Digital video marketing is in a golden era of innovation. The online world is stacked with creative developers constantly pushing the envelope in one way or another. Whether it be a new algorithm or a new social media platform, the internet is evolving on steroids.
Digital marketers must constantly adapt to new challenges and opportunities – they must innovate as fast as the environment in which they operate.
This online marketing Galapagos gives brands (and companies) a new frontier of choices far exceeding the early, now quaint, days of running a commercial on network TV. To be clear – under the right circumstances, a TV commercial on network TV is still great, but it’s now just one way to go.
Digital marketers and companies produce many types of videos pushed through a web of online and traditional distribution channels that can reap tremendous results.
Online video dominates everything from ROI to SEO. Nobody asks the question, “Should we make a video?” anymore. The question now is, “How many do we make?” You may be a company that wants to make a staff training video or post an explainer video for a new product on your website.
You may be a new brand that wants to use video platforms like TikTok and YouTube to reach a specific screen-addicted demographic. Or you may be Geico and spend $1.5 billion a year on advertising. No matter who you are or your end game, the rules of video production are the same.
When producing your video in 2021, here are eight things to consider (in alphabetical order):
- Branded Video Content
- Customization
- Education-Instructional-Training
- Engagement
- Increase sales
- Production Value
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Mapping
Branded Video Content
The hyper-competitive online marketplace requires brands to form deeper emotional connections with potential leads than their competitors – no easy task. A brand can maximize its video’s ROI with campaigns united by a common design and style. For example, a company’s videos should match its website, logo, and persona.
Digital video distribution is multi-channel or omnichannel if you prefer that term. Each platform has parameters that affect performance, and each is different. A video project can get lost in space if there isn’t a cohesive, integrated approach that ties them all together in the viewers’ minds and hearts.
Consider this prime example of branded video content. A company’s website is its global corporate headquarters. Anybody can access it 24/7 from anywhere there is internet access. A company home page with eye-catching corporate video content with excellent production value is a fantastic way to impress potential customers.
Imagine a homepage with searchable video clips displayed as a custom thumbnail image (to give it some pizazz), preferably video thumbnails, which increase YouTube click-through rates.
Customization
Video is the key that unlocks multiple kingdoms. If you make a single video and distribute it through ten different video advertising channels, your company can make an exciting impact. However, a better strategy is to make ten other videos – one for each channel.
Imagine you travel to ten different foreign countries, one right after another. You only speak your native tongue, and you stick to the tourist attractions. No matter what, your trip will be a remarkable and memorable chapter of your life. No one will question that.
Now imagine that you know the language of every county you visit. Instead of staying at a hotel and snapping selfies at famous monuments, you remain with natives of the country and see the country as the locals do. That is a different and more enriching experience.
Customizing video to the language and customs of the social channels or online distribution channel on which it will run gives brands an advantage over those who employ a one-size-fits-all strategy. Examples of customizable components that define a visual story are video format, sound, and length.
Education-Instructional-Training
Video isn’t just for hawking products.
If your brand, keep in mind that your digital video marketing strategy may include corporate videos whose target audience is a company’s employees or explainer/product videos on a company home page and social media channels.
If you are a digital marketing agency, keep in mind that your digital video clients can include educational videos for students or instructional videos for professionals.
LinkedIn Learning is the quintessential website for education-instructional training videos. Some are live-action. Some are animated. Many are both. All require professional writers, producers, and talent.
Engagement
Video increases user engagement. Not satisfied with that fact, online marketing professionals employ various deft tools to boost engagement beyond video’s inherent effectiveness.
Competition for eyeballs, hearts, and minds spur innovation. Corporate motion graphics, interactive videos, and virtual reality are three great examples.
Corporate motion graphics is an animation and voice-over combination akin to oysters and Champagne, beer and baseball, and The Captain and Tennille.
CMG videos guide viewers through products and services with ease and charm with excellent conversion rates that make people in C-office suites hand out performance bonuses.
Interactive videos are, by definition, engaging. It’s one thing to look at a slot machine and another thing entirely to pull the lever. Real people like to remove the lever.
People think of virtual reality as some sci-fi technology that will immerse them in an alternate world – and it will.
For digital marketing, however, VR is an effective way to transport viewers into the video. For example, real estate agents widely use 360-degree VR videos to give people tours of residential and commercial property.
Increase Sales
According to Wyzowl, 80% of people say product videos give them more confidence to purchase a product. Product videos can highlight features, show them in use, or explain how it works. The next best thing is to have a company ambassador in the room with the potential customer and sell it to them in person.
Product videos have a demonstrable effect directing online purchasing, which is a game-changer. Once the benefits of product videos are numerous to ignore, the stragglers who dragged their feet adopting product videos as an integral part of their digital video marketing strategy will be one step behind their competitors.
Production Value
Your video should be professional quality everything – picture, sound, performance, production design, editing, and graphics. Ads that do not meet the sophisticated expectations of modern consumers are ineffective and become fodder for parody.
Video is so important to marketing strategies that the number of videos in production is unprecedented. As companies ramp up the number of videos they produce, standards must not slip. Here is an example completely separate from digital marketing – wine. Cue the background music to “Red Red Wine.”
Making fine wine is a collaborative art form, just like video production, and it’s well-known that when a large company gobbles up a successful boutique winery, the new owner will inevitably ramp up production at the expense of the quality. The wine suffers a loss of reputation.
This trade-off occurs at a single winery or across an entire region. Marketing agencies need to guide their clients away from this trap. The best business model is one that maintains its integrity.
Search Engine Optimization
Video increases a website’s search ranking. Add a video, your ranking improves. It is that simple, except that it’s not simple. It’s a complex shell game of different algorithms employed by online ad distribution channels that are subject to change without warning (so to speak).
Let’s take a look at Google’s ranking method to showcase how video boosts SEO. Google uses two key metrics to rank a site:
The number of backlinks that refer users to the site.
The amount of time a viewer spends on a site.
Video typically pushes up both metrics, resulting in a higher SEO rating. A video may get prospects through the door, but the customer journey should end with a high-quality video with great storytelling and production value, or the video could have the opposite effect than intended.
Social Media Mapping
You have a finished video. Now what? The top 15 social media platforms in order by # of active users: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, QQ, Douyin, Sina Weibo, Telegram, Snapchat, Kuaishou, Pinterest, and Reddit.
The challenge here is two-fold. First, you should commit to an appropriate amount of due diligence to determine the platforms that will best help you accomplish your business objectives.
For example, maybe your target audience is hiding in gaming channels or responds to a specific type of video, such as customer testimonial videos. You won’t know until you get the data. Second, you should produce content tailored for the media you do choose. For example, shorter videos are the best content for TikTok.
An advanced level of expertise is needed to exploit all the potential advantages video can give a product or brand. Every platform has different users who engage with content in different ways.
On the back end, each platform has technical specifications that optimize quality and performance. Lastly, each platform has various algorithms that impact a video’s endurance in its search results.