How to Create and Execute a Video Content Marketing Strategy

How to Use Video Content Marketing to Generate Views, Traffic and Sales

Content marketing with written content types like blog posts, white papers, emails, ebooks, etc. has worked great for many years. It’s an effective digital marketing strategy.

But if you want to take your marketing efforts to the next level, you should start creating more video content as people prefer watching videos over reading newsletters, blog posts and other types of content. 

A good video marketing strategy can also help you generate more leads. According to a survey from Linkedin, 78% of B2B marketers agree that video engagement helps them identify higher quality leads and 57% agree that it drives more leads. 

Therefore, to help you get started, I am going to show you how to create and execute a video content marketing strategy that generates views, traffic, leads, and sales…

Find out what type of content your audience prefers consuming

Before you create the video content, you need to determine what type of content your target audience wants to watch. If you do this, you will also learn which social media you need to focus on. Here are the various methods you can use to learn about what your audience wants…

Check social media analytics

The first thing you must do is visit the insights section of your different social media accounts to view the demographics of your audience. Check out things like their gender, age, location, times at which they are active. Etc. 

Image credit: Facebook

You should also conduct an analysis of your accounts to see which posts got the most engagement in the past, especially the video posts. This will help you determine which topics to focus on and which you shouldn’t. 

Website analytics

You can also find more details about your audience and the type of content they like to consume by checking out your website analytics. On Google Analytics you will be able to view data like age, interests, location, gender, etc. under ‘Audience’. 

Under ‘Behaviour>Site Content>All Pages’, you will be able to see which blog posts got the most views. Your readers like reading these posts for a reason. It would be a good idea to create videos on these topics. 

If you want to dive even further and create videos that will convert, go into the ‘Landing Pages’ section on Google Analytics. This will show you which pages drove the highest conversions.

Note: You will only be able to view conversions if you have set up goals in your Google Analytics. If you haven’t set them up, make sure you do so now. 

Conduct a survey

The above steps will help you gather a lot of information about your audience and their content preferences. But this alone won’t be sufficient. This is why you should use this data and create a personalized survey that will help you gather more information about your audience. So, create a survey using a tool like JotForm that will help you find out what their challenges are and what types of videos they want to watch. 

After that share your survey with your email list and social media followers and get them to take part. 

Ask questions on social media directly

Not everyone will want to spend a decent amount of time to go through your survey and answer all your questions. This is why you should also divide your survey into multiple bits and ask each question on social media like Facebook, Snapchat, Linkedin and Twitter. 

Facebook also lets you create polls, so take advantage of this and ask multiple-choice questions. 

More people will take part as they can give their answer with a couple of clicks. 

Another place you can do something similar is Instagram. Instagram stories let you add stickers like polls, quizzes, and questions that can help you learn more about your followers. 

So, create a short video story and embed a poll into it and ask people to give you their answers. 

Choose social video networks

The next thing you need to do is choose the networks and video platforms. The networks you choose should depend on where your audience hangs out and the engagement levels of your account on those networks. Here are some of the top social networks for posting video content…

YouTube: YouTube isn’t just a social network. It is also a video search engine. This is the place that people go when they want answers. So, create videos that answer your customers’ most pressing questions. 

Like this high-quality video on how to start a garden

Instagram: Instagram is a great platform for sharing short online videos. The videos here can only be up to a minute long. But the top-performing videos are only 26 seconds long as found by Hubspot

For some ideas on how to create short videos, check out Ben and Jerry’s Instagram page. 

They regularly publish short and creative videos like the above one. 

IGTV: If you want to create videos that are more than a minute long for Instagram, you should take advantage of IGTV. Here videos can be up to an hour long and you can publish a preview on Instagram to encourage your followers to check it out. 

Facebook: Facebook is another great platform for video marketing. You should try publishing more live videos here as people spend 3X more time watching a live video. 

Linkedin: If you are trying to reach a B2B audience, Linkedin will work best for you. 

As you can see, different types of videos work on different social networks. You can either create different videos for different networks or just create one video and optimize it for the different networks. If you are going with the latter option you can use Screencast-O-Matic’s video editor to optimize your videos for the different social media. 

It’s not just the length of the video that matters, but also the dimensions. Different dimensions perform best on different networks. Then there are networks like Instagram and Facebook where you can publish videos in different formats (feed posts and stories). 

Screencast-O-Matic can help you crop and resize your videos and make sure they appear at their best on the different networks. 

Brainstorm topics

Once you know what your audience wants to watch and the best social networks to publish them on, you can brainstorm some video ideas.

Make sure you use the data from your social media analytics, website analytics, survey, and competitor analysis while coming up with the video marketing ideas. You can also create a persona of your audience if it will help you picture them and the videos they want to consume better. 

