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Need to add more video to your marketing? Wondering how to use video strategically?
In this article, you’ll discover tips and easy-to-use tools that will help you incorporate video into your marketing campaigns.
#1: Align Video Content With Your Social Media Marketing Objectives
Any content you create for your social media channels should ideally serve a purpose. Before you decide what kind of video to create, you first need to establish what you want to achieve with your social media marketing. Your social media objectives might include:
- Drive more traffic to your website.
- Build trust in your brand.
- Develop a larger and more engaged audience.
- Boost conversions.
- Generate sales.
While video content is easier than ever to create (as I'll show you later in this article), you should still try to invest your resources into content that supports your objectives, rather than produce video content simply for the sake of doing it.
Once you know what you want to achieve, decide on the best type of video to help you get these results. Below are some types of social videos you can create depending on your objectives.
Brand and Product Videos
If you want to use video to boost sales, create content that highlights your brand, as well as your products or services. Here's a short Coca-Cola social media video ad that highlights their Coca-Cola Zero Peach drink.
Put Coca-Cola’s NEW Zero Sugar Peach flavour to the top of your taste list. #BreakFree 🍑
Posted by Coca-Cola on Wednesday, May 16, 2018
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Another option is to show your products in action, as GoPro does on all of their social media channels.
Ride backcountry with #GoProAthlete @TravRice through Alaska, British Columbia + Japan on some of his most memorable runs of 2018.
Get your hands on gifts that sleigh + check out our holiday bundle at https://t.co/45sp1cQa3G. Order by 12/20 for Christmas delivery.🎄#GoProSnow pic.twitter.com/DpKIpZJ5gE
— GoPro (@GoPro) December 18, 2018
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Interviews
Video interviews with influencers, thought leaders, and other experts work well for building trust and boosting brand awareness. They're a great way to attract your audience's attention (at least if you're interviewing someone your audience wants to hear more from). If you're interviewing the right person, the conversation may also lead people to trust your brand more because of the association.
You can share snippets of a video interview on your social media channels and direct people to see the full video on your website.
Animated Videos
Animated videos in all forms work for pretty much any objective, from educational/how-to videos to videos promoting your products or services.
Oreo often uses animated videos on their Instagram channel to highlight their products, helping them encourage engagement and promote their products.
Listicles
Listicles are some of the most popular forms of content because they're easy to digest. You can create relevant listicles and turn them into videos (in many cases, animated videos work best) to boost engagement and shares.
Take a look at Buffer's Facebook video highlighting their three biggest social media mistakes.
3 of our BIGGEST social media mistakes and what we learned (so you don't have to make the same!) 🙈
Data/Research/Insights 👉 https://buff.ly/2gma4W9
Posted by Buffer on Wednesday, August 30, 2017
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Live-Streaming Videos
Live video works well for sparking engagement, building trust, and boosting conversions. Use live streams to show behind-the-scenes looks around the office, share interesting events you're attending, broadcast interviews with interesting and relevant influencers and thought leaders in your niche, and so on.
Educational/How-To Videos
How-to videos, like blog posts, can offer a lot of value to the viewer and boost engagement, traffic, and conversions. Produce short how-to and educational videos that are relevant to your target audience, as Nikon does in the Instagram video below.
Pro Tip: Turn your most popular how-to blog posts into social videos and use them on your social channels both as stand-alone videos and to promote your blog posts.
View this post on Instagram
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#2: Brainstorm Video Topics
Once you've decided what types of videos will help you meet your social media goals, the next step is to brainstorm topics. While it might feel a bit overwhelming at first, you can easily get ideas with a few simple tactics.
Check Your Web Analytics
If you have a blog or content and resources on your website, use your web analytics to identify your top-performing pieces. You can use these topics (even the exact headlines) as inspiration for your social media videos. Your audience already expressed interest in them, so there's a good chance that if your videos are good enough, they'll also attract your audience's attention.
Also keep a close eye on your competitors' social media accounts to see what kind of content they're sharing. If they're sharing videos, check out their best-performing content to see what types of topics they usually cover and what types of videos they create.
