Video, video, video. Everyone is talking about video. Perhaps you’ve been tasked to look into the feasibility of video for your brand or maybe you’ve read enough about the power of the medium to convince you that a video strategy is a worthwhile investment.

But wait, you already have a working marketing strategy. Wouldn’t creating a video strategy and adding that to the mix potentially confuse things if you’ve haven’t made allowances for it already?

Thankfully, no. Not at all.

You don’t need to knock down your current content efforts, nor do you need to rewrite your entire marketing plan if you haven’t already included video.

This article will walk you through how you can add targeted video marketing to an existing marketing strategy.

Let’s begin…

Why would you want to do that?!

So, yes, as established above, we can add meaningful video activity to an existing plan. But why on earth would you want to go and do a thing like that? If you are in any doubt whatsoever, check out the points below:

Attention – Getting and maintaining the attention of your audience is the most fundamental step in marketing success. Without it, you are invisible. The very properties of the medium of video make it an innately attention grabbing proposition. Be it on social, YouTube, email or your website, users today want to watch video.

Engagement – OK. So you now have the attention of your audience, now what? Your viewer needs to be engaged! Video can be an incredibly engaging medium, meaning your message will have more power and subsequently more influence over the viewer.

SEO – Having video on your website has been shown to boost your visibility on search engines (if it’s done correctly, of course). You’ll need to give clear thought to the metadata on the video and if you do, the rewards could be great.

Increase conversions – Be it a landing page, contact form, product page or an email, video can help you to boost your conversions. We’ve found with our own clients who do A/B split tests over landing pages that there is a clear lean towards video. This means more traffic, enquiries and sales to them – and there’s no reason why it can’t to you too.

Now that’s clear, let’s dive right in…

Step 1 – Goal review (for focus)
What are your goals in relation to your marketing strategy?

For your video content to be a useful investment it must be aligned with what you are trying to achieve overall.

The danger of skipping this step is that you could make generic, unfocused video content. Content like this will disengage your audience and can do more harm than good. We want your video content to be truly effective, so ensure you do not pass this step by!

To help, complete the following:
Our main marketing goal is:
Therefore, we must ensure that our video content focuses on the following:

Step 2 – Content Evaluation (so you know what’s working)
Now that you’re laser focused, it’s time for a quick rundown on what content is working and what’s missing the mark.

Look at your analytics and decipher the content that is getting the most engagement and most traction. The following questions have helped our clients, they may be useful to you too:

– Where are you getting the most engagement on social media? (in terms of conversations started, not just shares and likes)
– When are there spikes in traffic from social? Which channels are they from?
– Your blogs – which are the most engaging? Are there any themes?
– How are your landing pages converting? Are the leads that they’re yielding what you need to be hitting your targets?
– Product/services pages – are you getting conversions here?

Step 3 – Tying Video In (so you know what’s worth investing in)
So now you’ve done a review of your stats, you should have a really good overview of what is working and which areas need improving (there are always areas that need improving!).

Maybe you’ve spotted that you social channels are yielding much traffic – or that there really isn’t much engagement. If so, then consider running a social video campaign.

Perhaps there was a series of blogs that were crushing it in terms of being read and shared. Why not turn those into a video series?

Your landing page isn’t getting you your target amount of leads. Then run an A/B split test with a video on one and not on the other.

Perhaps your new product isn’t selling how you’d forecasted. This is a great sign that a sharp piece of video could get those numbers up.

One of the things I love about analytics is the story that they tell you about what is really going on in your business. Pay attention to what you’re being told and respond accordingly.

Over To You
You don’t need to eat the elephant in one gulp. Start small and then when you’re ready you can scale your video efforts.

In terms of producing video – of course there are folk like us here at Apricot who can help – but also kit is relatively inexpensive so doing in house video doesn’t need to be out of the question if you’re confident enough to give it a go.

In terms of video metrics – don’t judge a video’s success by the number of views. You need to be looking at stats like engagement levels, shares and conversions. These are much more meaningful in relation to business goals, so don’t be fooled by views!

Key Takeaways:

1. Don’t be intimidated by the prospect of adding video to your content mix
2. Be clear on why you are making your content – what are your goals?
3. Do an audit: what’s working and what needs improvement?
4. Using this info, make decisions on where your video can be deployed for maximum impact
5. Don’t measure video success (or failure) by the number of views. Dig into the more meaningful metrics.