Dos And Donts of Video Marketing

What is video marketing? Video marketing involves the use of video content to facilitate or inform viewers about your business, products or services. Businesses use videos across a variety of digital platforms and formats including the brand’s website, social media and many more. The definition is important before we highlight the Dos And Donts of Video Marketing.

Marketers have widely acknowledged the importance of video in marketing. Satista’s survey in June 2021 revealed that 81% of over 8,000 marketing leaders accepted that pre-produced video was the leading digital consumer engagement tactic worldwide. Another 13% said they were planning to use pre-produced videos. The next most used tactic after pre-produced video was livestream video with 73% of the respondents already into it, and another 19% planning to do so.

A major reason video marketing is so important is the fact that video is a prevailing medium among audiences. Most people would rather watch a video to learn about a service or product than read about it. In the first half of 2021, video content was the highest source of internet traffic worldwide at 53,7%.

Benefits of video marketing

1. It broadens your potential audience
   Video content has the ability to appear to clients or customers on different channels simultaneously. This implies that you have in a potential viewer that views your video content a potential customer or client who is not limited to time, space or location.
2. Retention of viewers’ attention
   Video content is a great medium with a combination of motion, colours, music, soundtracks, and subtitles that stand out against text and still pictures. The first few seconds of properly curated video content can attract and retain viewers’ attention, which helps possible customers discover your business.
3. Flexible content marketing
   Video marketing gives your brand the flexibility of projecting more captivating content in order to market your goods or services and showcase your business. Video content marketing doesn’t have to be all about ads and other subtle processes of your business’s day-to-day running.
4. Helps to showcase your brand
   Other forms of video content such as explainer videos help you showcase and tell your brand’s story and product in a captivating manner that text and images may not. Creating videos that showcase your products or services can help your customers see how your products or services can be of use to them.

The Do’s of video marketing

1.  Identify your goals.
   Before you venture into video production, you must identify the purpose of your video. What goal do you aim to achieve with the videos you want to make? Setting a campaign up front for the goals you aim to achieve will determine the type of videos you will be making if it is going to be promotional, educational, exciting or persuasive? Make sure to identify what your video aims to achieve.
2. Identify and define your audience and message.
   It is essential that you, first of all, identify who your target audience is. After this, you must understand your audience in order to send the right message or content that will help achieve your set goals. You should know what your audience what to see and hear in your video marketing campaign. You must seek to address the interest and needs of your audience so as to guide the content of your videos.
3. Top-notch visuals and audio only
   High-quality video productions are not always cheap and easy to come by, but they are worth investing in as they are going to be the contact point between your brand and your audience. It is highly important that the quality of your video file is top-notch, with clean, clear and good sound.
4. Make sound optional.
   Music and narration can make a good fit for a video, making it more compelling or effective, but do not assume that all your viewers will be actively listening. For example, they could be in public transit watching on mute. Closed captions and easy-to-read on-screen text are better so viewers can stay tuned without sound.
5. Ensure viewers know what to do after watching your videos.
   A good video marketing campaign must be clear to the viewers on a call to action, such as showing them how to use a product, giving them a link to purchase a product or directing the to where they can other relevant video content.

The Don’ts of video marketing

1. Don’t overestimate viewers’ attention.
   You do not and cannot have control over how long audiences view your video. This is why the first few seconds of your video content must be attention-grabbing. It must contain vital information that you aim to communicate.
2. Don’t aim to go viral.
   Going viral is not the specific goal tied to the result of your brand’s video. The true goal you are after, in the end, is brand awareness. A more reasonable approach is to tailor your campaign to brand awareness goals and create videos that help in facilitating the actualization of your goal.
3. Don’t just share your video once.
   Do not share a video with the mindset that your video is done once you have shared it on a particular platform. While you may celebrate your brand video’s initial launch, keep in mind that there are legions of channels and platforms out there that accommodate video content. Share your video everywhere and keep reposting.
4. Don’t emulate your competitors.
   It may be tempting for brands that are new in the video space to take a look at what other brands within the industry are doing and adopt the same strategy for their content. While you may feel that there are certain things that work for your own brand when you outsource, your videos should be a starting point for your own inspiration and from your own perspective.
   You never really know how competitors’ content is actually performing as metrics like engagement numbers and view counts may be misleading.
5. Don’t DIY all your content.
   DIY content is great for things that authentic feel like Instagram stories, reels or TikTok clips. But for executions such as commercials, product videos, or customer testimonial videos, attempting to take production yourself may only lead to disaster.

While you may think you’ll end with a decent final cut video, you’ll often get a better result with a video of noticeably higher quality.