eBook

THE ULTIMATE GUIDETO VIDEO MARKETING

STRATEGY

A comprehensive guide including tips & examples

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IntroductIon

Video marketing is the word on every marketers’ lips these days, and videos are constantly popping up in our feeds on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. But sometimes there are misconceptions about creating videos for marketing purposes, where many marketers think it’s either too difficult, too time consuming or too ex-pensive, or all the above. But it doesn’t have to be.

In this eBook, we will provide you with reasons why you should invest time and effort into video marketing. We will also give you an introduction to how you can use video for different marketing purposes, such as inbound marketing, using video to promote a product or service, and video for events.

But first, let’s take a look at what the statistics from 2018 can tell us about the status quo of video marketing.

CONTENT3 Introduction 4 The State Of Video in 2018 5 Take Your Inbound Strategy To The Next Level 6 1. Attract 7 2. Convert 8 3. Close 8 4. Delight9 Launch Your Product With A Bang Video As A Sales Tool 9 Step 1: Creating Buzz 10 Step 2: The Launch 11 Step 3: Demos and How-To’s 12 Step4:Trafficandconversion 12 Step 5: Keep the ball rolling 13 Supercharge Your Event Promo With Video 13 Add Video To Email Invitations 14 Create Recap-Videos 15 Live Streaming 16 Gain followers and create interest on social platforms 16 Teasers 17 Interview Attendees18 SEO and Video 18 Create Value 18 Choose The Right Keywords 19 So You’ve Got Your Videos.. Where To Publish? 19 Search Engine Optimization 19 Top Of Funnel 20 Bottom Of Funnel 20 Go Native 20 Conclusion

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The State Of Video in 2018Video is a great marketing tool that every marketer should use to increase visi-bility and engagement around their business or brand, and many marketers are already taking advantage of video. In fact, a study from 2018 shows that 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. Marketers continue to say that video has helped increase users’ understanding of their product or service and helped increase traffic and sales. And this is connected to the fact that consum-ers LOVE video! Hubspot reports that “where video and text are available on the same page, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service”.

In 2017, over 500 billion people watched video on Facebook every single day, and about 300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute. In fact, 1/3 of the time people spend online is devoted to watching videos.

There is no doubt that video should be a part of your marketing strategy in 2018. Because everyone love video these days, marketers should really start using it as a tool to engage, convert and educate.

Take Your Inbound Strategy To The Next LevelSimilar to video marketing, inbound marketing is a popular concept these days. But don’t think of these as separate entities - they can, and should be used in combination for maximum effect.

If you’re not familiar with the inbound marketing methodology, there are count-less resources available online (we recommend HubSpot). However, it can all be summarized into a simple concept: attracting customers through relevant and helpful content, adding value through every step of the buyer’s journey. Impor-tant factors for this is to create content of value for your potential leads, so they are willing to give you some information about themselves in return for access to your content. Content can be white papers, infographics, guides and videos.

Video should not just be a small element to your inbound marketing strategy, it should be one of the key elements. When building an inbound marketing strat-egy, you are asking your audience to engage in your content, so you should offer them content they find engaging. According to SmallBizzTrends, compa-nies using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-users, so if we follow that and many more statistics we can confidently assume video is one of the more effective ways to create engagement.

An important illustration used in inbound, is the sales funnel. It looks something like this:

Source: Hubspot

«There’s a popular misconception that people will generally only share frivolous, entertainment videos (cats and epic fails!) Our findings suggest that, if you create video content that your specific

audience enjoys, 83% of consumers would consider sharing it with their friends. Being a brand is not necessarily a disadvantage -

content is king!» Hubspot

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The goal is to turn anonymous users from prospects, to leads, to customers, and finally to ambassadors. To do this, they typically go through each stage of the sales funnel, and it is your job as an inbound marketer to nurture them through the stages. These stages have many different names, but for this purpose, we’ll call them attract, convert, close and delight. In this chapter, we will take you through each of these stages, and show you how you can incorporate video into them to get a better outcome.

1. Attract

In this stage, it’s all about catching the attention of your potential customers, and ideally lead them to your website. They might be in a research phase where they are looking at different options to solve a problem, or they might not even be fully aware of the fact that they have a problem, or that it is solvable. This is where you need to provide valuable content that feeds them with inspiration, without pushing your product onto them too much.

