• by Spencer Hadelman , October 23, 2020

The new customer acquisition journey is no longer linear and now takes a combination of marketing tactics to achieve optimal results. The number one vehicle to reach new customers? Video.

It’s important to keep your goals in mind when creating your video. Are you trying to drive awareness, sales, traffic, or all the above? Once you have established your goals, it’s time to get creative.

Not every company has the budget to include celebrity spotlights, or an award-winning production team. Yes, a quality video will go a long way, but there are opportunities to expand on the visual with user-generated content. Gather testimonials from your existing audience and repurpose them into short videos that give potential customers a closer look into what their brand experience can be in the most authentic way possible.

Using the correct tone of messaging is particularly important. Doing the research to gather customer insights before starting your video creation can help. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, companies with consistent branding are 20% more successful than those without.

While video may be a way to give your brand a refresh, it’s important that viewers have a clear understanding of who is speaking to them. With that said, it’s imperative that regardless of the social platform your video is posted on, you are always linking to your website or a landing page that has on-brand and consistent messaging that is clear across each channel.

Understanding your audience and setting campaign goals must start with research to determine what channel your target audience is most likely to be on and what content will resonate most with them. For instance, if you’re looking to win over millennial or Gen Z consumers, consider producing and/or editing shorter video clips for social channels like Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter.

Measuring the impact of your video marketing can be challenging, but with the increase of multi-device consumption, you should be able to capture the site traffic upticks soon after a video airs. Quality of traffic to your website and video engagement rates is also a factor. This is determined by the length on average of each website visit, as well as how much time someone spent on your video.

Did they watch the video in its entirety, or leave and skip out early? View count, while important to measurement, varies from channel to channel. For instance, on YouTube a view is considered 30 seconds, while on Facebook it’s only three seconds. Engagement through comments and feedback are also not to be overlooked. While these aren’t technically a metric, they give you the ability to dive deeper into how consumers are reacting to your video.

Video marketing will only keep growing as consumers spend more and more time watching video online. This creates large opportunity for your brand, but only if your content is done thoughtfully and stands out among the growing video noise.