Video marketing: 5 best practices for long-term results

To get the most out of your video marketing efforts you need to identify and implement the strategies that best suit your needs. Video marketing best practices is a key step in any strategic thinking; it is the implementation of a set of initiatives that are most successful in translating your interactions with audiences into conversions and sales.

A best practice is an established method, an extensively tested set of tactics and tools, that is generally considered superior because it can produce better results than any other alternative. These are practices that are used as benchmarks because they are first of all efficient, that is, they allow specific tasks to be completed in less time and with the desired level of quality. They are also capable of inspiring change because they are consistent with both the corporate value system and the common sentiment of the target audience.

When carefully planned and well executed, the use of video marketing best practices can help you increase your company’s visibility, engagement, and conversion with customers. They are designed to provide sustainable growth—in terms of brand awareness, lead generation, and conversions—and to foster authentic, long-term relationships with your customers.

In this post, we will share the 5 video marketing strategies that can maximize your investment.

1. Video redevelopment

The first of the video marketing best practices that we want to suggest is about repurposing existing videos. The huge advantage of this practice is that you don’t have to create additional content from scratch but can use content that you have previously created. For example: if you want to embed a video in a different channel from the original one or have it appear simultaneously on several platforms, you can edit the parts or sequences that need to be repurposed.

To reframe a video you must first identify the purpose and the new objective you intend to pursue, including the stages of the video marketing sales funnel where you plan to insert it. 

• Who is the target audience? Who is the video aimed at? Use any research that you have available on the characteristics (demographic and psychographic) that the people you want to intercept must possess.
• Why should users watch your video? How do you tune the viewer’s personal story to the brand narrative? Just knowing the critical issues that your company’s product or service intends to solve is not enough. Data analytics allows you to investigate the wealth of information from multiple sources and extract the insights that will be useful in understanding how your potential customers approach—or would like to address—solving their problems.
• What would you like viewers to do after watching your video? Conversions, new leads, click throughs. Videos need to persuade viewers to do something: buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, download an app, attend a free webinar. To encourage your audience to take the desired action, you need to improve your calls to action, place them at the right times, and make them compelling and perfectly consistent with the content of the video.

To answer these questions, you need to use all the useful information you have gathered about different touch points through both qualitative surveys (surveys and interviews) and analytical tools. You can use video analytics to accrue a broad type of knowledge that is both timely and articulate. You’ll need to calibrate the narrative based on this information, while never losing sight of the fact that we are offering concrete solutions to real needs. 

We have clarified what the goal of our video is. The next step is to establish the new format and choose the channels on which to publish it.

In general, reusing an existing video saves you time, money, and effort. For example, you can split a long webinar into four or five shorter clips and post them on your social channels. You can also turn your videos into podcast episodes by extracting the audio. Or you can convert text content to video and use the texts already posted on your blog or platforms as voice overs or scripts.

2. Video automation

Another video marketing best practice that companies are increasingly choosing to implement is the use of video automation. Video automation platforms enable marketers to quickly produce thousands of videos using data stored by companies and to generate different versions of the same video quickly and easily, with a scalable, data-driven approach. The video production process thus becomes much more efficient and competitive, allowing you to focus attention and resources on the overall strategy.

Video automation frees you from a traditional, often complex, very expensive and rigid creation process where adapting each video to the technical specifications of different distribution channels (so that it can be used in a multichannel perspective) can be time-consuming and complicated. On the other hand, automated content creation can happen in just a few steps, in large quantities, and is much cheaper. Optimizing available resources goes hand in hand with maintaining high quality standards and unlocks innovative ways to reach and engage your audience. In this way, you will be able to build stronger relationships with your customers.

3. Video storytelling

Storytelling, and video storytelling in particular, is one of the most effective best practices with which to communicate a message in a clear, incisive, and engaging way.

Among the many benefits of video marketing, the video format allows stories to be told in a way that makes them memorable and establishes a connection with customers (potential and acquired) through them. In turn, this connection can result in a conversion (such as filling out a contact form to enjoy a product demo), a purchase, or a spontaneous action of confirmation and support (for example, a positive review or participation in a discussion on a social channel).

A person is much more likely to remember something (even a product or service) if it is embedded within a narrative. And, if a story is memorable, it can be used as a point of contact between the brand’s world and the customer’s world; it can represent the beginning of a relationship that, if carefully and consistently managed, is bound to grow stronger and stronger over time.

