Smart video marketing is effective video marketing. It is on budget, on schedule, and set to live up to expectations.
6 tips to ensure you stay smart when it comes to video marketing:
1. Have a Plan for Each Video
What’s the target? What does the target care about? What do we want them to do?
These questions will help you craft a message and concept that will make for smart video marketing. Play out the whole campaign in your head or on a piece of scratch paper. You don’t want to be surprised. This will help you begin with the end in mind.
2. Create Realistic Expectations
As with any creative effort, it’s important to know your goals.
What are you hoping to change with this campaign?
Do you want people to be aware of an issue? Do you want your brand associated with a particular feeling? Do you want people talking about your content?
Whether it’s by clicks, comments, shares, visits, or queries, Smart Video Marketing is measurable. If you can’t measure your results, you don’t know if you’re meeting you goals, and you won’t know how to meet them in the future. You’ll run into things that seem hard to measure. Get creative. Find metrics that best reflect any change.
3. Have a Distribution Plan
So you’ve created a great piece of smart video marketing. Now what? Time for eyeballs.
Know on which marketing channel(s) your video campaign will run.
This can shape the way you present, target, and promote your video. Regardless of if this is a new channel for you or a well-established one, you want to be investing time into building this audience.
If your goal is to garner more traffic to your website, consider hosting your video on your website and sharing the website URL instead of a Youtube link.
Determine whether or not involving other people from other companies will be beneficial.
If you have the same target audience, co-op style content is great. It leverages the social reach of two personal networks. Everybody winse.
4. Keep Them Clicking
Video campaigns are just one component of a bigger marketing or sales program. Your video should make a statement but also be the beginning or continuation of a conversation. If viewers like your video, where will you push them next?
Calls to action are great, but don’t just throw one at the end of a video and hope it does the job. Make sure your ENTIRE video leads up to that moment when the CTA appears. Think Nike’s “Just do it.”
To truly make your campaign resonate, you need to seamlessly guide them through the conversion process from viewer to customer.
5. Get Professional
You‘re a subject matter expert for sure. But remember, smart video marketing doesn’t let the production value distract from the message or emotion in the video.
A video marketing company or a trusted video marketing expert makes a great resource when looking to do smart video marketing. They will be able to help you make, distribute, and promote your video efficiently and without killing your team’s bandwidth.
6. Be Yourself
In almost every form of video marketing or corporate video, the company that embraces its own personality and leverages it to a specific goal, wins. It’s that simple. Smart video marketing is video marketing that couldn’t have been done by any other brand but yours.
Now go get smart and kick some butt.