Social Media Video Marketing

How to make social media video marketing part of your content strategy

How do we get out in front of consumers on social media? With the saturation of content on social media that question is becoming difficult to answer, but there’s a solution.

Since chronological news feeds ended on social media, algorithms have dominated the content ordering system on industry giants like Facebook®. Facebook’s algorithm intended to bring more ‘meaningful interactions’ to get back to relationship-building. What does that mean for brands? Commercial content needs to engage users in conversation, otherwise post reach will suffer.

A solution to this dilemma? Video. It has been proven that social media video marketing is a powerful tool. Consider these statistics:

Social media videos are shared more than any other type of content combined
89 percent of B2B markets use video
Video increases the chance of a viewer making a purchase by 97 percent

The use of social video has more benefits than just beating social network algorithms. In a previous Blue Door Consulting blog, we discussed video’s benefits:

Building your brand and brand awareness
Increasing your audience across platforms
Increasing your sales (video advertisements increase purchase intent)
Having prioritized content on social media (video on Facebook is prioritized)

But, to be successful in video content marketing, you’ll need goals for each video that work within your business goals. Once you’ve established those goals, content, themes, platforms and other video creation elements come next.

5 steps of a social video strategy

1. Set goals and determine metrics

Like any strategy, start with discovery. What do you want to accomplish using social video? How will social video fit with your business goals? Can your social media video marketing strategy be consistent, brand aligned and engaging? Setting goals for your social video will keep it on plan, which leads to business results.

Use metrics, or key performance indicators, to track your business results. Be thorough in choosing what metrics to use while some options may be easier to figure out, they may not relate to the necessary goals. Metrics like number of views and impressions, audience engagement and click-through rates are all great to track because they will help tell you if your video is one people want to watch. But, the real metric is determining how your videos meet your goals, whether they be lead generation, sales, email signups or more.

2. Determine your target audience

Even the best video content won’t meet goals if it goes in front of the wrong audience. Use known company data and analyze your current social audience to understand who they are, what they like, how they comment and why they share on social media.

And, those audiences may differ from one social platform to another. Age groups and interests varying among platforms. Use a social media audit to help drive your decisions. Which platform does your target audience frequent most? How do they use different social media networks? Can you interact with them consistently across the different platforms? Take these answers into consideration as you develop individual videos.

3. Plan your content

Consider your message based on your goals and audience. Be educational and relatable. Be fun if it fits your brand. But, avoid being salesy. Any content that is heavily laden with sales pitches can quickly annoy your audience. It is important to seamlessly connect your pitch to the video content to keep interest without becoming overbearing. Timing and phrasing of the pitch or specific call to action should be quick and to the point. Also, as with any sales pitch, focus strongly on the benefits to the audience.

4. Plan video length

Some may believe that video length is not that important as long as the message is getting across. That is not always true. While each video will be different, the ideal length for most videos is under three minutes. And, quite honestly, that’s a feature film in many cases! Certain platforms, like Snapchat®, will require much shorter videos while certain content, like webinars, will require longer videos. Focus on effective, concise messaging to get your message through.

5. Evaluate and adjust

Using the established metrics, track your performance throughout the process. Continue to tinker your video content marketing strategy. Over time, with your collected data, you can compare what worked or what didn’t to adjust and increase reach and engagement.