Video Marketing for Social Media 101
In less than a year, according to Entrepreneur associate editor Erin Schultz, 80 percent of all online content will be video. Those businesses that don’t utilising video marketing in Bangkok, Thailand within the year may face the same fate as did those who didn’t go mobile a few years ago—they’ll be left in the dust.
Don’t panic. If your business hasn’t embraced video marketing on your social media pages yet, you can start now. With these easy-to-follow tips, you can capture a healthy share of the market in your niche with well-placed, compelling videos.
• Why you need video marketing on your social media platforms
• Why you need to create a video marketing plan for social media
• How to create your plan
• How to reach your target customers with your plan
• How to choose which videos you post
• How to choose the right social media platforms on which to post your videos
1. Know the Stats; Spread the Word
AdAge, the ‘bible’ of the advertising industry, points out that 69 percent of consumers who go online for information would prefer to watch a video than read an explanation of the same product. Even more telling, a business who use video to market their products and services will grow their revenue, on average, 49 percent more than those without video marketing.
Take these statistics into the boardroom the next time the C-suite suits tell you that the company doesn’t need videos to market its work. It does.
2. Make a Video Storyboard and Marketing Plan
Instead of just whipping out your cell phone to take a video of your new product in action and plopping it on your Facebook page, make a plan. Consider the following factors:
• Audience: What audience do you want to target this marketing campaign to?
• Stage of the journey: At which phase in their ‘buyer’s journey’ are they? What are the factors that will attract potential customers like them?
• What types of videos will appeal to the customer: Different products—and different customers—need videos that target both the customer’s need and the best aspects of the product.
• Where the target customers hang out on social media: If you post your videos where your target customers usually are, you have a better chance of getting their attention—and the sale
3. Create Customer Personas
Most successful social media video marketers look at the demographics of their target market to create a ‘persona’ of each of the types of people who are most likely to buy their product. For example, if your company sells action figure toys, you should look at who buys these and where they spend their time online.
In this case, one of the customer personas could be a young boy from about four to 11 years old who binge-watches superhero videos.
The typical audience for online superhero videos includes a lot of young boys Screenshot courtesy of Thailand Toy Expo
A second customer persona would be the parents of these boys since they often buy them as gifts. The parents, of course, will be looking at toy store social media profiles, not action videos, when they’re online. Furthermore, they won’t go to the toy store’s social media sites all year long—only before holidays and their children’s birthdays.
Once you have your customer personas nailed down, make it personal. Some companies even give these customer personas ‘names’ to help marketers keep their focus on their target audience and which social media sites they frequent.
Giving customer personas actual names helps you narrow your social media video content to their preferences
Screenshot courtesy of Autopilot.
4. Target Each Stage in the Buyer’s Journey
Let’s take our first customer persona, the little boy.
One of your videos should attract the attention of kids looking for cool toys to buy.
• Novelty: Stress that the toy is brand new
• Being the first: Point out how important it is to be the first kid in the neighbourhood to get the toy
• Desire: Build desire with features that appeal to him For lookers, nothing sells like novelty, being the first to have the product, and desire for the product.
If your product has competitors, here’s where your video needs to point out where your product is superior.
Features: In the case of the boy who wants an action toy, you’d point out all the features that make your toy superior. Does it fire actual soft projectiles? Does it move its arms and legs? Does it come with a lot of accessories?
Safety factors: Videos that target his parents, though, would stress how safe it is compared to its competitors.
Price: For some comparers—like the parents—price may be a factor.
Quality: Many people like to stack the quality of a product against its competitors. In our example, parents would want a toy that wouldn’t break easily.
The Ready-To-Purchase Viewers
Here’s where need you stress the fear of missing out (FOMO) for all your customer personas.
• Fear of missing out: Although the slant of the videos would be different, the key element is to convince buyers that if they don’t buy—today—they might not get the product at all.
• Use emotion: For the parents in our example, you’d want to perhaps show a sad child whose parents passed up buying the toy. For the child, you might show a video that portrays all the kids in the neighbourhood but one playing with the toy.
• Call to action that links to the product page: At the end, a strong call to action should include a link to the product page.
5. Choose a Video Type That Fits the Product, the Audience, and the Message
Let’s return to our example—the action toy. The boy, of course, would love a demo video that shows the toy in action. A video that brings out the emotion of fun, too, would appeal.
Yet emotional videos won’t work for every product, audience, or message. Different types of videos work best in certain situations. Here’s a short list:
These videos work best for the following situations:
• New products and services: Show how the product can benefit customers.
• Action items: Toys, cars, or sports equipment benefit from videos that show how they work.
