7 Steps to Build a Winning Video Marketing Strategy for Social Media  

We live in the era of various types of digital marketing, which denote a narrow specialization in promotion technologies. Video marketing is one of them. With the growing popularity of video streaming platforms, video content is becoming more and more in demand and effective as a marketing strategy.

As of 2020, 83.3% of internet users in the US accessed digital video content. As a result, 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool — up from 63% over the last three years.

Have you heard about video marketing for a long time and understand that your brand needs it? But still have not figured out how to implement it? Then, it is time to act! At Vista Social, we have compiled a 7-step guide to building a winning social media video marketing strategy. Let’s cover it step by step. 

Define Your Video Marketing Goals

Whether you are a newbie in video marketing or not, you need a clear plan to proceed with. It is a kind of roadmap that outlines the goals, system elements, rules for interaction, and success criteria.

Setting pre-defined goals is the first step to getting the desired result from the commercial. A marketing video can serve various purposes, such as brand awareness, sales, brand loyalty, and website traffic. Different types of video content are required for each of these goals.

Therefore, it is necessary to determine the purpose of creating a video. Ask yourself questions:

• What is the purpose of creating a video?
• What results do you expect?
• How will this goal help the audience?
• When to achieve it?
• Which goal has the highest priority?

If you target the marketing funnel stages, your video can fall easily into each step. In other words, when working on the goals, consider the stages of the funnel to craft video content with a compelling call to action.

Since planning plays a key role here, defining the strategy’s goals should be a priority. Once you set your goals, you are ready to move forward.

Identify the Target Audience

You need to be clear about what kind of audience you want to attract with your videos. To complete this step successfully, answer the following questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• What type of content does your audience need?
• Which channel do they use to watch videos?
• How do they react to the videos you create?

By answering these questions, you will get a clear idea of the target audience. Then you can better understand what type of video content can attract such an audience. 

Choose the Right Platform 

Having decided on the goals, think about where it will be preferable for your target audience to watch the video. According to Statista’s research, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat audiences spend half of their time watching videos. So you can start with any of these three channels not to go wrong.

It is also essential to know what types of video formats and features each social media platform supports. Check out a quick reference below.

Facebook

Facebook video ads appear in various formats. It is not surprising since Facebook wants to make video ads available for watching by as many people as possible.

• Feed video
• Facebook 360
• Live videos
• Facebook Stories 

Instagram

Video content on Instagram is gaining more and more popularity every year. So, Instagram video marketing is a truly effective tool that can blow up sales and take the business to a new level.

• Feed video
• Instagram Live 
• Instagram Stories 
• IGTV 
• Instagram Reels

Twitter

Once considered a text-based platform primarily, Twitter has taken a few steps forward by introducing its video features. It has also changed the way of advertising and marketing through the channel.

• Feed video
• Twitter Live Video

TikTok

TikTok is not just a fascinating endless video feed that Generation Z never stops talking about. Instead, this is a social platform where content will likely go viral.

• Feed video

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not just a place for effective text-based B2B content. For example, video content on LinkedIn now surpasses traditional text content in both views and generated links.

• Feed video
• LinkedIn Live 

YouTube

The high popularity and variety of video content types on YouTube attract businesses’ attention. As a result, video blogs become convenient and effective channels of promotion and communication with the target audience.

• Landscape and portrait videos
• YouTube Live
• YouTube Shorts

Determine Your Best Video Types

The purpose of video content is to allow the company to attract the consumer’s attention quickly and, as a result, increase its sales. Depending on the goals of the video content, we can distinguish its main types:

Educational

Videos of this type do not advertise your product or service in an obvious way. Instead, they provide essential information to help the user understand how to solve the problem. And the best approach is to provide as much information as possible. In other words, you share your knowledge and experience that arouses the audience’s interest and promote your brand. For example:

• Masterclasses on various topics.
• Online training, where your audience gets valuable knowledge and skills in a live format.
• Life hacks and ‘how to’ videos – learning to quickly and easily solve a particular problem.

Behind-the-scenes

Few people share what remains behind the scenes, although this is quite an exciting approach. Especially when you consider unspoken rules for brands in social networks: be open with your subscribers and minimize direct advertising. Your video can talk about the process of manufacturing goods, developing online products, creating content, showing the team, and more.

