How to incorporate video into your content marketing for better results

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As marketers, we’re always looking to improve our content, and using video allows you to just that. Videos that explain, teach, and delight give your content a strong boost, and help to bring your audience closer to your brand. According to Wyzowl, 88% of businesses say that video is an important part of their marketing strategy, and the numbers are only going up.

To start using video, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are many places in your existing marketing strategy and in your content marketing lifecycle where video already fits in. Content marketing is a lifecycle comprised of six different phases: strategize, plan, produce, promote, analyze and amplify:

In order to succeed with content marketing, you need to effectively manage and optimize your efforts in every phase. Failing at or neglecting just one of the phases compromises success, even if your content is high-quality. We’ll be going into greater depth on this topic in our upcoming Scoop.it and Wistia webinar, but for now let’s go over the basics—strategize, plan, produce and promote.

Strategize

As the first phase of the content marketing lifecycle, strategizing your content process is critical to success and the foundation on which to build your content marketing machine. When it comes time to strategizing your content pieces, you need to consider the following:

Who is your audience? Understanding your audience is critical when building your content marketing strategy. Identify who your target audience is, what their biggest challenges are, and answer their questions.
What are your business goals? Define your business objectives and make sure they align with your desired content marketing goals
What stage of the buyer’s journey is the content intended for? Where do folks convert? Identify and classify content to move prospects to the next stage of the customer journey. Where do folks convert?

There’s a lot to think about, and you should consider where and how video fits into this strategy. You can incorporate video into almost every content piece, but it has to serve a purpose and deliver on your goals.

Plan

Planning your content in advance sets you up for success. Your content should always tie back to your overall business goals (the ones you established previously in the strategize phase). Whether it’s for lead generation or awareness purposes, using video can engage your audience in a really unique and relatable way.

64% of businesses that use video say that it has led directly to increased sales, and 72% say that it has increased the conversion rate on their website. Depending on your goals, a well-planned video can move your numbers up and to the right. We’ll dive deeper into the different types of videos you can include in the planning stage in our webinar, but here are three basic types I wouldn’t skip over:

1. Product videos

Product videos are an excellent way to raise awareness about your product, encourage folks to sign up for a demo, and increase conversion numbers. According to eMarketer, four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.

Great product videos capture the attention of their audience, explain product functionality quickly and clearly, and relate back to the company culture in order to help the audience relate to the human side behind the product. Here’s a great example from our friends at Slack:

2. Thought leadership videos

If you have a blog on your website, you’re creating thought leadership material. These posts should be well planned out and serve a purpose, all the while providing value to your audience. These posts are critical to the inbound marketing strategy. If your thought leadership pieces explain or work through how-to content, adding a video will help them be more successful once you reach the promote phase of your content marketing lifecycle.

Thought leadership videos need to be the best of both worlds. They should stem back to your business goals (for example, getting more folks to use your SEO product), as well as be important and helpful to your audience (an example here would be answering common SEO questions). When done right, these videos are a win-win! You can find some great examples from Moz’s Whiteboard Friday videos here.

3. Introduction videos

Introduction videos are super versatile and can fit into any gated content piece that you’ve planned out. Whether it’s a long how-to guide that you’ve gated, a webinar that you’re doing, a downloadable infographic, or what have you—your audience wants to know what they’re getting before they give away their email address. In today’s marketing heavy atmosphere, your email address is sacred. A good introduction video allows you to gain the trust of your audience and let them know what to expect after they give you their information. Check out the introduction video we made for our upcoming webinar below:

This video lets you know what you’re in for before you sign up, so you feel confident that we’re providing you with value in exchange for your email address. Planning an introduction video in advance will drive your registration numbers up while making sure the leads you get are folks who are actually interested in your content. It’s a win-win!

Produce

Now it’s time for the fun part: producing your content. When it comes to actually producing video content, some folks may shy away. If you don’t have a fancy video camera or a professional studio, don’t freak out! You can make great business videos without spending a ton of money on a production company, or buying a $12k camera. In fact, you can just use your iPhone or MacBook. For scripting, we just use Google Docs to write out a script that sounds conversational, relatable, but still gets the point across:

According to HubSpot, 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI. Once you see a return on your video investment, you’ll be able to make a great case for buying a DSLR and a thrifty lighting kit that will make your videos shine. Believe it or not, everything you need for background and lighting, you can get for $100. Easy peasy!

Once you have your video ready to go, you want to add your CTAs and lead generation elements. You can do that by using Turnstile, Wistia’s lead generation form that sits right in the video player. No weird form pop-ups or poorly designed form elements. Turnstile shows up wherever you’d like it to in your video. We usually put ours in the end, but depending on your business goals and what you’ve discussed in the plan stage, you can choose the section of the video that’s right for you:

Promote

Promoting your content regularly is what is seen, shared, and loved by your audience. A great content promotion strategy is imperative to success. Lucky for you, 70% of users say they have shared a brand’s video with a friend, or on their social media channels. Folks love sharing videos! They’re more engaging than the best copy you can write, and sure enough—they get shares.

Creating a social video strategy will allow you to make the most out of each social media channel. They’re not created equal—what works on LinkedIn, for example, may not work on Instagram or Twitter. Creating a content promotion strategy can help you reach, engage, and convert as many people possible.

Analyze

While strategizing, planning, producing and promoting your video content are all important, you need a way to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. In order to succeed, you need to monitor and analyze the performance of each piece of content you create, so that you know what worked and what didn’t so that you can continually improve. With the right analytics tools, you can ensure you stay on track to content marketing ROI. We’ll discuss how to do this in greater depth during our webinar.

Amplify

And finally, it’s essential to amplify your content and continue to re-share your video after you’ve produced it and promoted it. You can’t just promote it once and expect to see results. Especially after all the time and effort you’ve put into it. There are several ways to amplify your content:

Share generously: You can’t just share your content once and expect it to perform well. After you first publish, you need to share it again a week later, and then again once or twice every month following.
Influencer marketing: Reach out to influencers you know will be interested in your video content. Investing in influencer marketing is a highly impactful strategy for maximizing your content reach.
Leverage automation for added insight on what to re-share when across your social media channels.

More to come in our webinar!

Back to you

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for our Scoop.it and Wistia webinar, and we’ll dive deeper into the content marketing lifecycle, adding and creating video, and move on to the analyze and amplify phases. See you there!