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Video Marketing Strategy
Video Marketing has the power to help any business grow. Video content naturally helps boost impressions, website dwell time, along with dozens of other digital KPIs. Achieving success with video marketing is about more than just creating video content. With a video content strategy that leverages the approach of Hubspot’s Flywheel model, your business can drive growth with an effective Video Marketing effort.
In this article, you will learn key information to help ensure that your brand’s video content is on-target and optimized to achieve real business goals.
The Flywheel
Attract
Engage
Delight
Video Marketing Strategy
Content
Channels
Optimization
TL;DR
What is the Flywheel?
Learn how to grow your business with a Video Marketing Flywheel.
The Flywheel originated from Hubspot and is a new way to think about the customer lifecycle. Every business must attract prospects, engage with those leads to turn them into customers, and then delight those customers. Video can be used at all stages of the Flywheel to effectively achieve business goals and drive growth.
attract
Capture attention and invoke curiosity. Use videos to attract new business and spread your message across social media and other advertising platforms.
engage
Use video to develop interest by educating your target audience. Convince and convert by turning interested viewers into paying customers.
delight
Word of mouth is more important than ever. Using video to create happy, informed customers also creates evangelists of your brand.
Attract prospects & provide value
“Give them something they actually want because that content builds up the relationship that then allows you to ask for the sale.”
[Gary Vee]
Regardless of industry, attracting qualified leads is vital to your business’s growth. This stage is all about showing who you are, highlighting your expertise, and providing unsoliticted value.
The Attract stage where we get the Flywheel spinning. Here you begin to generate interest about your company.
Here’s some tips on how-to attract qualified leads.
Provide Unsolicted Value
Provide value before you ask for anything in return. It’s just like any job- you have to work before you get a paycheck.
Feel free to give away:
- helpful tips relevant to your industry
- a free trial of your service
- a small sample of your product
- a limited time offer
Helping your prospects right off the bat creates a feeling of trust and develops a deeper relationship, which later on will make selling your product or service much easier.
Make Content Easy to Find
Eliminate barriers to make your content feel like a natural experience. People who are genuinely interested will pay attention.
Free, educational content is often posted on channels such as:
- Social Media
- Website
- Blog
- YouTube
Use Video
Consumers are obsessed with video.
In fact, about 80% of the Internet is comprised of video. Plus research shows that 45% of Internet users watch over an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos per week.
Businesses are constantly trying to cut through the clutter to reach their target audience. Since consumers love video, communicate with your audience using their preferred medium- video.
There are several types of Videos designed to attract your target audience:
- Brand videos show people who you are, why you do what you do, and serve as an introduction between you and your prospects. Consider making this video one of your most high-end pieces of content.
- Micro videos are 5-15 second videos designed to be eye-catching to someone scrolling through social media. Humans now have attention spans shorter than a goldfish, which is why we also call micro-videos, ‘goldfish’ videos.
- Thought Leadership and Industry FAQ videos both provide free information and establish trust between you and your audience.
As Gary Vee says, “Give them something they actually want because that content builds up the relationship that then allows you to ask for the sale.”
Brand video
Show who you are and what your company values are.
Micro videos
Short-form content is perfect for capturing attention on social media.
Thought Leadership
Build authority by establishing yourself as an industry thought leader.
industry specific faq
Provide expertise about your industry to establish trust early on.
Engage with prospects & turn them into customers
“Landing pages containing video receive 80% higher conversion rates.”
[Vidyard]
Once an ideal prospect has learned about your brand, it is now time to convert them into a customer. In this stage we must ‘Engage’ our audience and give them a reason to buy. However the engage stage actually contains several sub-sections- including both consideration and conversion.
During the Engage stage, you must:
- Form Relationships
- Build Trust
- Show Prospects that your Product is their Solution
Typically, during this stage, the prospect will be learning about your offering through your website or through one-to-one communication with a rep via email.
Today’s consumers don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to understand your product or service. Oh, and statistically speaking they also don’t trust you. Sounds grim for marketers…
But don’t worry! Video provides easy solutions for these shifts in consumer behavior.
Capture Attention Quickly
When both text and video are available, 72% of consumers would rather watch the video.
If a prospect has to spend too much time scouring your website trying to understand your company, she will likely leave your website, do a quick Google search, and land on your competitor’s site.
This isn’t because people are lazy (well, maybe that’s part of it), but as consumers, we have endless options at our fingertips thanks to the evolution of the Internet.
Having a product video or services video easily accessible on your website will help prospects learn about your product offering and value propsition.
Earn Your Audience's Trust
After a lifetime of being advertised to, consumers are skeptical to trust brands.
Consumers actually prefer referrals from a friend or colleague over advertisements. We will learn more about ensuring current customers are referring us in the delight stage, but regardless of whether a lead comes to you from a social media ad or a referral, you still have to gain their trust before they make a purchase.
