Video marketing is one of the best content types to add to your marketing strategy. But venturing into this whole new terrain of content marketing can feel super intimidating.
And if it’s your first video marketing attempt, it will set the tone for the rest. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can do more harm than good and put your viewers off. And once you figure out the winning combination, you'll be able to repurpose them to drive your social media marketing or email marketing strategy too.
So no matter your industry or business type, here are our top 10 tips to help you create stellar video content that will skyrocket your sales!
P.S. We’ve divided these into the planning, production, and post-production stages, so feel free to jump around depending on where you are in the video creation process.
Once you’ve gotten the key logistics out of the way, like fixing a budget and defining your objectives it’s time to plan!
Planning Your Video Content
1. The AIDA framework is your best friend
This is an industry staple when it comes to all things video marketing (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). This is going to be the core framework guiding your script. Even though what you're making is at its core a video ad, it must tell a convincing story to be worthy of social sharing.
With Attention, you want to get your viewer’s attention right away with a relatable situation and keep their interest by touching on a pain point specific to them. With Desire, you want to keep them hooked by showing exactly how your product addresses that pain point and offer a glimpse of how it will improve their quality of life. And at the final Action stage, you want to encourage them to buy now by tantalizing offers or discounts.
Let’s use an example of a small business owner who makes workout programs. If her target group is young women in their late 20s, she could center her video marketing campaign around a 6-week, 1 hour bridal boot-camp during the wedding season.
By doing so, she’s addressing a very specific audience, not just women looking to lose weight--but busy women looking to get in shape fast for their wedding day.
When creating videos for social media, the first few seconds are absolutely essential so make sure to create an out-of-the-box hook that will drive traffic to your page.
If you want to read more about the AIDA model, check out this link.
2. Map out your buyer persona to nail video marketing
No matter your video type, in order to create quality content that adds value, create a fictional buyer persona, a profile of who you’re making the video for. This could be your target audience or a more specific subsegment.
Get together with your team and brainstorm! A standard buyer persona includes basic demographic details (age, location, family), interests/hobbies, motivations, goals, preferences (channels where they can be reached etc.) and pain points.
If you need help with creating a buyer persona, head this way.
3. Keep your marketing video under 2 minutes
When creating your script, make sure you’re already optimising for video marketing by keeping the video length under 2 minutes.
In the age of infinite scroll, many will likely not stick around past the first 10 or 15 seconds. The view count doesn't always tell the full picture in video marketing, engagement does. So for the ones that do, get to the crux quick and hold their attention for the remainder of the video.
4. Create a storyboard to help you visualize your video content
Video marketers will often forget about storyboarding while they write the script. But a storyboard can help make your life so much easier during the production and post-production stages. These aren't just for animated videos after all.
In addition to the framing of the shot, a storyboard can also include its duration, transitions, visual elements, graphics, potential sound effects, etc. It can be as simple as a pencil sketch on paper. Whether your content is dialogue-driven like a customer testimonial or info-driven like explainer videos or a product demo, this is a crucial step.
Best Practices for the Production Process
Once you’ve got all the prep out of the way, it’s time to shoot!
5. Don’t forget to take test shots
If you’ve got the legroom for a video production team, they’ll probably handle this part. But if you’re doing it yourself, make sure to take test shots at your chosen location mimicking the exact conditions of the actual shoot day--the same time of day, the same camera angles and framing etc.
6. Keep the branding consistent wherever possible
With any piece of new marketing content, it’s super important to remain consistent for better brand awareness. This can be through the color scheme you use, the style of video content (eg a product-focused vs. a talking heads video, a tutorial vs. an unboxing), or even your frames and props reflecting the brand and brand colors.
7. Do multiple retakes and try out different styles
Even if you feel you’ve got your shot on the first go, take a couple more retakes with different angles and delivery styles. This is super important especially if your video is dialogue-heavy, like an explainer video or product review. This will ensure you have a sizeable bank of content that you could even mix and match to post on different platforms. For example, a longer version could go on your YouTube channel or a shorter one as a Facebook video.
Post-production Stage
8. Decide on a video editor
If this is your first time making video marketing content and you’re working with a tight budget, an intuitive, web-based editor like DailyCutting can help you get the job done fast. From automated captions to voiceover recording and and adding logos to your brand videos, it’s got all the features to take your content to the next level.
9. Optimize for social media
There’s a couple best practices to follow while sharing your video on different platforms, whether you are making a Youtube video or any social media video--like adding captions for viewers watching without sound, changing the aspect ratio to suit different social media platforms, and chopping out scenes as necessary to suit different platforms. You could always try video ads as well. Again, you can easily clone your video into different aspect ratios on DailyCutting.
Clone your video into different aspect ratios on DailyCutting
10. Don’t miss out on SEO
We often forget that marketing videos can also be optimized for SEO. So be sure to add keywords in the name of your video file and the title, but avoid making it feel dry or too sales-y.
Wrapping Up
Now that you’ve got our ultimate guide for making a killer marketing video, it’s time to script and shoot and overhaul your video marketing strategy! And don’t forget to check out DailyCutting for a fuss-free video creation experience - yup, you can create videos with zero editing - that helps your marketing video stand out. And check out our other blog posts for how-to videos, testimonial videos, product videos and other video marketing ideas.
And for more video marketing tools and tips and digital marketing strategies for your video campaign, check out HubSpot!