Unlocking the secrets of video marketing success

By Georgie Wood

In a world dominated by visual content, video marketing has emerged as the reigning champion of audience engagement and brand awareness on social media platforms.

Whilst creating appealing videos is a key part of the process, there is a strategic journey that involves understanding the Who, Why, What, When and How.

Who is the target audience?

Firstly, it’s important to understand who your audience currently is, and who the video is aimed towards. For example, if you were a children and baby brand your audience might be mums, parents and families.

Knowing this information can help you understand the style of content your audience might want to see and will engage with, as well as the best channels to reach them.

Tools such as Agorapulse are great for helping you learn valuable insights into your audience preferences, interests and behaviours. This understanding will allow you to create content that resonates with your current viewers or is more likely to attract new audiences.

Why are you making this content?

You need to know what you are aiming to achieve from the videos you’re producing in order to gauge their success.

Do you want to increase brand awareness? Boost brand engagement? Grow your follower count? Or send more traffic to your website?

These objectives are all useful to have in mind when you are creating the content as they become the KPIs you will measure against at a later stage.

Knowing the ‘why’ also helps in the video creation process, as you can look at the video and see if it’s engaging to watch, whether it’s clear who the brand is and if it’s a video that would encourage people to follow for future content.

What type of video are you creating?

My favourite stage in video creation – deciding what exactly you’re making.

You might have seen a video trend raking in the views through the use of a viral song or transition and have an idea on how your brand can get involved in the fun, or maybe you have a completely unique suggestion.

Either way, at this stage you will want to run an ideation session and research ideas to ensure the video you’re creating matches your strategy.

It matters down to the type of video style you’re going for.

Take TikTok for example, typically high-quality professional videos are less favoured compared to a video filmed on an iPhone, and of course the video dimensions are extremely important to factor in.

Posting the video

The final stage is crucial for maximising results and unfortunately isn’t quite as easy as simply hitting post – you want to make sure all that hard work pays off and people actually see your video.

Doing some basic keyword research can really help ensure your caption is adding value to the content and helping boost visibility with the algorithms.

Brand tags and hashtags can also be a great way to reach new audiences. If your video includes another brand you may work with, tagging that brand’s account can further your reach to a highly relevant audience.

Hashtags will also help with this strategy as niche groups and communities will often use and follow them. For example, #mumsofinstagramuk has 135K posts compared to #mumsofinstagram with 3.1M posts – and it has an audience that is highly relevant to a British children & baby retailer.

But be careful to only use relevant hashtags – you don’t want to spam the caption with messy looking hashtags.

Lastly, as you get more familiar with posting video content, you can start to analyse the patterns in engagement to work out the best time to post. This can and will change over time – so be sure to keep on top of checking.

The Results

Although not every video may seem successful at first glance, looking into the insights of video posts can help you learn more about the true performance and results. Below are the most notable metrics to track:

• Reach: Follower to non-follower ratio.
• Number of views: Total number of views and plays.
• Average watch time: The average length of time users watched.
• Watched fully: How many people have watched the video from start to finish.

It goes without saying that every video marketer wants their video to be viral. Although your video marketing strategy directs your content, it’s impossible to gauge how followers will react to published content.

Whilst it’s not possible to accurately predict, reviewing your approach and attempting to replicate positive results can help with understanding and defining the strategy.

On the other hand, if a video doesn’t perform well that can still be really useful information. Make sure to ask yourself “why?” and adapt your approach next time.

If you need some help creating an effective video content strategy, make sure to get in touch and we can help.