Did you know that we spend an average of 17 hours a week watching video content online?
A whopping 90% of brands use video marketing to skyrocket engagement, tell powerful stories, and encourage us to connect with them.
The question is, how do you create a video marketing strategy that reaches the For You Page on TikTok, Instagram Explore, and, most importantly, your target audience’s smartphone screen in 2024?
Stick with us as we dive into a beginner guide to video marketing, where we’ll share five engagement-boosting tactics to leverage in your next campaign.
1) Create Content That Speaks to Real People
It’s no secret that video content is extremely competitive in an online world. Users scroll through hundreds of TikTok videos in one session, and YouTube is inundated with plenty of video content, all covering the same topics.
In order to create a connection with your audience early on, ensure that you’re producing content that speaks directly to your target consumer.
Successful video marketing starts with knowing exactly who you’re talking to beyond your general demographics.
Each video you create should target leads at specific stages of the buyer journey. Consider the actions you want your viewers to take after engaging with your video. Are you aiming to increase brand awareness to hook new acquisitions, or are you talking to your existing customers?
The key to combating this is to create each video with an audience persona in mind.
What Is An Audience Persona?
An audience persona is a constructed character that embodies what your target consumer looks like. This tends to be a snapshot of your ideal buyer’s likes, dislikes, pain points and behaviors that all influence the type of content you create.
Translating characteristics of your audience persona into relatable video marketing ideas could cause you to ask these types of questions before constructing your content narrative:
– What motivates my ideal customer persona?
– What are their pain points? How can I fix them?
– Where do they engage with content online?
– How does my product or service weave into their day-to-day life?
– What type of content do they engage with? How can my content mimic that?
Asking yourself these questions is the key to creating content that resonates with your target audience. If you take each of these into account, you’ll create a video that speaks directly to your buyer persona and offers them a solution to their problem.
For example, if you’re uploading a tutorial video to your ecommerce website, ensure that it mimics the type of content your audience persona is used to engaging with in the social media verse.
It’s also important to support the content format your buyer persona is used to engaging with on your website. Some of the best ecommerce landing pages on the market, such as Nike and Zeuss, use a reliable template for video content that remains consistent across their website.
If you’re posting a long-form style video, ensure that your landing page template is quickly loading. Alternatively, for shorter-form, TikTok-style videos, choose a store template that supports that classic portrait format for that engagement-driving familiarity.
2) Quality Over Quantity: Focus on Content That Delivers Real Value
While the disadvantages of not posting content regularly are clear, many marketers forget the risks associated with creating too much video content at once.
A ‘video overload’ could seriously overwhelm your audience, especially if they are not used to engaging with multiple pieces of content per day.
There are a number of disadvantages associated with video overloading. Some of these include:
1) Sending an unclear message to your audience
Engaging with multiple videos from one brand in one session is likely to overwhelm and confuse the consumer, especially if each of these promotes a different product or covers a new topic.
2) Increased viewing times
Did you know that most viewers only engage with brand content for up to 32 seconds? Moreover, according to Podcastle data on audience engagement, the average American gives videos 17 seconds before deciding to move on. So if you’re posting Reel after Reel and TikTok after TikTok, leads are likely to get bored and quickly swipe away.
3) Poor quality content
If you favor quantity over quality, it’s likely that your video content will suffer. Engaging videos take time to curate. If you’re pumping out short-form content with no clear message or meaning, you’ll see your engagement rate fall despite appearing frequently on your demographic’s feed.
Quality over Quantity
This age-old debate has never been so important when it comes to video marketing.
The general rule of thumb when it comes to producing and posting video content is to prioritize quality over quantity. Brands are likely to benefit from posting 1-3 short-form videos a day on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
Your role as a video marketer is to create content that gets your audience excited. The key to achieving this is to leave them waiting for more. If you release consistent, high-quality content with powerful hooks, engaging narratives and embedded conversation starters such as hashtags and branded trends, you’ll find that TikTok or Instagram’s algorithm will begin featuring your content at the top of your target buyer’s feed.
The fashion retailer Guess is a great example of a brand that has seen benefits from prioritizing video content quality over quantity.
After joining TikTok, they initially posted just seven videos on their platform. Each of these videos was of high quality, shot like high-brow adverts, and contained a great hashtag campaign to accompany the content.
Their #InMyDenim campaign saw influencers swap their old outfits on camera for new, stylish outfits made by Guess.
Raking in 38 million views and 38,000 followers, with just seven videos to their name, the power of quality spoke for itself.
Is There Still A Place For Quantity?
If you look at the data, platforms such as TikTok and Instagram still favor frequent video posting from brands.
The key here is to strike the perfect balance between quantity and quality.
If you want to increase your video posting, why not repurpose your high-quality long-form content into multiple short reels/TikTok/shorts videos? This ensures that consumers are not overwhelmed by new content but rather reminded to re-engage with your previous promotions.
3) Optimize for Engagement: Hook Viewers in the First 5 Seconds
As a video marketer, it’s likely that you’ll compete against endless reels of content on social media and the web.
In order to induce success, hooking your viewers instantly is crucial.
In fact, according to experts at TikTok, 63% of the videos with the highest general click-through rate deliver a key message in the first three seconds.
