Marketing Through Video Content & Ads
People are undervaluing and underutilized video in their digital marketing strategies. As of 2021, an average person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos. Video has long been a very effective digital marketing method, and with the innovations into streaming and indexing sections of video content, its possibilities continue to make it one very strong delivery method.
Facebook, who has invested a lot of its budget to research more than many other silicon valley giants, found that video has been more effective at creating engagement than traditional content.
Finding Your Audience
The internet is a collective of overlapping communities, of people with similar interests, backgrounds and methods of finding the answers they need. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but by testing we find our audience, get to know them, and how the interact with our products and services.
Services such as YouTube and TikTok have also gotten better in recent years, adjusting their algorithms using the latest in AI technology, to serve people content and ads they are interested in. People understand that marketing is a large portion of the internet, and can be welcoming ad as long as they seem relevant and useful to them.
Serving Content at the Right Time
The question is often if people really get to see the ads you pay for. One of the ways YouTube resolved this is through short 5 second ads, which cannot be skipped, which they show before related content.
Using YouTube tool “Find My Audience“, you can start learning about your audience and how they use video in their path to purchase. Some people are more inclined to look for guides, others prefer reviews by experts, whichever the preferred method is, understanding this will be a key factor in deciding the content that is right for your business, and right for your audience.
Video Marketing Platforms
TikTok
TikTok is a platform focused around short content. Broad access to a broad, young, local audience. Focus on creating posts. Re-purpose popular content as ads. Define the target audience. While reaching a more young audience.
Instagram is a platform focused on photos and videos. A creative way to present the company, it’s values, what it has to offer, and how it contributes to its local community, in an authentic way. Define the target audience. While reaching a more middle age audience.
Facebook is a platform where photos and videos perform well. A great place to redistribute Instagram content. And easy to advertise on both Instagram and Facebook with the same content. Define the target audience. While reaching a more older audience.
YouTube
YouTube is a platform focused on video content. A great place to advertise on other popular channels with overlapping audiences, and re-upload popular ads and content from TikTok and Instagram. Define the target audience. By using Find My Audience on YouTube, we can find popular channels that have audiences with similar interests as those we want to reach. A broad audience where overlapping audiences can be reached.
Building Your Brand and Audience with Video
One of my favorite examples of great video marketing of the recent years, is Mercedes-Benz video they made to present their sustainability initiatives.
The video from March 2021, is a beautifully made story that connects the brand, the car and the wind, and a new partnership. The story it tells starts peaceful, but steadily escalates. It’s only near the end that an actual car enters the screen, but long before this you already know it’s Mercedes-Benz.
A beautiful example of testing, expertise and a full understanding of their brand, coming together, to create beautiful content that people love to see.
Getting Started
Videos sound like an expensive endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. Before we can create the campaigns informed by research, we run campaigns to research and learn.
Google, one of the biggest companies in the world, famously generates massive amounts of content, and many of their videos are made low cost, sometimes with mobile phones and other easily accessible equipment.
Google Partner Marcus Sheridan says, and I’m paraphrasing; it doesn’t have to cost much to start your video marketing tomorrow. The sooner we start testing, and gathering data, we can start narrowing in on how to create successful campaigns that work for your business in the digital space.
