This article about video content is a shorter summary as seen on Smart Company dated Thursday, June 6, 2019.

Great marketers only have two targets, and they are both completely intertwined. First, to create an ‘emotional connection’ between the customer and the brand, for generating loyalty and trust. Second, to make more products or services sold.  So if you want customers to engage at a deeper level with your video content to ultimately grow sales, you need to always have these two fundamental premises in mind.

Customers do not only buy products and services because of the price or the attributes of what you are selling. They buy based on the emotional connection they have to your brand. Visual marketing is the fastest and best way to build this connection so below we have laid out the tips in creating a powerful video campaign to build this emotional equity and put you top of mind when your customers are ready to purchase:

1. Admit it’s a video world

Video content is being watched now than ever before. That’s why YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. Mostly, the majority of online activity these days is spent watching a video. 

According to studies, 81% of businesses use video nowadays as a marketing tool, and in the B2B world, 96% of businesses use video in their marketing campaigns.

For that reason, a video is a powerful tool for brand engagement and lead generation tool.

2. No need to break the bank

In today’s age, smart brands are using simple production set-ups, small-scale scripts, animation, user-generated content, and video editing apps to create quality content in a short space of time. Doing it this way ensures that there is a quick turnaround project time, reduce complexities of production and a reduced cost that allows for more scalability. 

3. Keep it real

A dull corporate video with voiceovers and trying to be all ‘prim and proper’ is the last thing viewers want today. 

Make it real, use real people with inspiring and fun stories people want to watch and share.   Earn the trust of viewers through compelling content and storytelling whilst keeping in mind the five key pillars of great marketing messaging: inspire, entertain, inform, educate and brand promotion

4. Content doesn’t work in silos

Integrate your video content into a wider content marketing and social media strategy for the goal of generating ROI. Avoid the mistake of spending thousands of dollars creating a compelling, engaging video and then letting it live on a boring internal webpage somewhere.

Repurpose all over the interweb as required to help boost your awareness and key messaging.  The smart brands today are using YouTube and other video seeding and distribution channels to increase their reach of their bullseye target audience to give the right message, to the right person at the right time.  Just allocate a specific budget to each video or each campaign, set the campaign up correctly and away you go. This paid performance marketing channel can be used instead of buying TV to increase and thus grow your ‘new customers’ into your sales funnel.

5. Content marketing or ad?

Create a winning video for marketing and leverage the channel to the maximum by including regular videos giving a real and tangible solution to customer problems in an inspirational and entertaining way. The important point about this is that there needs to be some high level thinking and strategy up front to develop a robust plan as to what stories will be brought to life, when will these videos be rolled out, and which ones need to be boosted as paid ads.  And more importantly how does this create a complete interlocking system of love to the customer and new leads, data and sales to the business.

6. User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail

According to the data, a whopping 87% of consumers trust reviews and recommendations from family and friends who received a free brand experience, and 71% trust bloggers, vloggers or social media stars who have received the same treatment. On the other hand, customer reviews are trusted 12 times more than marketing coming directly from a brand or organisation. 

Leverage the user-generated content in your organisation by creating a compelling UGC campaign to boost natural word of mouth across your social media channels.  One quick and simple campaign idea: create a giveaway promotion, ask your community a question and ask them to post the answer with a photo, and tag a person to enter the promo – then select the winners and promote them across your channels.

7. Business ‘buy-in’ is fundamental to success

The process in creating quality content marketing deliverables is important to understand to get the buy in you need from the key stakeholders of the business.  Without it you will never be able to get the good stuff done. So here are the six phases of activity that you, your team or creative partners need to manage:

  • Marketing Strategy : That leads to a content strategy;
  • Creative ideation;
  • The Shoot & the Production;
  • Project management;
  • Stakeholder approval; and
  • Video and campaign implementation (what to do with the videos once complete).

Create a plan and then involve the right people from the outset. A smart video marketing campaign simply does not happen by accident!

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