Take this example from Med-Stop, for instance. They hook their viewers instantly by highlighting a key pain point at the beginning of their video:
“Running a trucking company is challenging enough. When you add DOT requirements…"
This instantly grabs the attention of their target audience and convinces them to keep watching for a solution to their problem.
What Does A Good Hook Look Like?
There are plenty of practical tips and tricks to add to your video marketing to catch a lead hook, line and sinker.
Here are some of the key components of a good hook:
1) A startling fact
If you have an interesting stat or a shocking claim to make, add it right at the beginning of the video as a means to shock viewers and leave them wanting to know more.
2) Ask a personal question
Involve your consumers right from the beginning of the video. Ask them a question that you aim to answer in the video. This gets them thinking about their pain points and makes them ready for you to offer them a solution.
3) Lead with a compelling character
Focusing on powerful character design can help you create an instant emotional connection with your targets. Animation, in particular, is often worth the effort. Unique and engaging character narratives instantly hook viewers and leave them wanting more.
4) Introduce powerful visuals
Show your customers an image they can’t turn away from. Visual elements define video marketing success in a modern digital landscape, especially as more viewers engage with videos in silent mode on their smartphones.
Warming up your viewers with a powerful hook is the key to encouraging them to watch your whole video.
4) Use Storytelling to Build Emotional Connections
Let’s talk about the power of storytelling. In 2024, a staggering 68% of customers prefer to engage with content that tells a story over traditional advertisements.
Using storytelling within your video marketing strategy builds a strong connection between the brand and consumer, in turn driving video engagement and enhancing customer loyalty.
Emotional marketing allows your brand to humanize itself. By building on customer emotions, businesses can create narratives that conjure particular feelings about their brand and its products.
A great example of emotion-first storytelling comes from the brand Fitbit. Their ‘Find Your Reason’ advert centered around inspiring customer stories of how users' lives changed after wearing their Fitbit.
For example, one story followed a young woman with Type 2 diabetes who struggled to get pregnant. After losing weight using a Fitbit, she finally realized her dream to become a mom.
In less than 30 seconds, Fitbit panned through stories from a diverse range of customers, illustrating the effectiveness of their product while still creating an emotional connection with their targets.
How To Master Your Own Storytelling Structure
There are plenty of ways to create emotion in your video marketing strategy using storytelling.
Depending on the type of message you want to send to your audience as a brand, there are a few different storytelling tropes you can follow:
1) Problem - Solution - Outcome
If you’re looking to target a specific pain point, this is a great storytelling arc. Position your character at the beginning of the video facing a problem before offering them a solution and positive outcome at the end of the story.
2) The Hero’s Journey
Positioning your brand as a hero follows a similar narrative to the example of Fitbit. Showcase how your product/service can save the day and transform your target buyer’s day-to-day life.
3) Before - During - After
If you want your viewers to experience what their lives could look like when engaging with your brand, create a narrative that centers around a classic buyer persona before they come across your brand when they first purchase from it and what their life looks like afterwards.
4) Feel - Imagine - Do
Invoking powerful feelings with your storytelling is essential. Encourage your customers to imagine their lives after engaging with your brand and show them what their next steps could look like if they were to take action on this feeling.
Emotional resonance is the driving force behind your video engagement and is the key factor that encourages social sharing and interaction with your content.
Using storytelling to invoke these emotions is crucial, especially in an ad-focused digital landscape.
5) Look at Data to Guide Your Next Move
Last but not least, let’s take a closer look at how to monitor the success of the first four video marketing strategies we’ve mentioned in this guide.
According to Google, 89% of top-performing marketers measure metrics such as engagement, return on investment, and conversion rate in conjunction with their marketing content.
Measuring the success of your video marketing (views, likes, shares, comments) is essential if you want to remain victorious as an online brand.
With this in mind, here are some useful metrics to track on your next video campaign:
- Video View Count: This is the total number of consumers that have watched part or aloof your video.
- Watch Time: To look at your view counts more closely, track your video watch time. This tells you how long viewers have watched your content before bouncing, including replays.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): If your video runs as part of a linked ad campaign, this metric will report how many viewers clicked that all-important CTA button.
- Video Shares: This metric is self-explanatory. The more view shares you receive, the more likely that your video will resonate with your target viewers.
- Content Conversions: This is the measurement of the number of viewers who completed a desired action after watching your video. The higher your conversion rate is, the more persuasive your video content is as a lead generation tool.
Monitoring stats such as your post likes, for example, provides you with a deeper insight into content formats that drive engagement and the topics that do the opposite.
These insights can be used to influence your next move, ensuring that you create content that continues to resonate with your audience.
Final Thoughts
For a final thought, let’s recap some of the key points mentioned in this guide:
- Create content that speaks directly to your audience
- Choose quality over quantity when it comes to creating powerful content.
- Hook your customers in seconds using interesting facts, questions, characterization and more.
- Create an emotional connection using storytelling.
- Monitor your success and adapt your content accordingly.
As a beginner, we suggest that you start small and refine your approach as you learn, using real-world feedback to guide you during each step of the way.
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About the Author: Rebecca Barnatt
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Rebecca is a content manager at Solvid. She specializes in all things marketing and digital trends transforming consumer targeting. |
