Guest Post by The Team at Vidyard
Most marketers believe that video marketing is hard. They envision a noisy Hollywood movie set full of expensive cameras, boom mics, cowboy and space alien extras, and some little guy in jockey pants with a clapperboard shouting "Action!" It's enough to make them leap behind their desk and hide their budget.
Why are they so nervous? It's because they don't know where to begin. Some 44 percent of marketers report that not having a strategy is their biggest hurdle to video marketing success and yet once they have one, everything changes. It becomes demystified. They realize that it's neither difficult nor expensive and they join the 70 percent of other marketers who find that video is their highest converting content medium.
If you want to realize the full potential of video marketing too, it's time to bust some myths.
3 video marketing myths versus the truth 1. "Video is expensive and best done by an agency." The truth: Most video is inexpensive and easily shot in-house.The last time we checked there wasn't an Oscar category for "best shot marketing video" and thus, no need for you to compete like there is. The point of video marketing is to harness the explanatory and emotional value of video to convey a message to your audience that really sticks, and this can be done in a variety of ways. Yes, agencies do a great job at high- production value explainer videos, but they're only part of the story.
If we think of video marketing content as a pyramid, the agency-led content is at the apex. Beneath it lies most of the video and most of the value.
And at the bottom of the video content pyramid lies a wealth of employee-generated content. Today's consumers prefer authenticity over quality according to Fast Company and this is why influencer marketing and user-generated content are exploding in popularity: people don't care that you recorded it with an iPhone, they care that you have something valuable to say. Anyone in your company who has some expertise can record themselves and create a piece of video marketing content.
Just take our Chalk Talks, for example. They're as simple as someone explaining a topic via a plain old chalkboard and they've been received quite well:
2. "It's extremely difficult to prove the ROI on video." The truth: Video ROI is easy to prove with the right tools.Some 72 percent of marketers aren't measuring video's impact, or they're doing so superficially with view counts. Why? Because they're limited by tools like YouTube or their website's video hosting feature which can only tell them how many people watched a video. But what if 99 percent of your viewers dropped off within the first three seconds? Would you know? Without deeper insight, it is, of course, next to impossible to prove that viewers are getting any value.
Instead, marketers need to measure their videos like they measure their websites. Online marketers employ a variety of tools from analytics to marketing automation to get a full picture of who their web visitors are, what they want, and to help deliver more of what they're looking for. A good video enablement platform does the same for video, plus a little more.
You see, video has some unique characteristics that make it extremely trackable. Because video is linear and viewers watch it end-to-end, an enablement platform can track what they viewed, skipped, and rewatched, and from this, infer particular product interests. For example, if your software company's explainer video highlights both a lead generation feature and a data cleanup feature and one particular viewer watched the data cleanup segment three times, it's time to send an automated alert to a sales rep.
And because of video enablement platforms' deep integration with CRM and marketing systems, you can weave this viewer engagement data into your multi-touch revenue attribution. Which videos impacted which leads when? How much did each net over the course of the year? With a video engagement platform, video ROI isn't just possible, it's easy.
3. "It's hard to know when and where to use video." The truth: A video strategy makes everything clear.Navigating anything without a map is difficult, which is why you need a video marketing strategy. Video has such a wide range of applications, especially once you accept that it's both easy and desirable to create it in-house and on a budget. For example, does video belong at the top of your funnel, the bottom, or throughout? Is video best used with decision makers or end-users? Who is responsible for creating and maintaining a video repository? To help everyone in your organization feel comfortable creating and utilizing video, you'll have to put this all down in writing.
To set your strategy, answer these four questions:
Review your answers with the team. Make sure that there are clear guidelines so that everyone knows precisely how to create, implement, track, and operationalize video in your marketing.
For more on building out your video marketing strategy, download Vidyard's simple Video Strategy Workbook.
Quiet on the set! And … Action!We've come a long way since our fear of Hollywood-level productions, haven't we? Video needn't be intimidating and once you begin exploring your strategy, you'll find that most of it can be created in-house on a budget, that it's just as easy to track as any other piece of content once you have the right tools, and that codifying your strategy can make video actionable throughout the business. What's left? Time to press "play" and watch the video marketing results flow in.
Source: 3 video marketing myths and why it's easier than you think
No comments:
Post a Comment