Research Keywords
As with other forms of content, you can use keyword research tools to see what keywords your audience is looking up and use those as inspiration for your videos.
Answer The Public is a free tool that lets you research keywords in a unique way. To use it, simply type in the keyword you want to look up and click Get Questions. It will then create visualizations that help you find out what questions your target audience has. Plus, you can see the search engine queries with prepositions and comparisons. These insights can be a source of countless content ideas.
Pro Tip: Click on one of the questions/queries to go directly to that Google search so you can see the top results and other content that exists on those topics.
Analyze Top-Performing Content in Your Niche
Earlier, I talked about using your own web analytics to see your top-performing content and use that as inspiration for your social media videos. Another useful tactic is to do the same thing, but this time, research all relevant content, not just your own.
Use tools like BuzzSumo to look up keywords and see the top-performing content for those specific keywords, based on social media engagement.
#3: Use Tools to Create Social Media Video
Whether you have video clips of your own to use or not, the good news is there are numerous useful content creation tools that will help you put together a compelling marketing video in minutes (at least once you get the hang of using them). The video tools in this list were built with marketers in mind to help you create content as quickly and easily as possible without compromising quality.
Wave.video
Wave.video (available in both free and paid plans, starting at $59/month) is a video creation tool designed to help you create videos for any platform as efficiently as possible. You can choose from over 30 layouts or start from scratch. It takes just a few clicks to optimize the same video for multiple channels.
Wave.video lets you upload your own images and/or video clips or you can use clips and images from their extensive library. Pick the ones you like and put them together in the order you want.
When creating your video, you can add text/subtitles, trim your clips, zoom in and out, and add calls to action, among other options.
You can also watermark your video, add music from their library, and then publish directly or download the video to share it later.
Wideo
Wideo (pricing starts at $19/month, billed annually) is a video creation tool that lets you make your own animated videos. While creating animations might sound complicated, the process is simple with this tool. In fact, you can select a template to get started and edit it to convey your message.
Wideo lets you edit the animation to add more scenes (or remove them), insert transitions, and select images and objects.
You can easily customize your videos with drag-and-drop functionality and add text to your video.
Promo
Another good option for creating online marketing videos is Promo (with plans starting at $49/month). This tool's focus is to help you create promotional videos for your brand, as well as promote sales, special offers, and your products or services.
Promo gives you access to a library of more than 12.5 million high-quality video clips. The videos are fully packaged by designers with appropriate music and text so they're easy to create or customize.
All you have to do is pick the right video, tweak it to make it your own (with your own message and call to action), and your video is ready to share online.
Best Practices for Creating Social Media Video
Here are a few tips for making the most of your social media videos:
- Always include subtitles. Remember that most people don't watch social media videos with the sound on. So whenever you create a video for your social channels, make sure that it offers the same value whether you're watching it with the sound on or off.
- Don't drag on too long. Social media content is usually bite-sized—images, GIFs, a few paragraphs at most of text. Video is no different. When you create a social media video, try to keep it as short and sweet as possible without sacrificing value. In particular, make the first few seconds count. Grab your viewer's attention and highlight your message within the first 30 seconds of the video
- Use the right formats. Each social network is different, so ensure that when you share a video, it's optimized for that particular social network.
Conclusion
Video is already the most popular form of online content. In fact, it's so popular that in a few short years it will nearly take over the internet. According to Cisco, IP video traffic will make up a staggering 82% of all IP traffic, both business and consumer, by 2022 (up from 75% in 2017).
So whether you're struggling to get the results you want from social media or simply want to up your game, creating and sharing social media videos might be your ideal solution. Follow the tips in this guide, grab a tool you feel comfortable with, and start creating more social video content to boost results across the board: engagement, awareness, traffic, conversions, and sales.
What do you think? What types of video do you share on your social channels? What tools do you use to create social video? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
More articles on social video:
- Learn how to set up a video studio without breaking the bank.
- Discover how to repurpose one video into content that can populate your blog, podcast, and multiple social channels.
- Find out how to create short, snackable videos for Instagram and beyond.
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