Video is an excellent tool to use here, because it is so engaging compared to other types of content. In this phase, customers might not be ready to allocate time and resources to read an extensive eBook, but watching a video requires much less effort.

Longer in depth interviews and webinars on topics relevant to your consumer are good offerings to give your audience. While white papers and PDF’s are still popular and effective ways to offer content, this will help set you apart and give content that the viewer can connect more with. A good idea is to publish short video teasers on social media, with a call to action that leads your audience to your website, where the longer version of the interview/webinar lives. According to Business Insider, videos ads have an average click through rate of 1,84%, which is the highest click through rate of all digital ad formats. This naturally makes it a great tool to draw viewers onto your landing pages. Once they are on your website, some of them will go looking for more content of interest, and learn more about your product and brand.

Here is a teaser we made for a longer interview we published on our website: http://video.vibbio.com/fremtidens-markedsforing-ep-6 (Content in Norwegian. It was originally posted on Facebook, Instagram and used in email). Since our product is video marketing software, we chose to interview a set of marketing thought leaders in our primary market (Norway), to spread knowledge about new marketing trends, and establish ourselves as a player in this space.

2. Convert

Once you have gained the attention of your visitors through engaging and ed-ucational content, it’s time to convert them into leads, a.k.a convincing them to give you their email address. According to a study done by Wistia, people spend on average 2,6x more time on pages with video than without. Since you have lots of video on your website/landing page, it means users will typically spend more time there. That is a great thing, because once you have them on your website, you can create conversion points designed to capture emails. A good solution is to put forms in close relation to the video they have just watched. Some tools, like Twentythree, lets you put collectors on the video that will prompt the view-ers to leave their email to receive more content to their inbox. If you do not have this type of tool, you can leave a form directly underneath the video, or in the sidebar, with a short and engaging copy that suggests that viewers leave their contact information to be sent more of the same type of content - since they’re obviously interested in it.

Here is an example of how we practice using videos to convert. As mentioned before, we used teasers in social media and emails, which included calls-to-action to a landing page where we ask the viewers for their email to watch the full interview.

http://video.vibbio.com/nils-apeland-on-the-future-of-marketing-vibbio-2

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3. Close

After watching your amazing video content and willingly leaving their email to learn more, anonymous strangers turn into leads. To prime these leads to become customers, you should send them more content regularly. If they keep engaging with the emails you send, you can slowly, but surely, begin to send them more product-focused content.

By incorporating video in your email campaigns, you can increase your click-through rate by as much as 96%, as well as open rates by 5.6%, which is great if you want to nurture your leads. Make sure to put the word “video” in your subject line to reap those open rate effects. It doesn’t have to be flashy, just write something like “Video interview with leading industry expert”, etc. Anoth-er common mistake is to try attaching the video file to the email. This creates another hoop that your leads have to jump through to get to the content, and will affect your click-through rates. Attach a video thumbnail in the email body with a clear and bold playbutton to encourage clicks. Again, Twentythree have some great features to make this even better, using GIFs.

In addition to email campaigns, you can also nurture your leads using remar-keting campaigns via for example Facebook or Google. It’s always good to use a mix of different types of content here, but make sure you include video into it!

Once you have nurtured your leads using video, it’s time for your sales team to get involved and try to book a meeting to close a deal. There are lots of ways for sales to use video as well, like sending personalized introduction emails with video, or using some of the product-related videos you have in their emails (see the chapter about product launch strategy to learn more). But because you have provided so much content along the funnel, closing should be easier.

4. Delight

So you’ve landed the deal - awesome! But the journey is not over yet. An impor-tant part of inbound is to keep your customers ‘delighted’ even after purchase. Keep feeding them with helpful videos that provides value, like demos if you’ve released a new product/feature, or how-to’s when they’re needing some inspi-ration. If you have a FAQ/knowledge bank/help center, this is also a great place to fill with video. Explaining in a way that is understandable can sometimes be challenging using only text and static images, but it comes alive in a whole new way with video. So keep creating videos, but not only for your potential custom-ers. That way, you’re on your way to turning your regular customers into brand ambassadors, who will attract even more people into the top of your funnel.

Launch Your Product With A Bang When developing a new product or service, it’s easy to get stuck into the planning and production-phase, and forget to create a marketing strategy for the launch. However, this is arguably just as important as the product development itself. Without an effective marketing strategy, getting people to purchase your product or service won’t necessarily be smooth sailing.

