What you need to know about video marketing in 2024

An introduction to video marketing

If you want to kick your marketing campaigns up to the next level, embracing video is a great way to do this. Engaging video content is at the heart of many firms’ strategies and it’s proven to get results.

According to Statista, 3.37 billion people around the world stream or download online video at least once a month. Therefore, if you’re not tapping into this huge potential audience, you’re missing out.  

Thanks to improvements in technology such as 4K cameras in smartphones, video is easier than ever to get started with. But if you really want to create a professional-looking product, there are a few things to bear in mind. So what do you need to know to make video marketing a central part of your content strategy?

What is video marketing and how can you leverage it?

Understanding how video marketing works and where you should be using it is the first step to a successful campaign. This may be more challenging than you realise, as this term covers a wide variety of creative content, from short five-second bumper ads all the way up to full-length documentaries. Therefore, knowing what will work best for your campaign – and your budget – is essential in making this form of digital marketing work for you.

What is video marketing?

Put simply, video marketing covers any form of video content you might use to promote your brand, product or service. This includes live-action shooting, animation or dynamic motion graphics, as well as both paid ads and organic posts.

How does video marketing work?

While video content can be used as a standalone aspect of your marketing, it should usually work as part of a wider campaign. Videos published on your own website, YouTube or social media channels work best as hero assets supported by a range of other written and graphic content.

Video can be posted organically on these channels, but firms may also want to consider paid video advertising in order to give their campaigns a boost and ensure they’re seen by the right people. All the major platforms, including Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, offer highly granular targeting that enables you to hone in on specific personas.

Why is video marketing important?

Video marketing offers a wide range of benefits. As well as the direct advantages of allowing your firm to increase its visibility and drive sales, there are a range of additional benefits that help give your brand authority.

Among the key advantages of video marketing are:

• It creates trust – Video can quickly engage with audiences and help businesses appear genuine, knowledgeable and open.
• It boosts SEO – Using video can go a long way to improving your brand’s visibility in Google and other search engines, as these services look favourably on this type of content.
• It’s shareable – A great video can be easily passed on via social media, allowing you to build your brand through word of mouth and gain free marketing.
• It builds understanding – Effective product videos show what you can do much more clearly than other types of content, helping to drive conversions.

What types of businesses should use video marketing?

Video may seem like a significant investment, but you don’t need to be a major brand with a large marketing budget to make it work for you. In fact, firms of all sizes and across all sectors stand to benefit from video content. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling physical products or ongoing subscriptions, or are aiming at business or consumer markets – video can help.

What are the types of video marketing?

Video marketing covers a wide variety of content, from brand awareness videos to help raise your company profile through to in-depth explainers. Broadly speaking, there are three main categories of brand video: awareness videos to help get on your customers’ radar;  engagement videos intended to stimulate a reaction from a user; and educational content that seeks to inform them.

Within this, however, there are many options. Among the key types of video marketing you’ll have to choose from are:

• Brand awareness
• Product videos/demonstrations
• Event videos/webinars
• Customer testimonials/case studies
• Explainer videos
• Training videos
• Livestream video
• Interviews
• Sponsored content
• Personalised messages

How to use video marketing for brand storytelling

Brand awareness is one of the most common uses for promotional videos, and at the heart of this needs to be a good story. In order to register in your audience’s minds, you’ll need to engage with them on a personal level with a compelling narrative about your business.

To do this, it’s vital to know who your audience are, including their interests and drivers. This  helps ensure you’re answering the right questions they may have about your brand and why they should want to work with or buy from you.

How to use video marketing for customer testimonials

A video customer testimonial is a great way to enhance a case study. Instead of relying on facts to explain how you helped a customer, prospective clients can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. A good testimonial gives your brand great authority, and gives viewers real-world insight as to how your product or service solves their problems.

How to use video marketing for product demonstrations

Product videos are among the most useful types of videography services. Being able to show visually exactly how your offerings work and what problems they solve can help customers more clearly understand what you can do for them. 

There are several ways to do this. Basic explainers, introductions to key features, step-by-step how-tos and demo videos that showcase real-world scenarios are just some of the ways you can show off your products in the best light.

How to optimise video marketing for social media

Social media platforms are among the best places to promote your video, but you need to tailor the content specifically for these sites if you want to see success. For starters., you need a compelling opening to stop people simply scrolling past, while you also need to get your message across clearly and succinctly. 

Using subtitles or other visuals to convey information without audio explanation is also important, as most social media videos will play muted by default. What’s more, as most people scroll social media on their phones, making sure you’re optimising for mobile is also a good idea. 

How to use video marketing for lead generation

Videos focused on lead generation need a different approach to those primarily designed for brand awareness. Think carefully about the type of information you want to include in these videos and make sure you’re focusing on quality content – explainers, tutorials and live video that connects with viewers in real time are great for this. Also be sure you’re including a call to action to help guide viewers to the next stage of the sales funnel.

If you’re offering something especially insightful or in-depth, such as a webinar, consider gating this content behind a contact form. However, to do this, you need to give your audience a compelling reason to hand over their details, so support your hero asset with engaging teasers and written content.

