Video marketing is all the rage these days and 2015 have been called “The year of video marketing” by a lot of people, not just us here at Shakr. Content creators are producing more and more video content and the stats are conclusive, to keep up in the marketing game you need to integrate video as an integral part of your marketing strategy. But if you’re new to the video marketing area you might be phased by all the different aspects and things you need to think about when it comes to video marketing. But fear not, we at Shakr have scoured the web for the best and most usable tips about video marketing, as well as adding a couple of our own. Everything you have to do to get up to speed and get a crash course in all the most important things to consider when doing video marketing is take a few minutes out of your day and read the 21 video marketing tips below. Are you ready? Let’s do this.

1. Repurpose Blog Post Into Videos (and vice versa!)

Evergreen content is awesome but chances are that some of your older post are buried under a big pile of fresher content, and there are a lot of people out there who probably never will get to see it. Take an old informative blog post and make it into a video, put it on Youtube and Facebook. Don’t forget that Youtube is the world’s second largest search engine and should be a part of your SEO strategy. Turn your infographic into a videographic, or hire a voice actor to read out your blog posts to create a podcast. Get your creative juices flowing and repurpose your awesome old content right now. Read more about different ways of repurposing blog posts on Quicksprout.

2. Make Every Video With a Customer Persona In Mind

Planning your video content should be as meticulously done (or even more so) as your other marketing tactics. For video content to truly resonate with your audience/customer it needs to be tailored to them. Do you already have customer personas? Great, use them in your planning of you videos. Don’t really know about customer personas or who your customers really are? Personas are fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers. Take a step back and develop some. Hubspot have an excellent guide here.

 3. Find Your Voice (And Be Memorable)

Finding your tone of voice for your brand is super important. It’s not about WHAT you do, it’s about WHO you are, and that’s what sets you apart from the rest. All of us have our own idiosyncrasies, favourite expressions, inflections, pace and so forth and creating a tone of voice that suits your brand will create familiarity and trust among your audience. To find your tone of voice, start with your brand values and establish what makes you an authority in your are and what set you apart and work from there. If you need a full guide for how to create a tone of voice for a brand I recommend checking out this awesome guide by Harriet Cummings. To find out how people make “boring” subjects interesting, check out these Youtube accounts: TestTube, CGP Grey, Numberphile. Notice how they all have a unique tone of voice and style, so make sure to develop your own!

 4. Upload Your Video Natively Your Different Platforms

Gone are the days where it was enough to upload your videos to Youtube and sharing the link on your social channels? Now every platforms demands its own attention, for various reasons. If you want more views and shares on Facebook, it’s vital that you upload your video natively to Facebook instead of just Youtube. Doing so will make you take advantage of Facebook autoplay feature and get you more social shares as we wrote about in this blog post. On top of that, a completely different style and language should be applied depending on which platforms you are using. An Instagram video and an Vimeo video are two totally different things and should be treated as such. Experiment with what works for you on the respective channels.

5. Use A Gif!

Instead of having a static image represent your video content, you can stand out even further if you use an animated GIF. You can then link that .gif to your full video content.

 6. Link It Up! (Website And Backlinks)

Don’t forget to link to your website, blog post and other resources when uploading your videos. Depending on what you want you audience to do after they watch the video, link to the appropriate resources. Linking also works the other way around, so don’t forget to link to your videos in other blog posts and on your website. Backlinks are hugely important for SEO so make sure to link it up any time you post a new video.

7. KISS! (Depending On The Context)

From wikipedia:

“KISS is an acronym for “Keep it simple, stupid” as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.”

This is great advice for video marketing. You need to hit the sweet spot between engaging, entertaining and informative without making it too complicated. As soon as your audience doesn’t understand you they will turn their attention another way. Your not competing for the Oscars here, you’re trying to get your message across.

 8. Don’t Make It Too Long

In the same way your audience will turn away as soon as you get way over their head, they will not stay long if you are boring them. Today people have an unprecedented amount of choices when it comes to media consumption so its vital that you don’t waste their time. Video Analytics data consistently shows video viewership drops off dramatically after 60 seconds which means that you have 150 words or less to deliver your message.

9. Use Consistent Branding

While developing a tone of voice and style for your videos, you should also be mindful about the branding. For example, are you always going to start or end with your logo and brand name? Or both? having consistent branding will make your audience accustomed to your style and will be less distracted, ready to be wowed by your content.

 10. Use A Convincing CTA

Call To Action is a term used for elements on a web page, visual graphic or video that solicit an action from the user. Designing call to actions in your videos requires some forethought and planning; it has to be part of your planning and scripting processes in order for them to work well. What is it you want the video make your audience do? Without a CTA, promotional videos often fall flat. Crazyegg have some great CTA tips.

11. Add Long Descriptions To Your Youtube Videos For Better Seo (Even Transcripts)

If you didn’t already know it, Youtube is a huge untapped SEO goldmine. In fact, Youtube is the worlds second largest search engine (and often you could easier land a first page ranking with a video than a blog post) and can be a massive traffic driver to your business. But for that to work you have to write really detailed descriptions. Because Google and YouTube can’t “listen” to videos, they rely on your text description to determine your video’s content. There are a lot of factors (video length, name, keywords, etc) for good Youtube SEO so for a more detailed Youtube SEO guide, head over to Backlinko.

