It’s getting harder and harder for marketers to capture the attention of their audience, especially in an environment where individuals are constantly being flooded with ads and promotional messaging. Marketers trying to improve marketing engagement have to do more than deliver the right message at the right time; they also need to provide their audience with content that is fun, eye-catching, and easy to consume.
That’s why video marketing is the perfect tool for marketers who want to stand out from the crowd and promote engagement. In a world where character limits and stock images reign supreme, video provides marketers with an opportunity to show their brand in a new light. This medium is extremely effective because it provides marketers a chance to deliver more creative and immersive storytelling and interact with their audience in a more personal way.
The best part is that any marketing team can take advantage of video marketing, regardless of their budget. Marketers now have access to cameras on their phones and free editing software (such as iMovie for iPhone), meaning that they don’t need an in-house videographer or expensive agency to harness this powerful marketing tactic.
So, if we’ve managed to convince you that you should at least learn more about how video might fit into your marketing strategy, you’re in luck! Today, we’re sharing a few easy ways you can leverage video marketing to improve engagement rates across all your marketing channels.
1. Use Video to Share Customer Reviews
Whether your business is B2B or B2C, one thing remains true — having a few good customer reviews under your belt can give you significant leverage over the competition. While written success stories or customer reviews are great to feature on product pages, video is a more eye-catching way to feature customer feedback on more prominent pages of your website and on social media. If you have the budget, a professional video is a great way to put together content pieces that you can use in everything from email campaigns to social media to your website. But don’t despair if you don’t have the big bucks to produce a high-quality video. Your camera on your phone or laptop can be just as effective when it comes to capturing and creating great content.
For example, over the summer we reached out to some of our most active customer advocates asking them to tell us what they love about Act-On via a recorded conference call. The clips we collected helped us diversify our social media marketing efforts to garner some extra attention from our audience. In addition to aiding with social media engagement, these videos were easy and affordable to produce, so we didn’t have to go out of our way to capture content or deplete our budget to get innovative with our marketing strategy.
2. Use Video as an Opportunity to Interact With Your Audience
Good marketing is always about delivering the right message at the right time. Segmentation and automated nurture campaigns are a great way to ensure that you are reaching your audience with personalized messaging and information that addresses their pain points and interests.
If you want to take your efforts one step further, however, you can create opportunities to have conversations with your audience. Live streaming, webinars, and social media are all great ways to have that “face-to-face” interaction with your audience without having to leave the comfort of your office.
6 Best Practices for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
These mediums aren’t created equal and how you use them depends on the type of content you want to create, who your target audience is, and what goals you have in mind. These are my suggestions:
Live Streaming: Going live on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram is an effective way of reaching your audience by giving a behind-the-scenes look at your organization or hosting a Q&A. This helps them get to know your brand and helps you establish credibility.
Facebook and Instagram Stories: Instagram and Facebook allow you to give your audience a behind-the-scenes look and tell a story without the pressure of going Live. Stories are a great way to create hype around product releases, address frequently asked questions, and show your audience what your brand is all about.
A great way to get the most out of stories is to be consistent with your efforts to give your audience an idea of what they can expect to see if they keep engaging with your efforts. For example, clothing company, Everlane, hosts its Transparency Tuesday series as a way to answer any questions regarding their company and get people excited about future product launches. By making this an ongoing series, they are able to get their audience to tune in and engage with their efforts.
Webinars: If your goal is generating leads and growing your email lists, then webinars are the way to go. Webinars are effective because they allow you to provide your audience with unique and valuable content, giving them an incentive to hand over their contact information.
In addition to fueling your demand generation engine, webinars also allow you to have live interactions with your audience and address any questions or concerns that they may have. If you’ve been keeping up with our Automation Essentials series, you’ve probably noticed that our hosts don’t only take the time to address questions after their webinar, they also tailor their future content based on the feedback they’ve received from previous sessions.
3. Create a Content or Newsletter Recap
If you’re having trouble getting eyes on your content, there are a variety of things you can do. To start, take a good look at your distribution strategy to see if there are any good opportunities for improvement or channels that you can add to reach your audience. You should also perform an SEO audit to make sure that you’re using keywords that resonate with your audience and will help you rank high in search engine results.
But sometimes, all your audience needs to take a look at your content is an extra push in the right direction. If you’re trying to get better engagement with your email newsletter or simply trying to build your email list, a video recap is a great way to give your target consumers a preview of what’s in store and entice them to learn more. You can link to this video at the top of your email or even promote it on social media as a way to motivate your audience to take a look at your blog, download an eBook, or visit a specific product page.
Act-On Can Help You Implement and Launch Your Video Marketing Efforts and So Much More
Your job as a marketer doesn’t stop at creating an engaging video. If you want your video marketing efforts to make a good impression, you have to deliver them to the right audience at the right time through the right channels.
Act-On makes it easy for you to launch multi-channel campaigns that attract and engage your audience. We give you all the tools you need to launch effective drip campaigns, host webinars, manage your social, create engaging landing pages, and more.
If you’d like to see how our platform can assist you with your video marketing engagement efforts, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They’ll be more than happy to show you how Act-On makes it easy to innovate your marketing strategy.