Creating Effective Video Content Marketing

Today, content marketing is king.  Becoming a real resource for prospective clients has become nearly as important as the product or service you are providing, and this is key to forming lasting customer relationships that lead to repeat business.

One of the challenges today in content marketing is marrying the intricacies of video production with relevant content for your business that can be delivered regularly and not only draw customers in, but result in conversions.

Video production has a lot of moving parts and involves a lot of creativity, which means the process can be opaque for businesses new to creating video content. You need to not only create compelling videos, but also ensure they’re providing value to your customers and leading them to pertinent information that will assist them in their buying behavior.

So how do you go about marketing your business through video, and how do you structure your video productions (and coordinate with your video production company) to drive customers where you would like them to go and make sure they connect with the product or service offering that would benefit them the most?

1. Align your value proposition with client education

The first element to consider when forming your video production content marketing strategy is to decide your value proposition.  What can a potential customer be educated about that will in turn lead them to examine your business as a solution for their needs?

The more complex the service or product, the more likely it may be that a client is not aware of or does not fully discern the difference between your offering and that of your competitors, and this is a great opportunity for video content.

Video is a great way to communicate ideas that would be very lengthy in written form but that can be expressed instantly through the moving image, which leads us to the next step:

2. Pinpoint what aspect of your product or service is best communicated visually

Some topics are best expressed through the written word, while others are visual.  This is a step that competent video production companies will help you determine during the pre-production process as a part of communicating their abilities in a transparent manner.

Secondly, you will want to determine which format best illustrates your points.  If your product is visually appealing, you may want to feature live action footage of the product in the real world.  If it ties into lifestyle, you may want to stage realistic footage of people utilizing the product.

However, more abstract ideas, or services that don’t lend themselves to being photographed may be better served by animations, such as explainer videos.

Explainer videos have become more common in recent years and the reason is simple: the right style of animation can grab a viewer’s attention and hold it even through complex or abstract ideas if the video production is put together the right way.

You’ll want to take extra care that the style of your animation matches the customers you expect to view it; a very squiggly and casual style, for example, may not sit well when the target audience is financial industry professionals or doctors.

3. Decide the path you want your customer to travel

One common mistake when it comes to using video production for content marketing is to haphazardly produce videos and then toss them into the void of the internet and hope for viewers to appear and somehow connect with the product or service you’re offering.

It’s vital to not only understand how your video sits with your marketing as a stand alone piece of content, but how all of your videos and marketing materials feed into each other and how they direct clients to move through your website.

Start with the high-level: what content do you want every potential customer to see and understand about you and your product or service?  This type of video production is the one you don’t want to cut any corners producing, as this will be one of the strongest and widest reaching elements of your video marketing campaign, and as such you’ll want your video production company to find the best balance of cost versus quality.

After the broad overview video, you’ll want to drill down to more specific topics and identify which kinds of customers that content will appeal to.

One way to do this is to utilize link overlays at the end of each video segment that will lead customers to a deeper piece of content more tailored to their concerns and interests.

Creating a trackable system of videos that specifically target audiences, starting broadly and ending up at a micro scale, will be a key way to helping your business grow via video content marketing.

4. Close the deal

Asking for the sale is a fundamental tool, and it’s no less applicable to video content marketing.  However, if your content is geared towards educating the client about the solutions you provide or the obstacles they may face that you can help overcome, you want to make sure your close is congruent with the rest of your material.

Clients can be turned off from a piece of educational material if they think it’s a sales pitch in disguise. Make sure that your close points to them to legitimate ways they can receive more information.

When done the right way, content marketing shouldn’t be “sales” in the traditional sense; it should be a legitimate way to link people or businesses with certain needs with the best products or services that will satisfy those needs, and help them to make better decisions when they find those solutions.

By utilizing video production content marketing that uses the best format, focuses on the right elements of your business, targets the right viewers and leads them to ever granular content that appeals to them, you’ll find your video content marketing leads increase and customer retention grow alongside your business.