Guest blogger Helen Clark has provided us with a blog about video marketing strategy and why it can be so effective.

There are more and more businesses that use videos to support their B2B and B2C marketing campaigns. This raises the question – Why is video marketing so powerful? Before we answer it, let us define video marketing first. Video marketing utilizes video content to help businesses promote their brand, products, and services.  Videos in marketing campaigns range from corporate training videos and how-to videos to customer testimonials and videos from live events. To help you understand the importance of a video strategy, we have to go through several reasons that explicitly explain why video marketing is so powerful.

7 Reasons Why Video Marketing Is So Powerful

1. Video Content Is Effective

The attention span of modern customers is short. In this minimal time frame, businesses have to deliver the intended message successfully. Texts and infographics require significantly more time to digest than videos.  People retain only 10% of the message when reading a text. On the other hand, those that receive the message via video, retain 95% of it. This makes videos the most effective marketing tools in terms of information retention.

2.  Videos Are Very Versatile

While infographics, images, and text are capable of being used in marketing, they do not shine in the versatility department as videos do. For instance, a video can be used to showcase the product design and features, show the viewer’s how it is used, etc. All of this can be achieved in just a couple of minutes. On the other hand, to receive this information via images and text, a viewer would have to spend significantly more time reading and follow step by step instructions.

3.  Video Has Great ROI

One of the metrics that marketers often take a look at to assess their marketing strategy efficiency is ROI. Videos appear as natural content to consume. What makes it more enticing is the fact that watching them is effortless. Since they are so easy to digest, they have far better engaging potential than any other types of
content. This is the reason why video offers high ROI to those that use it.

4.  All Devices Support Videos

With the expansion of the internet and mobile devices, it has become easy to consume all types of content on the go. Today, thanks to videos, companies can reach anyone with a smartphone in a pocket and successfully deliver the intended message.

5.  Videos Help Connect With People

Videos can feature animals, humans, nature, music, and precise colors. All of this enables videos to invoke targeted emotions in viewers. This potential can be leveraged to build connections with viewers and affect purchasing decisions.

6.  Videos Deliver So Much Information

Instead of wasting resources on writing dozens of articles and designing hundreds of infographics, companies can communicate a lot of information with just one short video.

7.  Videos Make Learning and Understanding Easier

Besides the short attention span, modern consumers also don’t have too much time to waste.  When they want to learn and understand something, they want to spend the least amount of time possible on it. Videos are perfect for this, as they turn the learning process into an easy one.

Where to Start From – 6 Cool Tips

1. Define Video Marketing Goals

While video marketing may be unique because it leverages video content to reach out to audiences, it is still marketing. This means that you need to clearly define your video marketing goals before proceeding with planning and strategizing.  Write down what you want to achieve and how it will help you improve your business. This will
help you track the success of your video campaigns.

2.  Get to Know Your Target Audience

Before you start recording videos for your audience, you have to learn a great deal about them.  For your videos to be successful, they need to be appealing to your potential customers. Learn what they need and what are their pain points.  Once you’ve completed your target audience study, connect the dots between your goals and their needs. This will help identify new video marketing opportunities that are beneficial for both parties.

3.  Find Out How To Meet The Audience’s Expectations

Every audience is unique in terms of expectations. This is why you should extensively study your audience to identify these expectations. The first step in this process is identifying your target audience problems, and the second is adopting the mindset of a problem solver.  If you deliver the videos that your target audience has been expecting, you will hit the sweet spot. Hence, you must always keep an eye open for comments and other forms of feedback
delivered on a silver plate by your customers.

4.  The First Few Seconds Count

As we have previously stated, modern customers have an extremely short attention span. Your videos should have an explosive start – something that will grab the viewer’s attention and make them see the video to the very end.

5.  Leverage Storytelling

People love a good story. You should leverage this by incorporating storytelling element to your
videos. This will help you make viewers want to see the entire video and build trust. Storytelling
makes videos more compelling and adds that inspirational element to them.

6.  Devise Video Promotion Strategy

And, finally, devise a video promotion strategy. You have already studied your audience, and you know where they like to hang out. There are plenty of ways to promote your videos. You can incorporate them in a blog post, share them on YouTube, social media and forums, send promotional links via emails, and so on.  The goal here is to reach as many people as possible. Start by sharing your videos where your audience prefers to hang out. But, feel free to continue sharing on other viable places.

Video marketing is not heavy on resources and assets. On the other hand, it offers so many benefits which make it one of the most critical assets in a marketing campaign. If you do not have the internal resources to create high quality videos, you can outsource it to a company that specializes in video advertising. One of these companies, the Video Caddy, delivers dependable video and audio editing and animation services.