The Best Video Marketing Tips To Get You Started

If you’re new to the video marketing scene—perhaps because you’ve just recently started a business or maybe because you haven’t been courageous enough to take on video marketing until now—you’re probably desperate to find a road map that will help you navigate the way to your very first video post. You need guidance on how to set the intent of your videos, how to create them, and how to measure their effectiveness or success.

The truth is, the roadmap doesn’t exist. At least not yet. It won’t exist until you create it as part of planning phase of your marketing video.

Video Marketing: Where to Start

Now, don’t get too overwhelmed by the term “planning phase.” Your plan doesn’t need to be so elaborate that it calls for graphs and charts and a life-sized diorama. It really all begins in knowing how video will play into your company’s overall marketing. If you don’t know why you’re creating videos, how can you expect them to be effective? The same holds true for knowing who you are targeting with your videos: If you can’t identify your target audience and what you want your videos to do for them, how can you expect a response from them?

There are a million terrific video marketing tips out there that deal with everything from script writing and lighting, to editing and posting, but this article deals with none of those things. Because to the average beginner like yourself, these tips (though all helpful and definitely worth investigating later on) are just going to overwhelm you right now. Yes, good lighting is VERY important, but learning about optimal lighting isn’t particularly helpful when you haven’t even decided on what kind of video you will create.

Business Video Marketing Tips

Below are five tips for beginners who are just starting out with video marketing and need the basics of planning a marketing video for their business. They’re launch points, so go through each and think about them carefully. What you end up with will be a plan you can take to your video production company or work from yourself if you plan on going it alone.

1. Have a purpose for your video. What do you want your videos to accomplish? You can throw together a video on your smartphone and toss it out there for the world to see, but if you don’t know what the purpose of that video is, you’re going to have a hard time tracking its performance. Every video doesn’t have to be about making a sale, but it should be about something—and you should know what that something is.

Include a person. Animated videos are great, but people respond more to a human face and eye contact. What do you do if being on camera is not your thing? Find someone else to be the face of the company. It doesn’t have to be you; it can be an employee providing expert advice or giving a product demonstration, or it can be a client providing a testimonial. You could even shoot a video of people from your company while they’re volunteering (to illustrate how your business gives back to the community). There’s nothing wrong with using animated video to promote your business, but shoot videos that show your clients the people they’re working with, too.

Add a call to action. Even if it’s something as simple as “Visit our website” or “Follow us on Twitter,” every video should include some sort of call to action. What will yours be? Without one, people will view your video and then quickly forget about you. Not every video is about making a sale, but the overall goal of your business is to make money. So if your videos aren’t telling people where or how they can connect with you, how can they ever do business with you?

Optimize your videos for SEO. Just like the content you post on your website, videos need to be optimized to rank higher in Google and on YouTube. When you consider the rate at which video is growing, there is a lot of competition out there. You can’t ignore SEO. What strong text title will you give your video? Make sure it includes your target keywords and also descriptive text. Write a solid description that tells as much about your video as possible and includes a call to action and your website URL. When you’re posting it to your website, don’t forget to add relevant tags.

Share your video everywhere. We live in a time when you have the Internet at your disposal—there are so many platforms to share your video: your website, YouTube, social media, your email list. You’ve obviously investing in video marketing to get your videos seen, so plan how and when you will roll out your video and make sure it’s out there for the world to see!

The Marketing Videos Start With a Plan

The planning stage is important not only for beginners, but for anyone who uses video as part of their overall marketing plan. It’s about creating with intent to get a solid return on your investment. There’s a lot of competition out there. A half-hearted attempt at a video to promote your business isn’t not going to reap the rewards you’re looking for.

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