Marketing via social media
Nowadays, social media of great use to marketing and business. Many companies and marketers are trying to use it to grow their business. With about a whopping 3.8 billion users worldwide, social media has the ability to help businesses with an unimaginable audience reach. Working with different social media apps is easy, but marketing on them is a bit difficult. You can’t generate leads just by throwing some boring pics/videos. Good command of the market, different networking tools, and creative content marketing are required if you would like to be a successful marketer.
Content marketing
Creating compelling content is central to every social media marketing campaign. The important thing is that the majority of social media users are interested in visual content. This is exactly why multimedia-based networks such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are such popular. Video content, in particular, is so popular among social users, especially youngsters. The more informative, funny, and high-quality your videos are, the better. If your goal is to win the marketing competition, you have to create attractive videos and broadcast your message using them. Keep in mind that without a concrete strategy for marketing you can’t expect a high ROI. Video marketing also is not an exception and building a strategy is a must for you.
You shouldn’t produce marketing videos without first conducting thorough research and creating a plan based on it. Video marketing strategy is what determines your budget, your deadlines, your video quality, your tools, and so on. In the following sections, you’ll know how to build a video marketing strategy step-by-step.
Set clear objectives and a realistic budget
The first step in building a strategy is to clearly define your final objectives and the amount of your resources. The most commonly used set of goals for video marketing that are being used by social marketers is:
Educating customers Increasing brand awareness Increasing online engagement Generating leads Increasing online sales Driving traffic to a website
You can also use the same list with just a little adjustment for your brand. Of course, these goals might seem a bit general. You have to know certain metrics to be able to measure your achievements. The number of followers, viewers, clicks, likes, and comments are several metrics that can show you the effectiveness of your video marketing. Last but not least you have to estimate your resources such as money, employee, tools, etc. Please avoid embarking on video marketing without a noticeable amount of budget. Of course, expertise and creativity are paramount but constantly streaming attractive videos needs money as well.
Define your target audience
After knowing your goals from marketing you should determine what content you have to create. Certainly, you can’t reach out to all 3.8 billion social media active users around the world. So, you have to know your target market and its potential customers to create proper content just for them. Gaining relevant followers is an important matter because you need a long-lasting and strong relationship. First, you can use your experience and knowledge about previous and current customers. Don’t forget your loyal customers at all since they’re the most probable group that might buy your products/services. It’s good to categorize them according to age, gender, location, position, and any other specific characteristics that might have impacts on your target market. It’s recommended to use social analytics tools to get user demographics and find your target audience across all social media platforms. Also, you can do competition research and recognize your competitors’ social activities. Then, you can track their followers or even collaborate with them to promote each other’s content. Finally, it’s useful to utilize social tools like Kicksta for this purpose. Such tools can help you to automate the process of finding organic followers who are relevant to your industry.
Select suitable platforms
Now, you need to reach out your target audience on social media services. You can use the newest statistics to find out which social media platform is suitable for you. For example, the people who are aged less than 35 comprise around 70 percent of users of Instagram. Instagram has also great video streaming features such as Live and IGTV. So, it’s a good platform for video marketing and targeting young people. As another example, 60 percent of TikTok’s users are between 16 and 24 years old. It is a platform just for video clips that really appeals to Gen Z. So, it’s very good for marketing/advertising teen and young products/services especially that. Additionally, video features on social platforms should be very important to you. For example, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok stand out among all social media platforms for their video applications.
Produce high-quality video content
Now, the main stage of your strategy begins: content generation. Here are the most popular types of video content you can generate:
Commercials: advertise your products’ best features Engaging videos: usually friendy to increase engagement rates on social media platforms Educating videos: teach users something related to your products/services Product videos: introduce a specific product/service, usually the best or the newest one Animation: funny animated video clips to draw users’ attention to your campaign Interview: getting feedback from customers or even experts about your brand Documentary: explaining your company and the process of your production
Try to prioritize your budget for these types of videos. Apart from the type of content, your videos’ quality is paramount. Advancing in smartphone technologies is improving the appetites of social users. So, you have to take care of the format, style, resolution, and length of your videos. You can start with learning from your competitors and then create your own video style. Repeating a specific style in all your videos will help you build your identity so that users remember your brand.
Schedule your posting time
Another important matter about video marketing is having exact scheduling for posting videos. If you like to get maximum exposure for your videos, you need to post them when the majority of social users are online. The best time for posting on social media vary from one industry to another. Try to do market research to find out the best schedule for your niche. Fortunately, there are many useful social tools such as Crowdfire and Hootsuite that allow you to automate posting on your social accounts just using a single dashboard.
Find relevant influencers
Nowadays, Influencer marketing is a very creative technique in marketing by which you can increase your ROI. Many marketers consider it to be the best way to build brand awareness on social media. Bear in mind that many social profiles are not really engaged and can’t be trusted as influencers. Social Tradia has recently reported that selling Instagram accounts is the first goal of many Instagram influencers. So, be careful when selecting influencers for your marketing campaign.
It’s necessary for you to find niche-relevant influencers using valid social tools such as BuzzSumo and Awario. They have gathered a great database of influencers for each niche and categorized them based on age, gender, followers, location, language, etc. Then, you can collaborate with them for video marketing in several ways:
Analyze your performance
Another thing is that social media marketing is an ever-changing field and you can’t always rely on a solid video strategy. It’s a must to constantly measure your achievements and compare them with your competitors. This is where your objectives can help you the most. Fortunately, there are numerous social analytics tools you can use to compile your brand’s activities on social media. Using this data, you can enhance your video marketing strategy. Try to recognize your best video content and find out the positive points that have made them successful. Repeating these points in your works can increase your ROI in the future. Getting feedback directly from followers using polls are also another way to improve your video marketing strategy.
Final word
We summarized the whole procedure of building a video marketing strategy step-by-step. Always track the newest trend in your target market and on all social media as well. Try to experiment with different approaches and get feedback from your customers to reach an effective style in video marketing.