Video has proved to be an effective tool for both marketing and sales, and should therefore be incorporated into every product launch strategy. In this chapter, we’ll go through each step of the product launch process, and how you can use video each step of the way.

Video As A Sales ToolAccording to HubSpot, we are 85% more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. Studies also show that consumers often seek out product vid-eos when in the research-phase - especially when buying online. This is not so strange, because with video, you can get a better feel for the product than by just consuming static content like text and images. You should therefore make sure that wherever people might go looking for information about your product, you provide them with a video.

Step 1: Creating Buzz

Before launching a new product, that no one has heard of, it is important to build curiosity and interest. This should start well before your launch date, and build up towards the launch. Create short videos that provide glimpses as to what you’re launching, without giving it all away. To start your conversion pro-cess early, building a waitlist for the product can also be a good idea. Create a short and attention-grabbing video with a call to action to get people to sign up to be the first to know when the product launches. This email list will consist of highly interested leads that will most likely respond well to the rest of your launch campaign.

Branding is extremely important in these videos, even if you already have a rec-ognized brand. The product is still new, and video branding is a powerful tool to help form associations between the brand and the product.

Take a look at this example from Samsung that gives a hint at what’s coming, without giving it all away.

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Samsung https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhaiD-gUhZU

Step 2: The Launch

For the launch itself, you want to make a blast. All that interest, curiosity and buzz you have built up in the previous weeks, will hopefully have your audience ready and waiting. However, don’t expect everyone to have seen your teaser videos, so don’t leave out any vital information on the basis of false assump-tions. The launch video should be exciting and eye-catching, while providing information about the new product, and providing a call to action where the viewers can go to learn more. As with all videos, remember to tailor their lengths and formats to the different channels you are publishing on.

Look at this eye-catching video example from Apple’s launch of Iphone X:

IPhone X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW6hFttt_KE

If you’re planning to host a launch event - make sure you create a video from that as well. Let the attendees remember the highlights, and the no-shows re-gret their decision. Read more about event videos in chapter 3.

Step 3: Demos and How-To’s

No matter how simple or complicated you think your product might be, it is al-ways useful to create some videos that demonstrate different use cases of your product. This will not only be helpful in the sales process, as potential customers can learn about your product, but also as a reference that acquired customers can use to answer questions - saving your customer service team some work.

If you are launching a software product, screen recordings are always useful to incorporate into these types of videos. Create long, in-depth tutorials to post on your website, and shorter snippets that give insights into the different selling points for social media.

Check out this how-to video from Spotify:

https://vimeo.com/122550866

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Step 4: Traffic and conversion

When your product is launched, and your website is up and running, it’s time to start posting video content that is directly geared towards traffic and conver-sion. Focus on one, or a few, of your major selling points per video, and try to frame it in a way that solves a problem for

your target group. If you have the marketing budget, it’s also a good idea to put some cash into the distribution of these videos. Think about where your custom-ers usually find you - is it Facebook, search, Youtube, Instagram, etc? All these offer opportunities for paid video content that will make you stand out from the competition.

A powerful Call To Action is absolutely necessary to lead your viewers through to your website. Spend time crafting call to action messages that are tailored to your target audience. If you have a wide target group, it’s better to create sever-al versions of the videos with different calls to action, than trying to grab them all with the same message.

Step 5: Keep the ball rolling

After a successful launch, it can be tempting to just take a breather and ride the waves. Don’t forget to keep creating engaging content that will keep leads and prospect warm, and eventually converting. You can read more about this in our chapter about inbound video marketing.

Supercharge Your Event Promo With VideoImagine you’re in charge of marketing and PR for an event your business is hosting. How will you promote it? Maybe you’ll send out some email invitations, create social media posts, or print flyers and posters and pay for advertisements in magazines and in public spaces. But what if we told you that creating video content can boost the interest in your event significantly? In this chapter we will go through how you can use video as part of your marke- ting strategy for your event - before, during and after.

Add Video To Email InvitationsAccording to Endless Events, most event marketers believe email marketing is the most effective channel for promoting events. And since video is proven to be the most efficient marketing tool, you should try to implement videos in your email-invitations. According to Forbes, video in an email leads to 200-300% increase in click-through rates.

