the possibility of upselling and cross-selling operations designed specifically based on the individual recipient. 

And in the medium and long term? A definite improvement in communication between company and customers, with a net increase in retention, thus in revenue. 

Here, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the personalized video revolution. 

How to make them and distribute them through the most diverse channels? By relying on specialized platforms such as the one offered by Babelee. 

5. Analyze the results…to continuously improve 

Here, we come to the last of our tips for improving your video content marketing strategy. A tip that, again, has to do with data collection and interpretation. 

We are referring to the analysis of the results of your campaigns. 

Videos, in fact, are the type of digital content from which the greatest amount and depth of data can be extracted. Technically, this characteristic is called “granularity”. 

In concrete terms, it means that marketers have a wide range of articulated information at their disposal, about how viewers watch the video, about different targets with their different behaviors and reactions, about what worked and, on the contrary, what did not work. 

All of this should be analyzed with the utmost care and without bias. The data, after all, does not lie. And what comes after this painstaking analysis? Comes the time to recalibrate. 

Experience tells us that there is no more effective strategy than learning from your mistakes. Reinforce what has worked. And straighten out what went wrong. And – beware! – this is not a one-time operation. 

You must know that there is no miracle video content marketing strategy that is perfect for all brands, for all contexts, and for all targets, immutable. 

The good news is that, today, thanks to digital tools, every video content marketing strategy can be continuously improved in an increasingly surgical manner. 

We will conclude with one final decisive note. Another of the advantages that personalized videos offer is the precision in recalibrating your campaigns. 

In fact, by analyzing your campaign results down to the individual recipients, personalization becomes more and more personalized.  

Thus, step by step, we have a truly unprecedented virtuous circle!