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A post shared by Christian Louboutin (@louboutinworld)

Interview

In this type of video, a hero is a person. This may be a company representative, an expert, or a well-known person. Also, you can consider an interview with a client. When a satisfied consumer talks about your business and product, potential consumers perceive it with great trust and confidence. A company representative can act both as an interviewer and as a respondent.

Entertaining

Entertainment content aims to evoke positive emotions – a feeling of lightness, relaxation, a distraction from everyday hassle. Such videos quickly spread on the web and make the brand recognizable, thanks to this effect. For example, you can use music and dance videos, humor, memes, and GIFs. Such videos are often reposted, which brings a large influx of users.

Introducing Boden Bored Games, AKA how to keep small people entertained when the weather is oh-so British. First up? Mini Indoor Olympics. pic.twitter.com/v7n5TAubBb

— Boden (@Bodenclothing) July 25, 2017

Documentary

The purpose of the documentary video is to evoke the audience’s emotions and loyalty based on real stories and people’s experiences. In addition, such a video conveys the company’s value and evokes a friendly attitude. As an example, you can shoot short films about the brand with real stories that help to feel the atmosphere of the enterprise.

To achieve the company’s goals and increase customer awareness, various combinations of the above types of video content are possible. The main thing is to focus on its quality to increase sales and profits.

Content Production Planning and Post-production

Defining goals and types of video content is only part of the task. No video content strategy will work without planning. Planning your video content is the best way to be consistent when creating, uploading, and promoting.

For example, if it is a branded video, it is better to attract a professional studio or a company that deals with video marketing tasks.

In case you decide to do this all in-house, you need to ensure covering the following steps:

1. Take care of the technical part of the process and provide the equipment and props required are available.
2. Writing and editing content/scenario.
3. Storyboarding the video.
4. Planning the video shoot for optimal filming. 
5. Choose the right people for the video.
6. Selecting proper places and optimal timing with natural daylight.
7. Deciding where you will take the footage to be edited.
8. Determining who will review and approve each step.
9. Ensuring the video music is licensed.

Once the steps above are processed, it is time to get to post-production.

Post-production is the final stage of creating video content when the video is wrapped and converted into a full-fledged media product. Post-production includes editing, compositing, color correction and dubbing, sound editing.

Usually, videos for social media channels require light post-production. For example, you will edit the caption and title but not much else for Facebook or Instagram. On the other hand, you may need to add tags, multiple language captions, detailed captions, and more for YouTube.

Schedule and Promote Your Video

Now that you have completed video work, you are ready to schedule and upload. Some social media platforms like Vista Social offer publishing tools. You can schedule and publish your content to Facebook, Google Business, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and YouTube.

Every video that you have ever used is conveniently stored in your account, enabling quick access to every media item ever used in the post.

Note that one fully produced video could be uploaded to several social media channels over a month-long period. With this being said, it is very convenient to use Vista Social for scheduling and publishing purposes.

Another critical step is video promotion. Its cost will depend on the advertising platform, the duration of the advertising campaign, and many other factors. Having a budget for the promotion process is necessary; just treat it as an investment and a long-term perspective.

Analyze Metrics

Do not forget about the metrics that need to be determined initially. If you do not know what will define the result, it becomes difficult to analyze later. This can be the average duration of views, coverage in social networks or reposts, conversion on the site, or CTR of video ads.

In addition, the analysis will clarify what you need: to refine the material, replace some parts or even come up with something new to improve the metrics.

Do not be limited by platforms’ native analytics, and use Vista Social’s reports that will quickly tell you if your social media efforts work. Efficiently gather and explore detailed data to measure results, demonstrate impact, and influence decision-making. 

Conclusion

In our age of progressive technologies, video is one of the most effective ways to deliver information. Moreover, for any brand, video marketing is a modern and scientifically-based approach to attracting a new audience and building relationships with existing ones.

Remember that, as in any other tool, you cannot do without strategy and numbers in video marketing strategy. However, with Vista Social, scheduling and publishing, engagement, analytics, or listening are just a matter of a few clicks. So get started for free to discover a hassle-free process to manage your social media channels.