• Items with complex instructions: Demo videos help sell by simplifying the instructions for installation or operation.
Emotion is a strong factor in most buying decisions. Although its greatest appeal is in business-to-customer products and services, it can work equally well in a different context in business-to-business buying decisions, particularly when FOMO is the emotion stressed.
Use these emotions to bring more customers to your doorstep:
• FOMO: Fear of missing out on a good thing
• Love: Purchasing a product that makes another person happy
• Sadness: The result of not purchasing your product or service
• Happiness: The result of purchasing your product or service
• Desire: Bring out the facets of your product that customers can’t resist
• Recruiting employees
• Trying to convince buyers about your company’s commitment to excellence and good service
Then, a video that shows your company putting those values into action is a good choice.
Thought Leadership Videos
• Build authority: If you are selling a service, you need to convince potential customers that you’re the best there is in your niche.
• Solve challenges: Find out what challenges your target customers need and create a video that helps them solve these challenges.
If your company or organisation plans to hold an informative live event, why not bring your potential customers in on the action? Post videos during these live events and watch your target audience grow their interest in your product.
• Lectures by well-known authorities in the industry
• Question-and-answer sessions
For a new product—or a new business—an educational video can go a long way to introduce your work to the world.
Show your target audience:
• What your business or product is
• What benefits it can bring
• How it works
• For B2C sales: Nothing attracts more customers than a heartfelt video of an appreciative customer extolling your product or service’s benefits. These videos make fabulous choices for beauty products, music lessons, psychotherapy, or any product or service that can make one’s life better.
• For B2B customers: Testimonial videos can prove most effective when they see how other businesses have used your service or product to bring in more revenue.
Finally, your videos can appear in paid ads as well. These ads will appear in your target audience’s social media news feeds.
With today’s wealth of user data—their demographics and their preferences—it’s possible to create paid, targeted videos that reach most of your target audience with videos that appeal to them.
6. Post Your Videos on the Social Media Platforms They Frequent
Just like the little boy in our earlier example, you want your videos to appear when your target customer is online. Dive into your customers’ demographics to discover which social media sites they frequent most.
Once you have that list, you can choose the best social media platform for each video. Various social media platforms work better for certain types of videos than others. Here are some of the strengths of the four most popular social media platforms for posting videos:
Twitter limits video length to 30 seconds. It’s also a favourite place to post impromptu videos for near real-time reporting.
This length is ideal for short how-to videos, since the length makes them easy to remember. New product videos, too—like the hypothetical new action toy we’ve followed throughout this guide—can also benefit from the immediacy this platform offers.
• Impromptu videos
• Real-time reporting
• Short how-to videos
A favourite of photographers for years, Instagram has recently entered the video market. It limits video posts to 60 seconds.
Instagram is a great platform to ask people to post videos of themselves, their family, or their friends using the product.
This platform’s culture discourages blatant promotions so a subtle approach is best. The action toy’s manufacturer, for instance, could encourage parents to take videos of their children as they play with their new toy.
The platform’s roots in photography make it a great choice for videos of photogenic products or tourist locations.
• Videos of your product’s users
• Videos that illustrate your product’s photogenic features
Facebook offers a new feature, called Facebook Live, that provides a platform businesses can use to post live events, such as seminars, new product introductions, and concerts. Food and beverage videos work exceptionally well on Facebook, since people often look at their Facebook page during the lunch hour. Facebook also has one of the finest collections of data on its users that video marketers can use to target the people that fit its customer personas.
• Live videos
• Food and beverage videos
• Music videos
• Entertaining videos
• Information-rich mining of target customer base
The most popular platform for videos, YouTube gives businesses the opportunity to create their own ‘channel’. It goes way beyond music videos, though.
These videos can create a brand story that includes products, results of a business’s services, its culture or its customers using the product. YouTube videos can be much longer than many other platforms’ required lengths.
Fashion brands, like Greyhound Original, get a lot of traction when they post videos that showcase their pieces in action or the creative process behind each garment.
Because Google owns YouTube, YouTube has a marvellous set of analytics that helps you sift through the data to find your target audience.
• The power of Google analytics
• Brand stories that require longer video length
• Music videos
• Your business’s own channel
Fashion giant Greyhound Original puts the power of YouTube to work to showcase their collection
Video courtesy of Greyhound Original
Millennials’ favoured platform by far, Snapchat is essential if you want to market a product to young adults. Its fun vibe makes it best for less-serious posts that keep blatant self-promotion out of the picture.
• Fun vibe
• High appeal to millennials, teens, and other young adults
After you choose the social media platform on which you want to post your videos, make sure that your videos’ dimensions meet the technical specifications of each platform.