Video marketing is huge right now, and it’s easy to see why. Video is one the easiest types of content to consume, and a phenomenal way to engage customers and maximize outreach potential. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, figuring out how to create videos that actually speak to your target audience can be daunting.
Not sure where to begin? Here are the 7 most essential steps of any successful video marketing workflow that will give you a head start on developing your own tailored framework.
Video is an excellent way to enhance your digital marketing campaigns. But before you actually start creating video content, there’s one major question you need to answer – who is your unique buyer persona?
When defining your buyer persona, keep in mind that the more detailed your personas are, the better you’ll be able to generate ideas and topics that resonate with your audience.
Google Analytics, market research, social media analytics, and sales team feedback are just a few options for gathering valuable data for your buyer personas. Remember to look at demographics, purchase channels, as well as professional and personal goals and challenges.
Pinpointing your personas’ questions, doubts, and pain points can help you develop a more valuable and meaningful video marketing strategy that is tailored for your specific audience.
To achieve that, consider all possible questions (or objections) each of your personas may have in relation to your product or service.
These may reveal important information such as the personas not being aware of a pain point, your solution category, or your brand.
More to that, remember that the buyer awareness journey can be complex, with multiple non-linear steps within its stages. Every time you plan a new piece of video content, make sure you are brainstorming around each stage of the journey and are answering at least one of the persona’s questions.
Your brand’s tone of voice plays a huge role in influencing how people perceive your messaging. It represents your company’s values and personality and applies to all types of content you deliver, including emails, social media posts, website content, and video.
While your overall tone of voice should be consistent, note that it may vary slightly based on your target personas. For instance, marketing SaaS to millennials will require different communication styles than it would for older generations (e.g. baby boomers).When answering your persona’s questions, it might be helpful to think about how you’d address each persona’s concerns if your brand were a human.
Essentially, your buyer personas and the questions they ask will tell you exactly what topics to cover in your videos. Combine these answers with your personas’ interests and online behavior and create tight, impactful key messages.
Once you and your team have decided on 3-5 key messages that best answer the buyer persona’s question(s), it’s time to create a storyboard.
In digital marketing, storyboards are essential for planning videos from start to finish, as well as identifying any gaps before spending money on production. By putting together a series of sketches that represent each individual shot you can ensure that the final product is what you envisioned.
Once you have your core messages and storyboard, you can start formulating the actual video scripts. The outline of your scripts should be clearly communicating the core message to the personas and addressing their pain points.
With your script and planning all set, you can move on to the actual video production process. Producing videos might seem a bit intimidating, especially if you are just starting out, but if you’ve covered the steps above it should fall into place quite easily.
That being said, there are some points you should keep in mind when figuring out how to create videos:
Most social media platforms have a time limit for posting video content. For example, videos on Instagram can be up to 60 seconds long (unless you’re using IGTV), while YouTube allows verified accounts to upload videos of up to 12 hours. Regardless of how long your video is, remember that you should reel viewers in within the first few seconds.
Showing off who you are as a business is important for keeping people interested in your content. Whether you are looking to create videos for YouTube, Instagram, or other platforms, note that viewers generally respond best to real, authentic videos.
No matter what type of video you are producing, remember to tell viewers what to do next when the video ends. It could be as simple as telling them to head over to your website for more information or inviting them to try out a new service.
Weaving video into your content marketing strategy can boost conversions, improve reach, and increase customer loyalty. Even more, video content has great repurposing value – you can reuse it to create blog posts, social media posts, and even audio content.
Ready for more content marketing tips? Head to our blog to discover how audio content can supercharge your digital marketing strategy.
My job is to match talented, motivated marketers with high-growth companies, arm teams for success, and then get out of the way.