Adding videos to emails is beneficial because:

1) Videos will make a bigger impact on the receiver than just plain text,

2) People respond more positively to a product after watching a video, and

3) It can get your point across faster.

To promote an upcoming event, you can create a video with clips from your pre-vious events along with relevant information, and add it to the email-invitations or newsletters you’re sending out before the event to create engagement and to inform.

You could also create short teaser videos with the speakers where they give some statements about what they will talk about at the event, what they are looking forward to, or why people should sign up, just to name a few examples.

If you’re new in the email-marketing game, you could try the free solution mailchimp.com to get you started.

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Create Recap-VideosCreating recap videos is a good way to show everyone how great your event was after it’s done, and is also great for promoting next year’s event. These types of videos work well not just in email invitations or newsletters, but also on social media and on your website.

You can publish recap videos some weeks after the event occured to give a little taste of how it was to those who didn’t attend, but also as a thank you to everyone that attended and participated. You can also use the same video to promote next year’s event by changing the text and adding information about when and where the event will be. Your videos should always end with a call to action so that your audience know what to do next. With recap videos used to promote this year’s event, your call to action should encourage people to sign up, or lead them to your website where they can learn more.

To be able to make recap videos, you will need to do some filming during the event. You should try to get video clips of: the speakers on stage, attendees mingling, the dinner afterwards, exhibition stands, concerts, and so on. Make sure you film different parts of the day to get a little variation in your clips. And remember - it’s always better to get too many shots than too few.

You can use all of these different video clips, add fun or inspirational music, and inspirational messages or relevant information, and you will have a video that shows how inspiring, fun or interesting it was at your event. And hopefully, peo-ple would want to sign up for the next one.

Here’s an example of a recap-video from the Norwegian event, Startup Extreme, that uses video clips from previous events to promote Startup Extreme 2018.

Live StreamingDuring the event, you should consider doing live streaming. According to Eventbrite, live video is a worthy investment for different types and sizes of events - from smaller festivals or concerts to business events. To keep it cheap and simple, you can shoot the videos with your phone and stream it on Face-book Live or Periscope. According to Digitell, 30% of people who watch a live-stream of an event will attend the same event the next year. You can read more tips about how to livestream an event on Facebook Live here.

Your live streaming doesn’t have to be a minute-by-minute showcase of what’s happening on stage. There are other types of settings you can film, such as:

Behind the scenes:This type of scenario is great to film with your smartphone. It gives your viewers exclusive information and footage of what’s happening behind the scenes.

Q&A’s: You can also bring your speakers backstage and do short interviews with them, and encourage your Facebook followers to post questions for the speakers in the commentary section.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjYdW0CqCiA

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https://www.facebook.com/KatapultFutureFest/videos/1898468577092942/

Interview AttendeesDuring your event, you can also film interviews with other attendees that have interesting stories to tell and use these videos for your social media pages. Take a moment to think about all the interesting people that will be attending. Some attendees will probably be experts within a specific field - and they most likely have something interesting to say. Take advantage of this, and interview some of them during the event about topics such as: their field of work, the topic of the event, or make them give a customer testimonial about your event, just to name a few examples. In that way, you will have a lot of video content that you can use throughout the year, and you will provide your audience with valuable content. The huge advantage here is that when you publish these great stories on social media, you will im-mediately have a much bigger chance at reaching people that did not attend your event - and they might start following you on your social media channels and be interested in attending your event next year!

Here’s an example of how you can interview someone at an event to make a fun and interesting social media video:

https://www.facebook.com/vibbio/videos/1722387824457462/

Gain followers and create interest on social platformsTeasers When you’ve already made a recap-video to promote this year’s event, it’s easy to make shorter teaser versions of it to boost curiosity and increase engagement around the event on social media. These teasers should rarely be longer than 30 seconds, and to gain maximum engagement, they should be eye catching. If your recap-video is energetic, then so should your teasers be. These teasers’ main function is to boost engagement around your event and your social media pages, lead to the longer recap-video, or drive audiences to your website.

If you don’t have any video material from previous events, you can interview some of the speakers that will participate this year before the event and create promo teasers out of this. Here’s an example from Katapult Future Fest 2017:

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SEO and VideoSearch engine optimization is important for all types of content - including video. There are several steps you should consider for optimizing your videos for search and ranking, and listed below are elements we recommend to con-sider when creating a video.