 12. Use Video In Email Campaigns To Increase Open Rate

According to a study from Marketo (reported here by Vidyard), using video for email messages increases open rates substantially. Marketo found the emails that used video for a direct call-to-action had a 53% higher click to open rate over emails without an obvious mention of video content. Start experimenting with video in your emails and see what kind of results you get.

 13. Post Videos Consistently

Consistency is the name of the game in the video marketing field. In fact, top brands all have a common YouTube tactic; They post videos on a consistent basis. Successful brands often publish 50 percent more videos per channel than the least successful ones. Try maintaining a consistent schedule of video posting and use a content editorial calendar to more easily manage your consistency.

 14. Don’t Be Too “Selly” – Focus On Great Content

Lets face it, none of us like to be actively sold to. It’s tempting to go crazy with your pitches in your videos but focus on creating engaging and viral content and you will reap the benefit. Explain the key benefit and how your customer can use your product or just focus on building your brand.

 15. Create Tutorials For Your Products

In the same way that use cases are compelling content that can help your customers decide to give your product a try, tutorials can be an effective way of onboarding your users and decreasing churn, especially if you have a complex product that have a steep learning curve. Walk them through your features and show them how to use your product. This can effectively be used in you FAQ and customer service communication, reducing the amount of grunt work done by your customer service people. You could even design automated email sendouts depending on drop outs in certain areas of your product, reaching out to them with a video walkthrough to help them navigate that particular feature of your product.

16. Engage With Your Audience (With Twitter Video)

A relatively new twitter feature is the ability to send video DMs, allows you to record videos up to 30 seconds in length right from the app and send it to your followers. For inspiration look no further than to Gary Vaynerchuck who is a big advocate for engaging with your audience in this way. Having a brand respond to you is still a huge thing for most people and something brands don’t do enough, and twitter have created a really powerful way for you to engage with your audience.

 17. Create Video Series

As we said, customers love consistency when it comes to what they expect from brands. That’s not to say that you should never surprise and delight them but one way to create consistency and familiarity with your brand is to create video series. Do a weekly round up of the most current news in your field or maybe a weekly shout out to your customers and new creative ways of using your product? Depending on your field and brand, the limits are endless. Get creative and experiment with your video series depending on your customers personas and you can stumble upon a goldmine of content that you can be pushing out on a regular basis.

18. Start With A Plan (Script It Up!)

Video marketing isn’t easy as just pressing rec (although we at Shakr make it super easy to create studio quality video ads) Creating a concise video marketing message that will resonate with the target audience can be quite a challenge. Follow these simple guide lines to easily create a script for your marketing video:

• Bottom Line On Top – Deliver your key message in the first 10 seconds of your video. If a viever stops watching you’ve still been able to get some part of your message across. If you wait until then end you might miss that chance.
• Support The Core Message – The main part of your video should convey the core message, how your customers will benefit from what you’re offering, success cases and so on.
• Call To Action – Always end your video with an last strong CTA that drive your viewers to perform your desired action.

19. Be Quick To React To News And Trends

Being first on the ball is really important in video. Catch the news wave, online phenomenon or current trend early and you can get massive traction. Are you a clothes retailer or fashion blogger? Get in early on #thedress. A lot of science blogs gained thousands of click where they explained what was going on and the most successful campaign were out of the gate within hours of it going viral on social media. Act fast and you might piggyback on viral stories.

20. Create An Awesome Title

Headlines or titles are the most important part in enticing your audience to watch your videos and make your video as shareable as possible. Titles are vital for grabbing attention in search engines and RSS feeds, email open rates, shareability and SEO. Spend a large part of your content creation time to choose a great title. This isn’t something that should be left to the very last minute just before posting your video but something that should be in your minute from the first second you start your ideation process. A lot of people are putting a lot of effort into creating interesting and engaging videos, but then just slap any old title onto it without realising that in doing so they might be ensuring that their video is never seen.

21. Use Case Studies For Extra Compelling Content

Something that is a very useful content reservoir is customer use cases. Tell the story of your existing customers and how they benefit from your product. Told well, use cases can be a very effective conversion tool for your brand. Today, 9 out of 10 people look for product information online before committing to buying a product. This can be online product reviews, social media posts, etc etc. People know that a quick googling session can spare them from a bad experience and poor investment of their budget, so show how to successfully use your product and how real users are benefitting today to put their minds at ease.

 22. Create SMART Goals For Your Video Marketing Campaigns

“Setting goals is easy but achieving them isn’t. That’s why setting SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely – is the first step in making your goal a reality” – Project SMART

Lets face it, you’re probably not going to create the next billion views video on Youtube. And putting unrealistic goals on your Youtube subscriber number is only going to deflate your confidence and make you give up quickly. Start small, set realistic goals, create content on a consistent basis and watch your number grow steadily. If you follow these tips you’ll be well on your way to succeeding.

For some inspiration watch this video by Gary Vaynerchuck:

Well there you have it, 21 actionable tips that you should consider in your video marketing. Are you ready to step up your game in the video marketing arena? Let us know what you thought of our tips in this post and if there’s anything you’d like to add. If you’re pumped to start churning out some awesome video ads look no further than to our own service right here. If you liked this post it would mean the world to us if you’d share it on social media. And hey, sign up to our newsletter to get free video ad templates and actionable video marketing tips straight to your inbox.