It’s no longer news that video content gets you customers. At least 64 percent of consumers admitted that they are likely to purchase a product after watching a video about it. Users tend to spend more time on a website when there’s video content available, and YouTube has been reporting steady growth in video consumption year after year.
Feel like jumping on the bandwagon, but don’t know where to start? Here’s a simple 5-step blueprint to help you with that.
Step 1: Understand What Your Audience Wants
In this case, video marketing isn’t much different from content marketing in general. Before creating anything you need to understand what your audience actually likes to see. An explainer video, tutorials or some short and intriguing behind-the-scene captures?
To get your answers, start with the simplest thing: just ask. Shoot a quick survey to your customers via email and ask your social media followers for tips. It’s not worth investing in video content unless your audience anticipates for it.
Next, do your research:
- Scout your support inbox for commonly asked questions and troubles users had with your product.
- Research trending headlines within your niche using BuzzSumo and Alltop
- Check out what questions are buzzing on Quora and on other social media networks.
Step 2: Align Your Ideas With Your Goals
Got some video content ideas jotted down? Great, now lets see how those fit to your business goals. Ideally your video should occupy the sweet point at the intersection of your brand goals, audience interests and the possibility of doing such a video right now.
Using this approach you can narrow your list down to the most valuable ideas, which will bring you qualified leads and measurable ROI.
Step 3: Polish Up Your Toolkit
Video production shouldn’t be a costly matter. In fact with the right tools and skills in your arsenal you can shoot and edit a professionally looking video within just a few hours.
Do invest in:
- Decent lightning
- An external mic for crisp sound
- A professional voice-over if needed.
Essential Video Tools
- Camtasia to shoot your video screen
- Nutshell – a drag & drop video editing tool, which also animates your images and can add simple, attractive animation.
- Animoto – freemium video editing tool with great functionality
- Common Craft – is a paid tool you can use to create animated whiteboard videos with paper cutouts as characters.
- To create simple animation check out Animatron or consider taking a few animation classes – there’s plenty of free and paid ones online.
Step 4: Make Your Content Resonate
According to Christina Desmarais from Unruly, there are 18 psychological responses you should aim for with your video content if your aim is to go viral:
- Happiness
- Exhilaration
- Amazement
- Inspiration
- Hilarity
- Contempt
- Disgust
- Sadness
- Warmth
- Pride
- Nostalgia
- Surprise
- Knowledge
- Shock
- Confusion
- Arousal
- Fear
- Anger
Emotional content is what really connect you with your customers and encourages them to take action – share the content; click through to your CTA etc.
Write your script with a certain emotional response in mind and pick the music that elicits the right type of emotion too.
Step 5: Promote, Promote and Promote Once Again
Once your engaging video is up, it’s time to attract the max eyeballs possible to it. Obviously upload it on YouTube and publish a dedicated blog post on your website. Instead of dropping a link to YouTube on Facebook, upload your video directly to the network for better exposure.
Consider sharing the juiciest bits of it as an Instagram video ad; a quick Pericope update and a Snapchat teaser.
Share your video on your other social media profiles and consider re-scheduling it for later, so that it kept driving traffic your website over and over again.