Create Value This point might seem obvious in an inbound marketing strategy, however it is very important when planning a video. Regardless of what type of content you create, you should always create something that adds value to the audience. Ask yourself the question: what information can I give my audience that is of value and interest to them? In this way, you can build trust with your viewers, increasing the chances of them moving further down in the sales funnel.

Companies can easily forget that their expertise and knowledge can be inter-esting for their market. Although these videos focus more on creating a com-munity around their expertise and those who are interested, rather than sales, it will benefit your company all the same. If you create videos with topics that your viewers are genuinely interested in, the videos are more likely to be shared, which will lead to an even wider reach.

From an SEO point of view, it’s important that you decide on the goal of your video. Whether the goal of your video is to generate links (get people to link to your videos or share them), or increase conversions, you should have a clear target audience in mind, and always think quality over quantity.

Choose The Right Keywords With video as with other types of content, keywords are still essential to make it easier for your audience to find it. Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google, so it’s important that you treat your videos as you treat your writ-ten content.

You should:

Choose a search engine-friendly title that includes the long-tail keyword you wish to rank for in Google searches, and

Give your video a file name that is relevant and include a short description about the video. Here you also want to try to include the keywords you are looking to rank for.

So You’ve Got Your Videos.. Where To Publish?Once you have made your video strategy and produced some video content, it’s time to put it out there for the world (a.k.a your target audience) to see - and the key here is just that, your target audience. Try to publish in are-nas they naturally gravitate to, or in places where they would go to look for information about your service. In addition to this, you should also keep in mind the different stages of the funnel, as well as SEO, when you make your publishing decisions.

Search Engine Optimization

Choosing the right platform to publish on can also affect your search rankings. Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world, and is considered a better publishing channel than for example Vimeo, when talking about findabil-ity and SEO. If you use the same SEO strategies for your videos as your written content, they are more likely to rank high on Youtube searches, but also in Goog-le searches. But Youtube is still one of many publishing channels. Remember that video can be used in all parts of the sales and marketing funnel, and you should therefore aim at posting videos on the platforms that corresponds to where in the funnel your content fits.

Top Of FunnelAt the top of the funnel, you want to create valuable video content that can be helpful to your audience. With these videos you should attract your viewers, and lead as many people as possible further down in the funnel. For this purpose, social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram are all great platforms to publish your videos. Find out on which platform your target audience typically spend their time, and focus on posting your videos on that platform. In that way, you are able to lead and move as many “right” people as possible further down your sales and marketing funnel.

The videos you post on social media should lead the audience to similar content on your website, or they could lead to a longer version of the same video that you have hidden behind a form on your website. If they are willing to leave their email address, they will have moved further down in the funnel, and you are closer to converting them into paying customers.

It’s important to keep an eye on how your leads engage with your content, to give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, it’s a good invest-ment to implement a video marketing publishing platform on your website, such as Twentythree, Vidyard or Wistia. This type of tool will give you a great oppor-tunity to track how your leads engage with your content and convert them into paying customers, as well as making sure your video player is onbrand. A video marketing publishing platform will enable you to track all your videos: on social media, on your website and on your landing pages.

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Bottom Of FunnelVideos are not only for marketing on social media or websites. You should in fact also encourage your sales team to use video in the emails they send out to potential customers. Shorter product videos or how-to videos work well for this type of video marketing in the bottom of the funnel. Therefore, we strongly recommend every sales team to use video in their day to day sales communi-cation.

Go NativeHowever you choose to publish your videos, you should always keep in mind that you choose the right format, length and content for the platform you’re publishing on. But keep in mind that it is always best to publish natively, ie. posting directly to the platform, instead of sharing a link or an embed code from Youtube or Vimeo. The reason for this is that platforms tend to favor na-tive content, and doing this will therefore give you an organic algorithm-boost. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and now even Linkedin allows for this, so take advantage of the opportunity!

ConclusionNow, you are hopefully better acquainted with video for inbound marketing and gotten some ideas on how you can start implementing videos in your overall marketing strategy, in cases such as a product launch or for promot-ing an event.

There are of course other instances where you could use video as a market-ing tool as well, but we think that if you follow some of the examples served here, you have come a long way in creating more online visibility and en-gagement around your brand.

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www.vibbio.com