How to leverage Video to double your marketing ROI

The digital domain is a rapidly evolving marketplace. If you are using interesting text to attract users, it’s good. If you are using infographics, even better. But if you are NOT using Video Marketing, you need to make significant changes in your marketing strategy, right now!

Let us look at some statistics:

• Video on landing page can increase conversion by 80% or more.
• Companies using video marketing enjoy 41% more web traffic.
• Video amounts for 55% of all mobile data traffic.
• Video drives 157% more organic traffic from search engines
• 4 times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about it.

Sources- Aberdeen, Visually, Brightcore, eMarketer

Video Marketing is hot

Videos are fun to watch and easy to share. An interesting video gets your message across voluntarily and with ease. 90% of users say that product videos help them to make a decision to buy a product. Additionally one in four consumers will lose interest in a company that does not incorporate video content on any of their channels.

But even without the statistics you know that video marketing is the next big thing. It is estimated that within the next few years huge improvement on all web traffic from videos.

Video marketing, quite simply is incorporating videos in your marketing. The concept is simple, just make an interesting video about your product or service and upload it on a hosting website. Post the link or better still embed the video at relevant pages and wait for the user to engage with it. If your video succeeds in generating user’s curiosity, you have favorably turned a visitor into a potential customer.

Factors that shape a video marketing campaign

Target Audience

Your marketing should not be a one size fits all approach. You need to tailor it according to the needs of your consumer.

A video marketing company Eyeview was able to generate 6X ROI to a home improvement retailer by implementing a one-to-one video marketing approach. They delivered over 180,000 “personalized” videos to over 7 million visitors.

For a more efficient targeting of customers, remember:

• You are there to solve a UNIQUE PURPOSE.
• You need to build TRUST by showing that you care.
• Define a VALUE PROPOSITION.
• APPEAL and not just force to EDUCATE.

Budget

Cost is a major factor to drive your campaign in any type of marketing. SMBs generally skip digital marketing efforts altogether in fear of incurring heavy costs. According to a study 39 percent of respondents cited this as a challenge. But times are changing and Digital marketing as well as video marketing is well within reach of small time businessmen. Opposed to popular misconception, it is fairly easy to create an appealing video these days:

Message and purpose

While you might have overall marketing campaign goals in your mind, but every single video must have a unique purpose. When developing the script everything must relate to that “unique purpose”. DO NOT jump to start making a video before answering strategic questions like the message of video, business objective, desired response from the viewer etc.

Remember:

• Online viewer has a very short attention span, unless you are making a product description video, interview or a lecture keep your video as short as possible.
• Get to the point quickly: Do not waste time in boasting about your company and its legacy. Keep the video to the point and wrap it up in about 2:30 minutes (a shorter video is much better)
• Use Emotions. Emotions do not necessarily means sadness. It can be anything ranging from humour, warmth, excitement or even anger. A video which target user’s emotions generates more views and share.
• Be creative. You need not stick to a single emotion to drive your message. You can even mix two or even three emotions to make your video more interesting. Just keep it short enough for a user to engage.

Timing

While your video content needs to be individually targeted, the opposite is true for its sharing.

• You need a right consumer at a right place, at the right time in the right frame of mind
• Do not send out your campaign on the right day and expect to break the internet. It’s not that simple. All the factors are important
• A specific time of the year like Father’s day or New Year provides you a great opportunity to kickstart a unique video campaign.

Promotion

In order to create an effective video marketing campaign your video needs to be seen by a huge audience. You need to promote it extensively for users to discover it.

• It improves your visibility. It is also a major feature of SEO.
• It increases traffic. To your video and your website as well.
• Builds hype around your product and makes a user curious about your video.

Consistency

The most impressive feature of a good brand is their consistency, if the brand fails to reciprocate the results, its user base starts to crack up and eventually disengage.

• Makes you a reliable brand.
• If you have successfully created a buzz earlier, people start to look forward to your videos in advance.
• Conveys your brand’s identity, outlook and attitude.

Uncountable numbers of companies are employing video marketing to boost their brand awareness and subsequently the conversion rates. Here are some uses of video marketing:

Steps to create an effective marketing campaign

Let’s give you a step by step methodology based on the aforementioned factors to successfully implement video in your marketing strategies:

Research for Personalization:

1. Do an exhaustive pre-production research about your audience
2. Your marketing efforts must include the language that reflect your target market and resonate with them.
3. Use data science to do a behaviour analysis of your audience. Try to gauge what “clicks” with them.

Cost analysis:

1. Decide the format of your video. You can create an animated video, a short story or even a slideshow video.
2. Decide budget according to the “viral potential” and your target market.
3. Understand distribution methods. Analyse the success of your campaign across multiple channels
4. Forecast ROI of your video campaign: absolute ROI, relative ROI, distribution modeling

Production:

Based on your budget you can employ the following methods to create an effective video

1. Employ a professional video production company– The best (and most expensive) option is to hire a company to create video advertisement of your product. You can have the script and models ready and ask the company to ONLY shoot the video or you can ask the production firm to do the video marketing right from the ground up.

2. Use softwares to create and edit your video – You might need some technical skills and a lot of creativity to make yourself a video good enough for marketing. There are free tools that create video of your Powerpoint presentations and photos with standard transition effects like fade, hide, zoom in/out. However they look very unprofessional and you need to buy the product to remove software’s watermark.

3. Use unconventional approach- The unlimited digital exposure and ceaseless innovations have restructured the ways in which videos are made. Let’s look at some amazing ideas:

• Vlog- Start a Vlog (Video blog)It is an amazing technique to reach viewers. Countless stars have emerged by uploading a video from their WEBCAMS!

• Vines and ultra short videos– It reflects the transition of audience’s requirement. Thousands of videos upload daily on wide ranging websites which are no more than 20 seconds. Still gains attention and generate large number of views.

• Turn your text into videos- Text needs to be read, a user has to make an effort to gain knowledge. But videos are a different medium. They “show” information, hardly forcing the user to make an attempt.

Marketing

Here comes the main part. You have successfully created a video, now the main step is to promote it to let people know that your video exists

1. Begin by recommending it to the people you know: friends, relatives, clients. Ask them to watch the video and sharing it online.
2. Use free marketing via social media like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram etc. Make sure to link it to the social media account of your business.
3. Embed your video at company’s websites and blogs.
4. Get your video listed in major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Focus on SEO strategies to rank higher.
5. Collaborate with other companies but not the direct competitors to market your video.
6. Consider paid marketing options like keyword marketing and YouTube advertisements if your budget allows.

Analyse

After you have successfully implemented the video marketing campaign, your work is still not over

1. Review your video’s performance using a video marketing analytics tool.
2. Ascertain what went right and what went wrong with your video.
3. Rectify your mistakes and plan for the next campaign.

Case study: Dollar Shave Club

Dollar shave club has been the focus of many case studies since they launched a viral video that generated 18,000 new customers in the first 48 hours and growing to 330,000 customers by 2013!

This graph succinctly explains the customer’s response for the video

Key takeaways from the study to use it in your video marketing campaign:

• Use of humour for engagement.
• A straightforward call to action to BUY THEIR BLADES.
• Short video. The total runtime of the video is 1:33 minutes.
• Subtly turns down other competitors by pointing out useless features in their products.
• Viral loop. They offered their customers a free month of razors for every referral.

Moving pictures, sound and story, was the main reason behind Television’s immense success. Though we have come a long way into a period of “mobile television” but the impact of videos and imagery only seems to grow stronger. Use video marketing to get your message across vast multitudes of users in a fun, motivational and entertaining way, boosting your conversion rates in the process.