How Do You Build a Video Marketing Strategy?

What is the most effective video marketing strategy right now?

We would obviously say YouTube ads, but video works across the whole of social, not just YouTube, so you want a strategy that runs across whichever platforms your customers are actually on. One of the most effective approaches at the moment is what we call a YouTube first strategy: that is your brand awareness, the top of the funnel, where the clicks are coming from, educating someone and getting them onto your site. That traffic is cold, so people are not necessarily converting on the first video, but they can then be remarketed to based on how much they watched.

The actual close of the sale might happen on a different platform, for example Facebook or Instagram, where they get remarketed to with an offer, as long as the funnel is built properly. On top of that you can run a remarketing loop of emails with testimonials, case studies and further education, taking people on a journey.

What tools do you actually need to make a marketing video?

You need far less than people think. Brands like Bentley and BMW have shot cinema quality commercials on phones, using proper directors who knew what they were doing, but you can create great stuff without that. On our own YouTube channel we have videos about lighting tips and so on from the team, and the entry level can be quite simple: a couple of lights, a tripod worth about £300. It is more about thinking through where your audience is, what the hook is, and what you are trying to communicate.

Put a strategy in place before doing the video, because that decides what video you actually make, and write scripts and bullet points first. At the other end of the scale we work with partners on TV and cinema quality shoots with full crews, and we are in conversations at the moment with people who might spend two hundred thousand pounds on a TV commercial and sponsorship package. You do not need a lot of money fundamentally, and you do not need professional actors, lighting or camera operators, but it does depend on what you are trying to say and who your customers are.

The biggest thing that lets people down is usually the audio. If you are reasonably close to a decent phone the audio is fine now. Simple things matter, like not having noises going off in the background, and lapel mics costing around £15 work really well. The technology has changed so much in the last few years that a couple of hundred pounds can get you a good setup, and you do not need a lot, or sometimes even that much.

What is the easiest way to get into video marketing?

From a brand's perspective, the easiest way is to set up a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, put some videos together, and measure what comes out the back end. I think this is where a lot of people go wrong, they end up disheartened because they are not seeing results, so attach your analytics, or use something like Google Tag Manager, and once your content is out there and tracked you can actually see what is happening.

As with anything, you need to do a bit of research into what good videos and good creative look like in your market. You have to put the work in and do the research, but the one advantage with video marketing is that it does not have to be expensive, it can have a really low entry point, as long as you show passion and commitment. A good place to start is looking at what other people in your market are putting out, particularly the ones with really large view numbers off the back of ads, because that content is clearly converting and gives you a template. Do not try to be all things to all people either, niche into a certain sector so you can really learn one area well.

How long should marketing videos be?

A typical bumper ad is six seconds, Instagram runs around 15 seconds, and Facebook 15 to 30 seconds, though there is an argument that two to three minute videos work better. On YouTube at the moment, an ad length of two to three minutes is about the sweet spot, but we have clients running ads that are actually 30 minutes long, and if it is the right content for the right audience, and people are watching 20 or 30 minutes, that is amazing. That is one of the big advantages of YouTube: we have made ads with a great hook, a highly produced 30 second TV-commercial-style opening with the call to action in it, followed by the chance to educate, inform, tell a story and talk about the brand and its history, which you could not ordinarily do elsewhere, because YouTube lets you target well enough to reach people who are genuinely interested, educated, informed and entertained.

I was speaking to a national brand a couple of weeks ago that purely ran their TV ad on YouTube, exactly 30 seconds long. They got 2 million people to watch it, and because you only get charged once someone passes 29 seconds, they effectively got one second of paid footage. It was an amazing piece of creative, but the opportunity they missed was that they could have gone on for another two or three minutes about the brand, the story, or other products. If that had been, say, a sports brand, I would be telling that client to use the time afterwards to show and rotate other products or offers of the month, and it is still relevant, but nobody is doing it. There is often that classic tension in the room between "it's an awareness ad" and "we want product ads that are selling", when on YouTube you can actually do the brand piece and then the product piece straight after.

How does video work across social media?

The whole thing is connected: if you have a really great piece of video content telling a great story, use it everywhere, you might just need to alter the length and the call to action slightly for each platform. We are all used to putting video onto social now, or we should be, and there are a few basic rules worth paying attention to, such as not being too far from the camera and equally not too close, so it feels right, though that depends on what you are trying to do and what point you are making.

We repurpose a lot of what clients have made themselves, cutting it down for Facebook, Instagram and everywhere else. One approach worth trying is what I would call a base level test: start with a very simple piece of creative and a call to action as your first ad, and if you see conversions off the back of something that is not a typical polished ad, then you know you can scale up and produce a higher level piece of creative with confidence that it will get you a lot more conversions.