Create the content

Once you have a lot of ideas you can go ahead and create videos. The videos you create should be for your audience who are in the different stages of the funnel. Here are the different stages of the funnel and the type of videos you should create for them…

Top of the funnel video content (TOFUVC)

These are the videos where you only share free content that helps your audience. You don’t try to sell anything here. The videos need to be purely educational. These can range from how-to videos, entertaining videos, tutorials, interviews, etc. Your main job here should be to share the best content and build a bond with your audience. 

Here’s an example of a top of the funnel video from Mind Valley. 

If you watch the entire video you will notice that it is purely educational. They don’t try to sell you anything. 

But they do include a call to action in their YouTube end card and in the description to a landing page to get viewers to convert to leads. 

This is an important step you need to take too. You can easily set up a lead generation landing page like this by using a marketing tool like Leadpages.

Middle of the funnel video content (MOFUVC)

Middle of the funnel video content consists of educational content that is targeted towards people who are aware of you and your services. But they are unsure about working with you because of some reservations. 

The videos in this part of the funnel should drive the point that you are the right person to work with. Content that can be used for this include webinars, testimonial videos, video case studies, etc. 

Here’s an example of a video case study from Jessica Yarbrough

In the video, Jessica’s client talks about her services and how helpful he found them. 

This will resonate with people who have heard about Jessica but were unsure about whether they should work with her. As they will earn about how she can help them. 

And to help people take the next step, she included a link in the comments. This takes them to a landing page where they can sign up for a consultation call. 

So, make sure you set up something like to go with your middle of the funnel videos. Here you focus on promoting your services without any other distractions. 

A landing page like this can be built by using Leadpages again. 

Bottom of the funnel video content (BOFUVC)

The bottom of the funnel video content consists of videos that will help you drive sales directly. These are chiefly sales videos and screen recordings/explainer videos (in case your product is a software). The aim of these videos should be to inform people as much as you can about your product so that they will want to buy it. 

An example is this video from Right Channel Radios. 

As you can see it is a short video where they tell you about the new product. And then they link to the product’s landing page in the video description. So, that you can buy it immediately. 

This sort of method will work best for eCommerce stores like Right Channel Radios where the products cost less than $100. 

One of the main things I like about this product’s landing page is that they added the same video to it. 

This will help the landing page convert better as the video at the top will boost the conversion scent connection between the video and the landing page and make visitors feel familiar with the surroundings. And they didn’t simply embed the same YouTube video on the landing page. 

Instead, they uploaded the video onto a different platform with no outbound distractions. This is a good thing as when you directly embed YouTube videos, the link to the video and relevant videos will be displayed. This can distract viewers and decrease the conversion rate. 

So, it is better to upload the video to a hosting platform that lets you remove distractions. 

The Right Channel Radios eCommerce store is built with Shopify. So they were able to take advantage of this builder’s ability to upload and embed a video directly. 

If you are running an eCommerce store too, this feature should be built-in into your builder. 

But if you are running a different kind of website, you can use a paid video hosting service that lets you turn off the branding and distractions. 

Another thing you will notice about the video from the above store is that they end the video with a large logo of the company. 

This matches the same one on their website. This can increase the conversion rate too, as it can boost conversion scent. The logo is on their website too. Logos can also improve brand awareness. 

Promote it

Once you have created the video and connected it to your funnel to make sure views convert to leads and sales, you can begin promoting it. Here are a few tactics you can use to promote your videos…

Email it to your subscribers

If you have a list of email subscribers, make sure you email it to them. This will help you nurture your subscribers and drive views at the same time. 

Share it on social media

After you email it to your list, share the video on your social media channels, even if you publish the video on a different network. As cross-promotion can help drive views. 

An example is this video preview Cupcake Jemma published on her Instagram account.

It promotes a video that was published on her YouTube Channel.

Use a content distribution channel

Another tactic is to use a content distribution channel like Quuu Promote

Here you submit your video along with images optimized for networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, and the influencers on the distribution channel will share it around for you. 

Email and social outreach 

After that, you can do some email and social outreach and ask people to share your videos. To find influencers who will be interested in sharing your videos, you can use Social Animal

Just search for a keyword that is relevant to the video you created. It will show you the most shared posts on the topic. You can then see who shared the posts. 

You can contact these sharers and ask them to share your videos. Reaching them out via a social network like Twitter will be easier. But I recommend that you email them as it will help you make a more personal approach. 

You will stand out from all the others taking the easier route. 

You can find the email addresses of these people by using a tool like Voila Norbert

After that do your research on them and send out a personal email. This outreach strategy will get you a lot of views and shares. 

Another tactic you can try is SEO. This tactic is a necessity for your YouTube videos. 

Conclusion

This is the step by step process you can follow to create and execute a video content marketing strategy. Implement it today to drive more views, traffic, leads, and sales.