The power of emotions

The responses that a video can activate are first and foremost emotional. When properly governed, the emotions elicited by video can be harnessed to give meaning and depth to the brand experience, foster identification between target audience and brand, guide audiences along the path to purchase a product or service, and lead to long-term engagement. In video storytelling all of the expressive aspects of audiovisual content (moving images, sound, voice overs, overlay text) combine to translate something ideal, such as emotions, into a perceived and recognizable reality. At the same time, they convey information about products and services in the simplest, most effective and immediate way.

Through video storytelling, brands can channel the emotions of viewers and consumers and simultaneously, after providing them with more comprehensive, multifaceted, and in-depth knowledge, use this emotional charge to propel them to action.

4. Animated videos

Animated videos allow greater creative flexibility and freedom than other types of videos. In animated graphic videos virtually everything—people, animals, physical objects as well as concepts and processes—comes to life through drawing and animation. The particular communicative mode of these videos allows for visual metaphors, a rhetorical device that can simplify complex messages without trivializing, distorting, or betraying them.

In addition to making complicated things easier to understand, animated videos make it possible to visualize the invisible and intangible and show what the audience cannot see in real life through moving images.

Underlying the success of this best practice, video marketing is the incredible expressive power of different animation techniques, from the traditional, where images are drawn or painted by hand on paper and then photographed and displayed on film to those made with computer-generated imagery (Computer-Generated Imagery or CGI). Beyond the different techniques used to make them, animated videos can consistently communicate company values that cannot be experienced directly.

Although the constant innovations of computer graphics programs are continually adding new features, the essence of videos using animated graphics remains that of the early, pioneering cartoons: to tell engaging stories. In this sense, the reasons why animated videos are so effective are almost “super powers:”

• They can furnish imaginary worlds (storytelling),
• They allow moments of strong abstraction (explaining),
• They correspond to viewers’ real needs (personalization).

5. Personalization

Among the video marketing practices featured in this post, personalization is the trend that is likely to become even more relevant and pervasive in the near future. This is because advances in data analytics are already enabling sophisticated profiling of consumer experiences, which are being investigated more and more accurately across multiple channels, at different stages of the customer journey, and resulting in increasingly high-performance tactics.

Personalization is the set of practices and technological resources used to collect, select, and categorize customers’ personal data, which are then used to construct targeted messages that are in line with their particular behaviors, needs, and preferences. Personalized videos allow you to connect with your potential customers and convey communications that are perceived as more authentic. 

Every business scenario, every moment of communication with customers, any type of interaction through digital platforms or generated for transactional purposes becomes a possible ground for operationalizing the contact strategies that have personalized videos at their core. Through personalized storytelling, built from knowledge of the user’s actual location, video can call the viewer by name. 

Personalized videos as a response to a need for relevance

As never before, consumers today are caught up in the process of digital transformation: they are connected, attentive, and demanding. Most of them casually frequent all digital channels and are gradually becoming accustomed to a seamless, multichannel shopping experience. Personalized videos are a key solution, effective at any point of contact: from extracting the hidden value in customer data to creating highly interactive communications. High conversion rates are the most visible consequence of the success of this best practice, which is based on listening, on a new balance of the brand-customer relationship. 

Personalized videos are so effective because they satisfy a need for relevance, which is all the stronger in an environment where we are inundated with mostly irrelevant information. Content that corresponds to us is part of the personalized online experience, and many users are willing to share not only email addresses, phone numbers, and biographical data with companies, but also other information that affects them closely, such as desires, concerns, urgencies. This flow of data shows no signs of slowing down and it will find increasingly innovative applications thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence. For marketing, this is an enormous resource, an asset to be administered with intelligence and respect.

Opportunities to participate in the conversation with brands are multiplying and differentiating: customers want exclusive, authentic, engaging relationships. The five video marketing best practices we briefly discussed in this post fully address this very need. By implementing one or more of these strategies you will be able to streamline and enhance your video production and save time, money, and effort, stand out from the competition, create an emotional connection with your audience, and achieve long-term winning results.

Babelee

Copywriters, video creators, digital marketers and developers: this is who we are! Young, passionate, geeky and very keen on media and technology. Fancy to meet the team? Contact us or submit your cv, we love talented people.