Incorporating Video into Your Content Marketing Strategy
As companies rely increasingly on video content to engage consumers on their websites and social media, video has become an important part of any content marketing strategy. Videos have the power to both show and tell, offering your audience a brief overview of your product without drowning them in text. However, successfully incorporating video can be costly, and there are a few pitfalls you need to watch out for. Here are some tips to ensure that you successfully incorporate video into your content marketing strategy.
Create Videos for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
As with all your content, always aim to align your videos with particular stages within the buyer’s journey. For example, if you’re focusing on the awareness stage, you should introduce your brand and provide a background on your product or service. At this point, videos shouldn’t be focused on selling your product. Instead, they should help a viewer to identify a problem they may have and begin to educate them about solutions you can provide.
For the information gathering stage, you’ll need to create video content that serves an audience that is looking for a more in-depth understanding of your services. At this point, it’s good to have content that compares your products to those of your competitors, providing some specific evidence about how your product will better serve your viewers.
As viewers reach the decision stage, it’s important to get into even more detail about the results your product or service can provide. Videos focused on this stage in the buyer’s journey should provide real-life examples of the results your product can offer, such as demonstrations and testimonials about success stories.
Consider Website Load Time
Slow load times can deter new and returning visitors from accessing your website. Obviously, a site that performs poorly creates a bad user experience has the potential to hurt consumers’ trust in your brand and reduce your sales. Large videos are one of the biggest contributors to this problem. Creating short, low-quality videos with smaller file sizes would seem to solve the issue of speed, but obviously that’s not the solution you should choose if you want to maintain a positive reputation with your customers.
Fortunately, there are more practical options that will allow you to offer high quality videos without sacrificing speed and functionality. Your best option is to compress your video in order to optimize it for the web before uploading to your site. During this process you can adjust the quality, resolution, and format of your video in order to maintain a balance of quality and speed.
Another option is to host your video on another platform altogether, such as YouTube or Vimeo, and then embed it into your website. By using this method you aren’t dependent on your company’s private server or the shared servers provided by your web host to process and deliver your content to viewers.
Schedule Your Video Content
Publishing content on a regular basis is important if you want to keep your audience engaged. Even if you are producing high quality video content, if you are inconsistent about when and how often you’re posting, your audience will not know when to pay attention to your brand. This requires considerable planning. Rather than posting a single video about a product, think about how you can tell a story about the product over a series of videos.
Once you’ve created a concept for a video campaign, you’ll need to make sure they are published on time and in balance with other content you produce. This is why a reliable content management system (CMS) is one of the most essential tools for businesses. A CMS will allow you to plan your publishing schedule for videos and other content far in advance, ensuring your audience won’t lose track of your brand.
Produce High Quality Videos
Keep in mind, each piece of content you produce is a representation of your brand, and low quality is extremely apparent in video content. Shaky footage, bad lighting, and poor audio quality could damage viewer’s perception of your brand. However, you don’t need the most expensive film equipment in order to create high quality videos.
Many of the latest smartphones are capable of recording quality videos, though you can also invest in a high definition camera for as little as $100. Either way, you’ll want to get a tripod in order to ensure you maintain a stable camera angle. It’s also unnecessary to invest in cumbersome lighting equipment. Instead, you can utilize natural light when possible or position direct lamps to provide sufficient lighting for your subject.
Obviously, visual aspects matter in video content, but one of the most important features of a video is clear audio. Again, this doesn’t have to be expensive, but you should plan to invest in a clip-on microphone or a separate recording device in order to ensure your audio sounds professional. Also be sure to choose a location without excessive background noise from employees or other environmental factors.
Video continues to prove itself as one of the most engaging, interactive forms of content available. It can quickly help people to understand your company and begin to form a personal connection, while guiding prospective clients through the buying process. By keeping these strategies in mind, you can successfully incorporate video into your content marketing strategy and continue to build a loyal following for your brand.
