Video Marketing Best Practices with Lumen5
Table of contents
* Understanding the different types of video marketing
How to create a solid video marketing strategy
How to share video content on social media
How to measure your video success
Conclusion
Introduction
Lumen5 is an online video maker that enables you to create marketing videos quickly, easily, and with no video editing experience required. There are many benefits that come with implementing video in your business:
Video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year than those who don’t focus on video.
93% of marketers say they’ve converted a lead into a paying customer thanks to a video posted on social media.
Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.
This guide is designed to help you understand the basics of video marketing and empower your business to fully benefit from using video as part of your wider marketing strategy.
Understanding the different types of video marketing
It’s worth getting familiar with the different types of marketing videos out there. Below, we’ve detailed five of the most common videos that can be used as marketing assets to help convince, convert, and retain customers.
Video Type 1: Content Marketing / Thought Leadership / Brand Awareness
Brand videos are a great opportunity to show who you are and what your mission is. Typically used as part of larger ad campaigns, brand videos are used to build awareness around your business.
Market research, customer studies, industry reports
Unique insights, new angle, market perspective
Company announcement, new initiative, press release
What are the benefits?
Solidifying your thought leadership positioning
Establishing expertise and authority on a subject matter
Reinforcing the core messages of your brand
Video Type 2: Explainer / Tutorial / How-To
When it comes to videos online, not everything is about entertainment. Explainer videos enable you to provide your audience with useful knowledge that will help them better understand the products and solutions you offer. In this video category, we can find:
Step-by-step walkthroughs, how-to videos
Tips and tricks, quick advice, online courses
Mini-documentary, educating on a topic
What are the benefits?
Grab audience attention with useful information
Deliver value and build relationship through education
Increase audience confidence in your brand
Explainer videos are typically used above-the-fold on a website homepage or landing page. They’re also beneficial to pin on social media channels or upload to your business’s YouTube channel.
Video Type 3: Lists / Rankings / Collections
Videos that summarize long, list-based content are an ideal way to share lots of information in a short amount of time. Listicle video marketing tends to perform well on social media.
What are the benefits?
Give the audience a starting point to dig deeper
Sharing lots of information in a short span of time
Quick and easy videos to create
Video Type 4: Promotional / Advertisement / Sales
Promotional videos can help a business promote their product or service. Usually launched before a product is released, promotional videos are handy for building buzz around your latest release.
Promoting or explaining how your product works
Promoting an upcoming event to get registrations
Advertising a product or solution
What are the benefits?
Encouraging the audience to take action
Influence buying decisions
Generate signups, leads, and purchases
As you can see, there are many different types of marketing videos out there. Before you dive in and decide which is the right fit for your business or campaign, you’ll need to think about creating a video marketing strategy.
How to create a solid video marketing strategy
Developing a solid video strategy will help you start your campaigns and video creation with a focus and framework to achieve great results.
Design an achievable goal. The best way to design a professional video marketing strategy is to set yourself goals using the SMART framework: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. “Get one million visits a day” won’t work. Try something like “increase traffic from social media by 5% on a monthly basis,” which is more SMART focused.
Target the right audience. Your business should have buyer personas mapped out, but if you don’t, at the very least have an understanding of who specifically your target audience is. For example, an explainer video that targets middle-aged women from Texas who typically eat at Olive Garden will look very different from a video that targets millennial men who love chowing down at the latest hipster restaurant.
Much like any marketing strategy, each video should align with a different stage of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, or decision. This will help you build a robust strategy that nurtures your audience into making a purchase or sign up.
Awareness videos should educate your audience on your product or service, for example, a how-to video.
Videos that target the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey should explain in more detail your offering, so an explainer video will fit best at this stage.
To target the decision-making stage, a customer testimonial or success story video will help convince and convert your audience.
Create a video content plan. How many videos are you looking to share over the course of a week or a month? What type of videos do you want to create? Creating a content calendar can help you map out and plan your content.
Solidify a video workflow. Who’s going to be creating the videos? Will they need to be signed off from anyone else in the company? Solidifying your video creation workflow will save you time and resources in the long run. We’ve got a guide on How to Sharpen Your Workflow also available.
Plan for distribution. How will you share your content? Where will your video assets live? On your website, social media channels, email campaigns, or will they be used as sales enablement tools? This information can also be contained in your content calendar.
Measure, measure, measure. Tracking how well your video campaigns perform will give you valuable insight into what worked well, and what didn’t. You can check out our article on video metrics for help on measuring what really matters.
For even more video tips, click here for our content marketing best practices guide.
How to share video content on social media
Every social media platform is different. We’ve put together a few tips to help you get the most out of sharing video content on social media.
A video on your main feed should be 60 seconds in length
A video for your story should be 15 seconds, per story
Add a link to your brand website in your bio
Make your bio snappy, authentic, and appealing to your target audience
Ensure that your content remains on-brand; don’t deviate too far from brand colours, style, and voice
An organic (non-sponsored) video should be 1-2 minutes in length
Upload your video directly to Facebook, rather than sharing a link from YouTube
Focus on posting quality content, not quantity
Tag other pages that you mention in your post
Produce your video so that it still makes sense even with the sound off
A video for your feed should be 15-30 seconds in length
Don't just create another interview video
Ensure your video is mobile friendly
Upload your video directly to LinkedIn, rather than sharing a link from YouTube
Create a video that’s less than 5GB in size
How to measure your video success
Tracking, measuring, and analyzing data is one of the most important parts of any successful video marketing campaign. After all, how will you understand which strategies work well and which need some finessing?
Some video hosting platforms and social channels give you access to data that will help you understand basic metrics, for example, views, play rate, and audience engagement. These metrics are a great starting point to measure and analyze what video content is aligning with your goals and which isn’t.
Conclusion
We hope you found this guide useful! We’re always open to feedback and if you want to get in touch to chat about this guide, or anything else Lumen5, contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager or email [email protected].
Updated on: 26/05/2022
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