How to make a successful marketing video: tips and best practices

Summary 

There is no miracle recipe to answer the question of how to make a successful marketing video. But there are some basic pillars that are valid for any type of business. 

• Don’t aim immediately at the sale in an invasive way, but start by telling a story that creates attention and involvement in those who watch it. 
• Know how to choose the right call to action and insert them in the right place in the video. 
• Take the best care of the SEO aspects of your video: it’s often from search engines that the Customer Journey begins. 
• Know how to navigate social networks, paying attention to their differences, in terms of limits, opportunities, and targets. 
• Aim decisively towards personalized videos: the definitive marketing turning point, today. 

The king of digital marketing is video. It’s the common experience of brands and companies in a wide range of industries. Audience preferences say so. And so do the numbers. 

We talked about the 5 challenges of video marketing, where we focused on the challenges of video marketing, challenges that concern growing your audience, first of all. Therefore, the need to maintain a clearly recognizable identity for one’s own brand and campaigns, knowing how to adapt, at the same time, to the different channels through which communications pass. Finally, the frontier of personalization (to which we will return later). 

These, in extreme synthesis, are the challenges on the horizon. With this new post, we want to provide you with some ideas, suggestions and best practices to overcome them. 

We’re here to address a decisive issue, starting with a question: how to make a successful marketing video? 

We’re aware that there is no miraculous and universal answer. Yet, there are some very solid pillars, and it’s on these that you have to build your strategies. We have chosen to isolate the five that, to us, are absolutely fundamental. We’ll analyze them in the continuation of this post. 

1. Start with stories, not sales 

The main objective of marketing is to sell products or services, either directly or indirectly. But never forget that sales is a destination through which you arrive in stages. And burning out on these stages is never a good idea. 

Put yourself in the shoes of one of your customers. She’s scrolling through social media on a break at work and stumbles upon your brand’s video. The last thing she wants to see is a video that screams buy, buy, buy! Most likely, however, what you want is to be told a story first. 

A very concise, simple, straightforward story. One that grabs your attention and is engaging. One that stands out from the rest. That has – in its own small way – a universal value. That builds suspense. Ideally, that it does all of this together (though that’s not always possible, of course). This story needs a hook. It must create a link between the brand and the person. And only then, as an unforced consequence, must it tighten the circle, to get to the call to action: and we’ll talk about that in the next point. 

First, though, a very practical tip: pay close attention to the construction of the very first few seconds of your video. According to a well-known study conducted by Microsoft, people, on average, end up losing attention after just 8 seconds (Source: time.com). 

And you need to get them hooked in that very short time frame! 

2. The right call to action in the right place 

We’ve seen the starting point when it comes to how to make a successful marketing video: start with the stories. But then you have to aim to tighten the circle toward conversions and sales. The decisive bridge is one: the call to action, a further step in the customer journey. 

So, let’s ask ourselves: what is the right call to action? And when should it be included? Again, we don’t want to sell you any miracle recipes. The truth is, it all depends on the context, the type of brand, the objective of the campaign, the target to which it is addressed. 

However, even in this case, there are some fixed points. 

• Consistency: the viewer should not feel too abrupt a disconnect between the pure storytelling part and the call to action. 
• Not too early, not too late: inserting a call to action in the very first seconds of a video is almost always useless; in fact, the viewer hasn’t yet understood what the message is, what the “story” is, and why that story might interest him. On the other hand, if you insert a call to action too late, you risk that most users have already abandoned the vision. 
• Direct, but not too direct: calls to action that are too vague don’t work. But a “learn more” or “visit our shop” button is often better than a “buy now” button. 
• Recalibrate, always: a great advantage of digital is the possibility to evaluate the results of each campaign in a wide and surgical way; this, thanks to the analysis of Big Data.
• Translated: you have the ability to test different call to action insertions, to evaluate their effectiveness from time to time, and consequently to continuously adjust it, quickly. 

3. Take care of SEO at its best 

Let’s tackle this point by immediately analyzing some data: 

• 93% of online browsing experiences begin via search engines (Source: techjury.net). 
• The top five organic results on Google’s first page garner 67.60% of all clicks (Source: martech.org). 
• In contrast, only 0.78% of Google users click on results that appear on the second page (Source: backlincko.com). 
• For 70% of marketers, SEO is more effective than PPC (Pay Per Click) in generating sales (Source: databox.com). 
• Search engines drive 300% more traffic to websites than social media (Source: digitalmarketing.org). 

All very clear, isn’t it? SEO is central to marketers; and that’s a known fact. The good news is that search engine algorithms tend to highly reward video production. And we’re talking about a very obvious preference: 

• On average, videos register an organic search engine ranking as much as 50 times better than links that contain only text (Source: seoinc.com).  

Be careful, though! It’s not enough to simply insert a video into a page. In fact, it is important to take care of some less direct aspects as well. Among them: 

• Build a relevant and coherent context around the video, with the utmost care for the textual part and for the other types of visual content. 
• Take care of the technical and backend aspects (better if relying on SEO marketing experts). 
• Pay attention to thumbnails. A good thumbnail, in fact, can double the traffic directed to a page (Source: brainshark.com). 
• Enhance Q&As and How-to videos: these types of videos are highly appreciated by the algorithm, because it is highly appreciated by the users themselves. 
• Put medium-long term strategies on track. Search engines always reward constancy in the production of content and its continuous updating. 

4. Make the most of social networks 

It’s impossible to answer the question of how to make a successful marketing video without considering the social networking arena. 

• As of January 2022, there were 2.29 billion monthly active users on Facebook (Source: datareportal.com). 
• On Instagram, there were 1.22 billion (Source: hootsuite.com). 
• The most downloaded app on smartphones worldwide in 2021? TikTok’s (Source: hootsuite.com). 

And what is the most rewarded content type on social in terms of views, engagement, shares? Of course, again, video. 

The topic is huge and complex. But we still want to bring back four practical tips here: 

• Always build long-term strategies; but with the right space for flexibility: on social, in fact, changes in sentiment can also be very sudden. 
• Optimize your videos according to the different platforms: what works on TikTok, for example, will not work for Twitter…and so on. 
• Pay the utmost attention to the very first seconds of your video (an aspect on which we have already focused above). 
• Post videos that can be understood and followed even without audio. For a very simple reason: according to a recent study by Verizon, 93% of American users view videos on social media without audio, from their mobile devices. 

5. Embracing the personalization breakthrough 

And here we come to the decisive point, the real turning point when it comes to how to make a successful marketing video. We’re talking about personalization. 

What are we talking about? We’re talking about a real revolution, capable of giving an unprecedented boost to your video marketing. With personalization, in fact, we start from the knowledge of the recipient of each video: and based on his characteristics, his behaviors, and his navigation choices, we can created a tailored storytelling and call to action; all with real-time adaptations and the implementation of interactive elements that transform the vision into a two-way exchange between brand and customer.  

It can be done. Automatically and with an omnichannel perspective. Even when you’re talking about user audiences of thousands or millions. 

It’s not science fiction. But the most mature and interesting result of data analysis and data-driven marketing. The epochal shift is from a one-to-many type of communication to a dialog that is truly one-to-one. 

Specialized platforms like Babelee deal with personalized videos for every type of business. 

And that’s where the future of video marketing is coming from: re-starting from data to put individuals at the center!