Video marketing is one of the most exciting new horizons in online marketing. It can serve a specific function whilst helping to reach the goals of a larger marketing strategy. It raises brand awareness, engages users with new products, generates leads and, crucially, boosts sales. Videos provide the perfect medium through which your business can connect with a wider audience. The more they’re engaged, the greater the conversion rates you’ll start to enjoy. With more of the population online than ever before, making the most of crowd-pleasing video content should be a key feature of any company’s marketing agenda.
Exploit video marketing for high brand awareness
We’re all familiar with the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Video marketing takes that idea and runs with it. Whilst there’ll always be a place for graphics and photos, videos can be far more impactful and able to grab an audience’s attention. Video marketing consists of positioning video content within a broader overall marketing initiative. How much weight you want to give video as a proportion of your brand awareness campaign will depend on the strategy you’re choosing. Some will add a video into the occasional blog post, while others will rely on video for the majority of the roll-out. Video has a huge amount of uses within the context of content marketing. You can use it to boost customer-vendor relationships, promote brand awareness, or utilise them to transmit information or assistance to your customers. Videos are the perfect medium for how-to guides, FAQs, product demonstrations, and much, much more. A lot of the time, video marketing is created simply to provide entertaining content in the hope that it can pick up some traction and turn viral, which in itself can provide a big boost for brand awareness.
The many benefits of video marketing
Consumers, on average, prefer to watch a video about a product instead of reading up on one. People find it easier to absorb information from a video, especially when dealing with complex technical information and specifications. The option to see a product in action helps people conceive of it as the marketers intend and helps to frame its function and articulate brand awareness. When someone feels that they really understand a product, they’ll be more likely to proceed with a purchase. Product demonstrations and how-to guides are especially effective in swaying a customer to a purchase where they might otherwise still be in two minds whilst establishing brand trust. This makes video content key to converting casual browsers into confirmed purchases.
Video excels with calls to action
A CTA (call to action) should be the backbone of any marketing material. Whether that action means making a sale, signing up to receive a newsletter, or leaving a response, successful marketing means getting people to come along for the ride. With a video, you can frame this call in a thousand different ways to be convincing to the demographic you’re targeting. You can also create videos optimized for conversion that guide viewers along the conversion path you’ve laid out while communicating branded terms. There’s no better medium for consistently flipping clicks into leads, sales, and customer retention whilst helping build positive brand equity.
Boost brand awareness
For an example of the power of video marketing, look no further than the half time advertising slots at the NFL’s annual Super Bowl event. Here, companies that understand brand awareness spend millions to secure the most expensive minutes in all broadcast advertising to premier commercials for iconic brands. It’s such an anticipated event that the adverts themselves have become almost as much of a pop-cultural phenomenon as the show itself. Corporations bid millions every year to air at this event because they know better than anyone what video exposure can do for brand awareness. While your brand awareness efforts won’t be quite on the same scale, you can use video content to answer customer queries, share testimonials, and craft compelling narratives to engage new audiences. With the popularity of social media and various tube sites (such as YouTube), there’s never been a bigger audience waiting to devour video marketing.
Raise audience engagement
Audience engagement is notoriously difficult to get right, but the video provides a huge range of tools to make compelling content that viewers won’t want to ignore. Live videos are a particularly forward-thinking approach to generating positive brand awareness. When presented with two videos on the same subject, audiences are more likely to watch live content for longer. Live-streaming has been accentuated by social media, where a brand name can be boosted by leveraging video to generate much more compelling engagement. Live videos, like sport, engage viewers in real-time and carry a social quotient where viewers feel like part of a community participating in a shared experience that generates brand trust. You only have to look to the recent launch campaigns in the run-up to the release of the next-generation Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles to see the whirlwind of online buzz and brand awareness generated by every new launch reveal. You can tailor your live streaming event with Q&A sessions or crowd takes and fan responses on social media. Whatever your approach, live video fosters a tangible connection with audiences that translates to a considerable increase in brand awareness.
Communicates your brand’s culture and personality
With video content, you get to immerse your customers in an experience. When you’re trying to build a brand and get its character across, no medium can hit all the right notes quite like video can.Video content humanises your brand and makes your marketing feel personal because people relate more to visual storytelling than they will to a graphic or email. Positive brand awareness often lives and dies by whether customers get a sense of authenticity and reliability from a company, and video can transmit these values in spades.
Video positions your brand as an authority
If you’re generating a steady stream of helpful, informative content that helps audiences solve problems, you’ll find yourself marketing and boosting brand awareness from a position of credibility. As we’ve discussed, there’s no better way to create educational content than with video, and once customers start looking to your brand to lead the way in your field, you’ll find conversions come that much more easily. Use video marketing to showcase your expertise in your given field and yield high brand awareness. When you cater directly to solving a problem and show audiences that you’re looking after their needs, you’ll find audiences will start looking after yours.
Video marketing 101
Barring the technical know-how required to put a video together, the logistics of video marketing function the same way as any other. Make content that furthers your goals, whether it’s raising brand awareness, boosting sales, launching a new brand, new products, or increasing customer engagement. However, putting together a successful campaign is a little trickier. Tracking metrics and measuring customer engagement are the keys to optimizing your campaign. This is all the more true given how data-focused video marketing can be. Absorb these fundamentals to get your campaign started on the right track:
Allocate resources
The one downside of video content is its cost when compared to alternatives like graphics and emails. However, this investment can pay big dividends if sensibly budgeted and well-executed and do more for brand awareness than a piece of copy ever could. Production budgets need to include filming equipment, editing software, and the professional talent needed to put everything together. Often – especially when starting out – it is more cost-effective to outsource all or even just part of this process.
Tell a story
Every piece of marketing should tell a story, and nowhere is this more critical than video. Consider the kind of narratives you want to create and how you’ll sell your audiences on them. A compelling story will hold an audience’s attention and give your campaign more opportunities to raise brand awareness.
Engage customers
Try to move past simply telling a story and look for meaningful ways to engage audiences. Come up with a hook to catch people’s attention. This could be a novel fact about your company to trigger brand awareness or an eye-catching implementation of your product in the real world where your brand can make a difference.
Short = sweet
You may be bursting with ideas for your latest piece of video marketing, but brevity can mean the difference between someone watching your video all the way through or bouncing elsewhere. Even if you want to cover something in detail, try to make sure that the different elements of your video are easily digestible on their own. Keep the focus on a handful of crucial concepts, and don’t waste time in getting to the heart of a subject. Viewers will have to strain less to maintain their interest, and a leaner video will cost less to produce.
Release and feedback
Once you’ve put your video together, it costs nothing to distribute on as many platforms as possible. YouTube, social media, as well as your company’s website, should be the bare minimum of locations hosting your content – and remember: once they’re up, make sure you keep promoting them. With coverage on a multitude of platforms, you’re sure to reap significant gains in brand awareness. But the work doesn’t stop there. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on performance statistics and marketing metrics to see where your content is making an impact and where it’s falling short of the mark. Getting familiar with this feedback to see what approaches work best will also provide valuable experience when it comes to launching your next campaign.
Conclusion: Video marketing is the best tool for raising brand awareness
By now, we hope that we’ve explained how important strategy and data analysis are when coming up with a video marketing campaign. Create a plan to serve every level of the sales funnel, and always remember your marketing goals when you’re conceptualising a video. We’re pretty convinced that video marketing is the marketing medium with the most potential when it comes to boosting brand awareness and engaging potential customers. Do you agree? Or do you think other forms of marketing provide better value for money? Get in touch and let us know what you feel!
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