Lead gen videos also need to have strong search engine optimisation (SEO) to increase their visibility and make sure they’re being seen by the most relevant audience. This means having the right keywords in the title and description and ensuring it is fully tagged.

How to create a video marketing strategy

An effective video marketing campaign isn’t only about the video itself – though naturally that is hugely important. It also requires you to think carefully about how to promote your video, where you want to publish it, and what you expect the next steps to be for viewers once they’ve watched it. If you’re missing any of these elements, your video production won’t be as successful as it could be, so it’s vital you factor this into your planning long before the cameras roll. 

What are the three stages of video production?

Any video project has three main stages – pre-production, production and post-production. It’s important to understand what each of these involve to ensure the creation of your video goes as smoothly as possible, to avoid delays and to make certain the finished product aligns with your goals and expectation. Here’s what you need to know about the basics of each.

Pre-production – Includes setting out the aims of the campaign and how these will be reached, as well as initial creative work. This involves market research to understand your target audience and identifying what story you want to tell. Once you have this, you can move on to scripting and storyboarding, as well as planning for the shoot itself.

Production – This primarily refers to the filming process itself, and covers everything from setting up lighting to capturing voiceover audio, as well as shooting main scenes and additional footage.

Post-production – The first job during this stage is to cut your footage together to create the final product, adding graphics, captions, editing shots into a clear story and making any corrections or adjustments before the completed video is ready to be published. 

What are the best platforms for video marketing?

The final step in the process is choosing where you will host your video. The simplest solution may be to embed the video directly into your website, but there are many other options available, especially if you want to use the video as part of a paid advertising campaign.

Social media is another channel you should always be looking at to promote your video content. Even if the main video itself hasn’t been designed with this in mind, you can always edit key snippets or teasers for use on these platforms. The sites to consider when creating a social video are:

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• X/Twitter
• TikTok 

Which one will work best will depend on your chosen audience and the message you want to convey. Publishing on the wrong platform can be a waste of resources if you aren’t reaching the intended audience.

Making sure viewers know what to do after they finish the video

An important part of any video is what happens next. While for some video campaigns, such as brand awareness strategies, the video view itself will be considered a successful interaction, for many others, it’s what your audience does afterwards that counts.

For instance, do you want viewers to click through to a landing page on your website? Sign up to a newsletter? Pick up the phone and give you a call? A compelling call to action is an essential part of any video marketing campaign, as it’s how you’ll measure the success of the campaign. 

Therefore, it’s vital you have the right support in place. For example, if you’re driving viewers to a specific landing page, you need to make sure this also offers quality content and is set up correctly in order to drive conversions.

How to measure the success of video marketing campaigns

As noted above, it’s what your audience does next that will define whether your video marketing campaign is a success or a failure, and there are several key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can keep track of. Some of the most common metrics to look at include:

• Total number of views
• Audience engagement (eg, how many comments, likes or shares does your video get)
• Play rate (How many viewers actually clicked to watch a video embedded on a page)
• Watch time (how much of the video did viewers actually see? What percentage completed it?)
• Clickthroughs
• Leads generated
• Sales

With metrics such as total number of views, it’s also important to know how these are being measured. For example, YouTube won’t class an interaction as a ‘view’ until someone has watched it for 30 seconds, but for X, they only need to have seen two seconds to count as a view.

What are the best practices for video marketing?

Producing and promoting a video can be a complex process for a marketing professional, but by keeping a few key factors in mind, you can make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible. By following key best practices and turning to the support of expert partners, you can greatly improve your chances of a positive return on investment, whether your goal is to get your brand noticed or give a direct boost to your latest sales campaign.

What are the key elements of successful video marketing?

In order to make any video content marketing campaign effective, you need to have the following:

• Clear goals – Right at the start of your planning, you should set out exactly what you want to achieve and how you’re going to define success. This should be as specific and measurable as possible – try to keep the SMART principles in mind when coming up with targets.
• Audience research – You need to know exactly who your intended viewers are and what they will respond to. Use in-depth research to identify your key personas, understand their pain points and address their issues or concerns.
• An engaging story – Good video storytelling is at the heart of every successful campaign. Identify what it is that makes your brand unique – your values, your history, your people – and put this at the heart of your messaging.
• Great production values – Just because you can film a video on your smartphone, it doesn’t mean you should. High-quality cameras, sound and lighting, all managed by experienced professionals who know how to get the best shot every time, is what sets the best videos apart from the rest.
• The right distribution strategy – The best video in the world won’t get results if it can’t be seen, so making sure you’re publishing the video on the right platforms, promoting through social media or email marketing, and looking closely at SEO are all essential activities if you want to record good results.

How can the right partner improve your video marketing?

Getting marketing videos right requires time, skill and experience. If you’re coming to this for the first time or your marketing team has limited resources available, it pays to partner with a specialist video production agency who can help guide you through every step of the process.

While a skilled production team to shoot and edit high-quality footage is a must-have, a full service agency goes far beyond this. At Axonn, we’ll be able to assist from end-to-end, setting our initial goals and scope through to publishing your video and conducting data analysis to identify what worked, what didn’t and what learnings can be applied to the next campaign.