There are several types of videos that will help you earn trust from your prospects:
- Customer Testimonial videos give life to the positive experience an existing customer has had with your company. It’s three steps above the written testimonial because you can see and hear from them.
- Case Study videos are a cousin to the testimonial, but are less narrative-based and tap into logic using numbers and statistics. Typically this is told from the seller’s perspective, rather than from the customer.
- Thought Leadership videos establish your brand as an industry leader. If you’re an authority in your field, you’re easier to trust.
Most markets are saturated. Even if your company is the very best in your industry, you must still stand out and convince someone to become your customer.
Using video will help prospects quickly understand your company and give them a reason to trust you. Once they trust your brand, they are much more likely to become a customer.
Keep Your Audience Engaged
Video keeps users engaged for longer than text.
The longer you keep a user on your website, the more likely they are to eventually become a customer.
When asked how they’d prefer to learn more about a product or service, 68% of consumers cited short video as their #1 choice. Video gets a message across quicker and more efficiently than text on a page.
To convince and convert, give users what they want- which is video!
testimonial videos
Develop trust with relatable customer stories
product / service videos
Demonstrate your features and competitive advantage
case study videos
Back Up your Value Proposition with facts
Thought Leadership
Establish yourself as an industry thought leader.
Delight customers and turn them into advocates
“About 50% of loyal customers have left a company for a competitor who was able to stay more relevant and better satisfy their needs.”
[Hubspot]
Remember when Alec Baldwin gave the “ABC- Always Be Closing” monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross?
Sure, making sales and closing deals is important, but it’s only the first step. In the 90’s, this ABC mentality might have worked well, but so did low-rise jeans and frosted tips. Society evolves.
Allow me to mount my digital soapbox to give my own version of an ABC speech, except mine is ABD- Always Be Delighting.
Delighting our customers is more important than ever. This is for a few reasons.
Word of Mouth Reigns Supreme
Over 80% of consumers trust peer recommendations over company recommendations.
When your customers have a pleasant experience, they will recommend your company to prospects.
In a day-and-age where consumers trust friend and family referrals far more than they trust marketers and advertisers, creating evangelists out of your customers is more important than ever.
Cost per Acquisition
It is much cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one.
Customer delight directly correlates to churn rate.
“It is 6-7X more expensive for companies to attract new customers than to keep existing customers.”
[Kolsky]
Since consumers love video, it’s one of the best mediums for delighting.
Show your customers the best way to use your product with how-to videos. Answer their questions in frequently asked questions videos (this also alleviates your customer service team from having to repeatedly answer the same questions). Highlight the best parts of an event with event recap videos.
Delighting customers makes the flywheel spin faster, ultimately fueling company growth.
how-to videos
Show your customers how to be successful with your product
product specific faq
Avoid answering the same questions over-and-over
event recap videos
Make your event last forever.
onboarding video
Provide support for your new customers
What is a Video Marketing Strategy?
Video Marketing
Video is taking over. By 2021, there will be so much digital video in existence that it will take 2 full years to watch all of the video content circulating in any given moment.
This begs the question- How does your video content cut through the clutter? Well, with a tailor-fit Video Marketing Strategy based on your business goals.
“Any video is only as successful as the digital strategy behind it.”
[Me]
Every Video Marketing Strategy is made up of a careful combination of
- Custom Content
- Channels Strategy
- Optimization Tools
How we use Content-Channels-Optimization depends on what stage of the Flywheel we’re concentrating on. Regardless of whether you’re attracting new prospects, engaging with those prospects and converting them into customers, or delighting customers, a solid video marketing strategy helps businesses reach their goals.
After all, any video is only as successful as the digital strategy behind it!
content
channels
What channels are your target audiences living on? How do we reach them on these channels?
optimization
How do we optimize our content on these channels to reach the greatest number of qualified eyeballs?
Content
Video content differs depending on business goals
Video Content
Your video content strategy will differ greatly depending on your specific business goals. When deciding which types of video content are right for you, think about it your customer’s lifecycle with a Flywheel approach.
If you want to attract new prospects, a brand video or social advertising campaign will likely benefit you the most. This is how we get our brand message to our target audience in an interesting and easy-to-understand way.
If your goal is to convert those prospects and turn them into customers, testimonial videos or product/service videos will be extremely beneficial. By providing prospects with clear value propositions and actionable information, they can be informed enough to make a buying decision.
If your goal is creating & retaining happy customers, how-to videos and FAQ videos can delight these customers and turn them into evangelists of your brand.
While most companies need content throughout all stages of the customer lifecycle, sometimes it can be easiest to start with one stage and build from there.
videos that attract
Brand Video
Social Ads
Thought Leadership
Industry-Specific FAQ
Event Promotion
videos that engage
videos that delight
How-To Videos
Product Specific FAQs
Event Recap
Conference Recording
Onboarding Videos
Channels
Go where your audience already lives
Distribution Channels
As you are creating your video strategy, it’s important to think about more than just the content of the video. F0r example:
1. How do you ensure people see your video?
2. How do you ensure the right people see your video?
The channels used to communicate with your audience greatly depend on your business goals and where your target audience lives.
