If you aren’t using video already as part of your marketing campaigns, you might want to start. It’s highly likely that your competitors are already doing so. Video is one of the most shareable, engaging and informative types of content out there. With video, you can show a process, tell a story, entertain people and help build an emotional connection. When done right, it’s a pretty great thing.

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about some best practices you can use to help with your video content advertising.

Quality Over Quantity

While “quality” may be a subjective term, when it comes to video, there are some things across the board you want to keep in mind. You can consider the quality of your camera and equipment, the quality of your cast and crew and the quality of your content. The list can go on and on. There are multiple elements that need to live in harmony in order to create a high-quality final product. We don’t mean that you need to spend $10,000 on a camera and another $20,000 on cast and crew. That’s just ridiculous.

Pre-Production

Before you turn the camera on, start out with giving some tender love and care to what happens in pre-production. At this point, a lot of items should be brought up and addressed. Consider the all of the elements of the overall campaign, figure out how the video will tie into everything else. Additionally, you’ll need to identify your target audience. By doing this, you’ll be able to produce content that specific people are going to enjoy. If you make something your target audience will enjoy, then there’s a great chance they will engage with your content.

You can also do some keyword research to see how you’ll be able to rank for certain topics. Let’s say you’re making a video marketing campaign around your new brand of delicious tacos. If you’d like to rank for something like “best taco recipe” or “tacos,” it may be difficult. See what the competition is doing. Create a video that’s better, than what others are doing in the same space, and consider targeting lower-competition keywords as well.

Production

Most importantly, make sure that the actual content of your video is spot on. This is an important step. Once you identify your target audience and find out how you’d like to be identified, then create some great content. By this, we’re talking about the scripting phase.

Let’s go back to our taco example. Make sure you’re actually offering helpful content to people with relative information based on the keywords you have identified. If you’re doing a product video, make sure to be entertaining, engaging and tell a story throughout the piece. Don’t just make it flashy pictures or cool slow motion. Well, you can do that, but make sure the messaging ties in with the visuals.

Make Sure It’s Relevant

In the section above, we touched based on making videos your ideal customer would enjoy. You’ve already figured out your goals for this video marketing campaign and you know who you’d like to target. Make sure to think as your ideal customer would so you can know what they’re going to like. The content you makes needs to be relevant to what they want.

Have you ever heard of a buyer persona? We assume you have. But for those who haven’t, a buyer persona is a somewhat fictional take on what your ideal customer is like. This takes into consideration things like demographics, buying/behavior patterns, motivations and goals. Having a buyer persona is a great way to really identify what your target market is going to want to see in terms of video content.

If you don’t narrow down the specifics, then you’ll most likely end up casting too wide of a net. This will really throw off your production and the results of the video marketing campaign. You’ll want to really know who these videos are for and how people are going to watch it.

Here’s an example. Let’s say we go back to the taco promo. This video spot would appeal to the youthful, foodie, Arizona-based, taco crowd. With upbeat music, a modern aesthetic and slow-mo food-focused macro shots this video will appeal to that very crowd.

Try To Make It Short

Let’s be real, we’re all busy. People have a lot going on and attention spans on the internet aren’t so great. People have the luxury of clicking away basically whenever they want (if you made it this far in the blog, you’re awesome!). Very few businesses have users so engaged with their company that they’re willing to sit through a long blog post or a ton of video content.

A great way to avoid making something too long is by taking your video topic and figure out what portions of it you’d like to cover. Then you can break it down into bite-sized chunks of easy to consume content and be good to go. Not know does this help people see what they really care about, but you’ll have more video content to share over time. Fluff is a really great marshmallow spread, but having extra fluff in your video isn’t going to please anyone.

There is research out there that tells you roughly how long a video should be. If you look into your video analytics, you might see that longer videos tend to lose people midway through. If you don’t do something to grab attention within the first 5-10 seconds, people may click away from your video. We aren’t encouraging clickbait (because we hate that), but we just want you to know that longer isn’t always better when it comes to video ads.

Conclusion

We barely scratched the surface of what should be considered as part of your video content marketing campaign. There is a lot of other great content on this blog and across the web that can add to the conversation, but if you start pushing out short, relevant, quality content. That is a good start.

And if you want to learn more about setting up a video marketing campaign yourself, check out our Video Marketing Strategy Blueprint. It is a short, actionable guide to planning a video marketing campaign.

Unlocking Your Ability to Create Powerful, Professional Video Content

If you had to create an engaging, professional video for your business today, could you pull it off? If you’re like many consultants and other business professionals, you’d probably feel completely overwhelmed. Even finding a starting point might seem impossible. And that’s frustrating, because you know if you want to grow your business, video is an essential part of your marketing, sales, and communications strategies.

What you don’t know, though, is how to easily create videos that:
❓ Strengthen your brand
❓ Establish your authority, and
❓ Make people want to do business with you.

That’s the problem we help solve. We have created the vidwheel Creator Network,  a community where entrepreneurs and consultants representing all industries can come together to master the simple steps to stabilize and grow your business through video. From strategy to audio and lighting, staging, preparation, to feeling 100% natural in front of the camera, here’s where you can learn it all. I created the vidwheel Creator Network as a supportive, energizing place to learn, share feedback, and grow alongside a community of professionals a lot like you!

Our affordable membership package even includes a done-for-you equipment kit. A video studio-in-a-box for your home or office. We’ve curated these kits for simplicity, versatility, and video creation power. No guesswork. No bins full of equipment you bought but didn’t need.

It’s the trifecta of video mastery:
✅ Right training
✅ Right equipment
✅ Right community

That’s the kind of ease I wish I had when I started my own small business.

If this sounds like what you’ve been looking for, please take a moment to check out the vidwheel Creator Network.