What Is Video Marketing? | Adobe Basics
Quick definition: Video marketing is using video to promote your brand, product, or service.
Key takeaways:
- Video marketing is an emotionally engaging way for brands to connect with customers and catch their attention in a digitally overloaded world.
- Strategic video marketing considers your brands’ goals and metrics, as well as your customers’ location in the sales funnel. For effective audience targeting, it’s essential to determine where videos will be placed and in what context they will appear.
- Advances in dynamic video and direct partnerships between brands will improve video personalization, audience targeting, and user experiences.
Answers to the following questions were provided in an interview with Ryan Fleisch, head of product marketing for Adobe Audience Manager.
What is video marketing?
What are some types of video marketing?
Why is video marketing important?
How do you use video marketing effectively?
How do you use video marketing for SEO?
What are the benefits of video marketing?
What are the disadvantages of video marketing?
What types of businesses should use video marketing?
How do I develop a video marketing strategy?
How will video marketing change in the future?
What is video marketing?
Video marketing is using video to market your product, increase engagement, and reach an audience more amenable to video than to text.
Video can foster an intimate bond between product and consumer in a way that text can’t, especially if businesses use people in their videos.
What are some types of video marketing?
There are many types of video marketing, such as:
- Video banner ads appear as advertisements on a landing page or website.
- Pre-, mid-, or post-roll video advertisements play before, during, or after an online video or a video posted on social media.
- TV video ads air as traditional commercials on linear TV outlets or streaming services.
- Live video includes real-time streaming of an event, conversation, or product launch.
- Sponsored video is easily recognized by that telltale disclaimer, “This video is brought to you by …” This category also covers explainer videos about companies and their products.
- Sponsored product placement is a self-referential form of video marketing that places a company’s brand or product within another type of video.
Why is video marketing important?
Video marketing is important because it is an emotionally engaging and multi-sensory experience. And emotion is key to successful advertising.
The length of time someone spends looking at a post as they scroll through social media is the same amount of time it takes to snap your fingers. The motion in video naturally captures short attention spans and makes people pause. They remember more of the content seen in videos than the content they only read or hear.
How do you use video marketing effectively?
In order to use video marketing effectively, you must produce enough content to meet your marketing campaign goals and objectives. That amount will vary based on your overall strategy.
You can increase your video creation volume and velocity by producing content that doesn’t require live actors, such as animated video and video that taps into stock and archival footage.
Then, establish a network for distribution, whether it’s through your technology partners or direct relationships, so you can get your video in front of the right eyes.
How do you use video marketing for SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) focuses primarily on written copy, but that doesn’t mean video isn’t helpful for your search ranking.
There is an undeniable correlation between video views and searches: A person who watches your video is more likely to search for your brand online. It’s a natural progression. A viral video ad — even though it is a broad, upper-funnel awareness asset — can create massive search spikes that boost your credibility and drive increased search volume.
What are the benefits of video marketing?
One major benefit of video marketing is that for consumers, video marketing is an emotionally engaging way to connect with a brand. If you were asked to think about your favorite video ad, you would immediately have content that comes to mind. But if you were asked to think about your favorite paid search ad, you probably wouldn’t have the same reaction.
What are the disadvantages of video marketing?
In marketing, there is always a chance for things to go wrong. Video marketing is no exception.
One disadvantage of video marketing is that it’s impossible to share your message all at once. You’re counting on your content being engaging enough to keep a viewer around long enough to hear your entire message.
Depending on the context and the platform where you place your video, potential customers will develop either a positive or a negative perception of your brand. The disadvantages of bad context spreads to banner ads and pop-ups as well. You run the risk of your video appearing next to unsafe content or content that doesn’t align with your brand values. For example, an airline targeting news pages about the airline industry wouldn’t want their ad appearing next to a story about a plane crash.
What types of businesses should use video marketing?
Every business is a good fit for video marketing. Since the invention of the television, video has become an invaluable part of the digital marketing toolbox. Advances in technology will allow organizations in any industry to optimize content for their audiences.
How do I develop a video marketing strategy?
The first step to create a video marketing campaign is deciding your goals, performing research, and analyzing data.
1. Understand emotion and metrics
When people watch your company’s video, what do you want them to feel and do? Alongside your goals, define your metrics. How will you measure the effectiveness of your video — conversion rates, click-through rates, video views, or the percentage of viewers who follow a call to action?
These two choices will dictate what your messaging should be and what type of video content you should produce.
2. Note the sales funnel
Which part of the sales funnel does your target audience fall into? Are they at the top of the funnel — just beginning their relationship with your brand — at the end of the funnel as a loyal customer, or somewhere in between?
At the very top of the funnel, potential customers are more emotionally driven. If you’re introducing your brand for the first time, you don’t want to overload your potential customers with technical messaging.
As they move through the conversion funnel, your video content is an opportunity to change their mindset. The next video marketing message can start to answer their questions and give them more information. If your audience is returning customers, your message will most likely cycle back to emotion to nurture and foster the connection they have with your brand.
3. Determine placement
Once you’ve determined the type of content to produce, you need to think about where to place it. For general awareness, a medium like television, without much targeting, may be sufficient. If you want to target specific personas for conversion, you’ll need to be more focused in your approach.
Ask yourself, what are your retargeting pools? Who are the specific users you want to reach? Where will you find them?
4. Consider context
Finally, your video marketing strategy isn’t complete without considering context. Context is important across marketing, but it’s crucial in video. What someone is already watching when your ad interrupts them, or which website they are browsing when your video pops up in a banner, matters. Associate your brand with premium and relevant content.
How will video marketing change in the future?
Marketing professionals have nearly perfected targeted marketing. This is essential to video marketing strategy today, and it will be invaluable moving forward.
The end of cookies
The days of cookie-based advertising — which allowed marketers to buy anonymous cookies of individuals that fit certain criteria — are coming to an end. Instead, marketers will need to establish direct partnerships to share data sets and target audiences on specific platforms. This is by far the most effective way to ensure you are reaching the right people, understanding what messages will resonate with them, and not wasting your ad dollars.
Dynamic video
You’ll also see a rise in dynamic video over the next several years. One feature of dynamic video is the ability to overlay text on top of a video, personalized to the individual viewer based on data you’ve collected from something like a product page they’ve visited or a price point that’s caught their attention in the past.
Splicing and editing
Another instance could involve marketing teams shooting multiple frames of a video and splicing specific shots together to optimize for individual viewer personas. For example, a travel company advertising beach vacations swaps in different beach scenes based on the viewer’s life situation — a family with kids splashing in the waves, a couple on a honeymoon holding hands and walking on the beach, or retirees playing bingo and sipping cocktails.
Post-production tailoring
A third approach to dynamic video is using green screen and editing technology to overlay a variety of brand elements or products into a video during post-production.
Imagine you are watching a show on your favorite streaming service. In the scene, the main character is having a bowl of cereal. One viewer sees a box of popular breakfast cereal. Another viewer sees a carton of almond milk. Yet another is watching the same breakfast unfold next to a carton of frozen waffles. What you see will depend on what you’ve bought before, or what brands are hoping you will buy based on your personal data.