If your goal is to attract qualified leads:
Use video on Social Media and YouTube to build your brand and communicate with your audience.
- Don’t worry about using every social media platform, focus on what your target audience uses.
- Post your videos on YouTube to build your brand and house a library of helpful content.
If your goal is to engage with your prospects:
Use email, your website, and a video marketing platform to convince and convert prospects, turning them into customers.
- The promise of video crushes the email game because it significantly increases your email CTR. We say ‘promise of video’ because you can’t embed a video in an email, but you can lead your audience to a video back on your website.
- When users are on your website, they want to quickly and easily learn about you. The most efficient way to do that is with video. Use video across your website to communicate different messages.
- Video Marketing Platforms such as Wistia help your video campaigns perform better and provide advanced back-end analytics so we know how our video are performing.
If your goal is to delight your customers:
Post your delight video content on your website and on social media.
- Create a helpful page on your website housing FAQ videos and how-to videos so your customers can get immediate answers to their questions.
- Posting helpful video content on social media is a great way to reach current customers since many of your followers are likely customers.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to make your brand more relatable. Consumers today spend so much time on social media, so make sure your brand is staying top of mind by integrating yourself with their social feed.
Video outperforms text-based and image-based posts combined, so using video on social media is will help you cut through the clutter.
Don’t underestimate the power of your personal social media too. Post your company’s video on your personal LinkedIn or Facebook. People trust other people, (especially their friends) so they are more likely to pay attention to posts from another human.
Email is an important channel of communication for virtually all businesses.
Email can often be monotonous and boring, but nothing jazzes up a dry email like a video. Consumers love video, and both open rates and click-through rate increases significantly when an email contains the promise of video.
Since it isn’t yet possible to actually embed videos in emails, use a GIF instead and link it to a place on your website where the video lives.
Website
Your website is where interested parties go to learn more about your brand, product, or service. 68% of consumers report video being their preferred method of learning about new products or services.
Let your site be a place full of content. Interesting and educational video content will help you establish your authority and trust between your company and a potential customer.
YouTube
YouTube is a great platform to help build your brand because it is the most popular video platform and the 2nd largest search engine on the Internet. Hosting your content on YouTube will help people be more likely to stumble across your brand while searching Google.
Wistia
Like YouTube, Wistia is also a video marketing platform. However Wistia is unique as it is geared to work for businesses.
Wistia offers advanced analytics and a custom-branded video player that helps you be more knowledgable on the back-end and more enticing on the front-end of your website.
We suggest using YouTube to build a brand, and Wistia to host your video on your website.
channels for attracting
channels for engaging
channels for delighting
Optimization
To ensure maximum reach and engagement
Optimizing Your Videos
The 3rd component of a Video Marketing Strategy is Optimization.
We already know that video is the most effective way to get your message across and helps create the best performance across many metrics such as:
- Engagement rate
- View count
- Shares
- overall reach
- Length of dwell time
However, there are ways to ensure that your video is optimized to perform better than your competition’s content. Your video will perform best on each respective channel if it is optimized for that platform.
Each digital platform is set up differently, which means that the video formatted for YouTube is not designed to work as well on your Instagram Story.
Here are some subtle tips that will help your video content reach it’s maximum potential.
Subtitles
The optimization tool that transcends any Flywheel stage is subtitles.
The majority of all videos on the Internet are watched without sound, so regardless of where exactly your video lives, including subtitles ensures your message gets across with or without sound.
Native
Sharing natively is hugely beneficial on social media. Native video far out performs a link to a video. Uploading the video file itself to social platforms (instead of sharing a link to YouTube) results in further reach, more engagement, and more views.
Format
Optimal video format differs depending on the platform.
Landscape videos are best for website and email while square and vertical videos perform best on social media.
Length
optimize to attract
Subtitles
Native
Format
Short
optimize to engage
Subtitles
Format
optimize to delight
Subtitles
Parting Words
Key take aways
TL;DR
If this was too long and you didn’t read it, don’t worry, I’ll summarize everything in 33 words:
The Flywheel is a customer lifecycle model designed to “drive business growth and customer delight.” Combined with video, the most powerful medium on the Internet, you can create a successful video marketing strategy.
The Flywheel
The Flywheel, created by Hubspot, has 3 stages that are designed to drive customer growth:
attract
engage
delight
Delighted customers are repeat customers. And then they tell their friends.
Video Marketing Strategy
Video is taking over the Internet. And the world.
But remember, any video is only as successful as the strategy behind it. Video Marketing Strategies are comprised of 3 components:
content
channels
Use the channels where your audience lives.
optimization
Landon Yarborough
Customer Success Manager
