How to Plan a Video Marketing Campaign From Start to Finish

Video marketing allows your business to effectively engage with your potential buyers. Let’s dive into some video marketing campaign best practices.

Video is the game-changing tactic you use to capture the attention of your target audience. Having a robust video plan improves your SEO, helps to educate and engage your user base, and ultimately helps you convert more leads through the sales funnel.

Whether you’ve just stepped into the scene, or you’ve been using videos for ages, you need a road map outlining what it’s all for, where you’re going, and how you’ll measure success.

Your plan doesn’t need to be incredibly detailed (as the performance of your first few videos will often reveal some necessary modifications), but you should have a good idea of how you’ll align video content with the goals of your company.

Your marketing videos help your sales team to close more deals faster, and by tracking your performance with video engagement data, you can see which content resonates best with your qualified leads.

A solid plan can be the difference between knowing your content is delivering ROI, versus throwing metaphorical spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Here’s how to map out your purposeful video marketing strategy.

Decide who your target audience is and what they’ll get out of your video

Use buyer personas to help flesh out a mental image of your most ideal customer. It’s likely that you’ll have more than one persona, so take the time to put yourself in their shoes and determine their motivations and pain points. How will these people be better off from watching your content? What do they want to see, and what will it help them accomplish? Looking before you leap is crucial for video. Producing video content can be expensive and time consuming, so you want to make sure you’ll nail it on the first take.

Determine who is responsible for creating content

This could be a single individual or a collaboration of a team. It depends on the scope of your project, and company structure. If your company is a small-to-medium sized business, you probably don’t have a dedicated in-house production team. You can either hire an out-of-house production team, or use a tool like Wistia Soapbox to make the video yourself!

Choose where to publish your video

If you are choosing between YouTube, LinkedIn, and your website for hosting the video, which one do you pick? Trick question! All 3!

The more channels you can use to publish video content, the more likely that users will see it. It’s likely that you will have ideal buyers that use a multitude of video platforms to watch content. By diversifying video platforms as part of your video distribution strategy, you are making it easier for people to find your stellar content on their own terms.

Create a publishing schedule

Just as you time your tweets and Facebook posts to run consistently, your video marketing plan should have legs as well. Instead of posting one video about a new product, think of your campaign in terms of a series. What type of story can you tell that will allow you to post it in multiple parts over the course of several weeks? Once you’ve determined the content of your videos, set up a schedule. Space the videos out evenly, timing them to lead up to a big product launch or event.

Use short-form videos

Social media has revolutionized the way online users communicate with each other, with short, concise statements being more and more preferred over longer forms of content. Micro-video apps shorten videos to less than ten seconds, making them ideal for sharing on sites like Twitter and Instagram. In this format, customers can quickly view a message as they scroll through their social media feeds. Brands can quickly send a message that will be seen by a larger audience, especially on Vine and Facebook, where they automatically play as a user scrolls past.

Optimize for SEO

When you publish a video online, you want to make it as easy as possible for search engines to parse the information and make you videos visible. After all, what’s the point of making stellar content if no one can find it? Adding links to the video description, creating titles with relevant keywords, and embedded video text all help make sure your content lands right on that first page of Google.

Don’t forget about the CTAs!

One mistake many marketers make is in creating a great video without attaching a call to action. Customers may enjoy your message, but if they have no idea what to do after watching it, your hard work will have been for nothing.The call to action can be something simple, like a coupon code for use on your website. For local customers, attach an offer of a discount for any customer who mentions the video in your store. Just a few words at the end of your video could lead to a conversion that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Be sure to measure, analyze and improve

The beauty is that as companies get better and better with video, they’re also making sales in the process. This is what smart business and marketing is all about.—Marcus Sheridan

At the end of the day, the main objective of marketing is to increase sales revenue. With this in mind, it’s imperative to have quantifiable ways to prove ROI, which go beyond the number of views on any one video.

Keep your marketing and sales teams aware of each other’s efforts. Sales needs to know the story behind the content so they can share and discuss it during outreach. Marketing needs to know how sales reps are using the content as well as receiving feedback to what works and what needs to be improved.

Video marketing is a great way for brands to stand out from the many text-based marketing efforts being launched each day. When conducted correctly, a video marketing campaign can help your brand reach new consumers and turn them into loyal customers. Using integrated platforms like HubSpot and Wistia, you can track your customer lifecycle from the first video view through close.