Monday, November 23, 2015

5 Ways To Maximize Your Marketing Video

By Sarah Parsons




When it comes to the success of engaging your audience with a clean, crisp video for your product or services, the way in which the marketing is handled really can make or break your businesses' success. Along with crafty storytelling and expanding your videos into a series, there are 5 helpful ways to maximize the way in which you can successfully market your videos.


1. Target Your Demographic

Knowing who your target demographic and audience are is key in perfecting the ideal marketing video. What is your brand trying to convey to who or whom? Having a clear goal in mind when considering your audience, specifically core age groups and social-economic background, enables you to be able to better design the content within your video.



For example, if your product is geared towards children, research on media crafted to attract children's attention is pivotal. Another example is if your core demographic is akin to luxury items, incorporate elements that would entice that audience by using sensual imagery and pacing. For additional resources on research for media and demographics, read this helpful article on 2015 media trends. 


2. Maximize Social Media Presence

Social media is currently the most used media platform in the United States and numbers indicate that popularity of social media sites are growing across the world. It is estimated that Americans 18-64, spend an average of 3.2 hours a day on social networks. Creating pages or accounts on these popular sites for your brand's videos will help encourage viewership. 


Creating pages for your brand is extremely easy. On Facebook, you can create a page for your brand to host your promotional videos. In doing so, your page will receive "likes"  and followers, which will in return increase the popularity of the page, especially in search engines. 

With the rise of social media, also creates access to keyword searches for social media users. After you establish a social media page or account for your brand, you can utilize the popularity of the "#hashtag", the symbol used before a typically one-lettered word, which will increase the frequency of those browsing the search engine. The use of the hashtag is particularly effective on Vine, Instagram and Twitter and is becoming increasingly popular on other social media sites by the minute.

Understanding which social media would optimize your marketing depends on research and your target demographic. To learn more, try reviewing this fact sheet.

3. Especially, YouTube

According to research, the debate as to whether YouTube will replace TV is still ongoing. Although the verdict is still out on whether TV will cease to be, there is no denying that YouTube has a following that shouldn't be ignored.  With subscribers in the billions, YouTube offers an opportunity for advertisers to showcase their marketing videos before and between streaming videos. 


There is also the option to create a YouTube account for your marketing videos. By having subscribers to your YouTube account, viewers will be able to be notified and view newly posted videos once they are published. By using YouTube's channel function, posting videos can become a serialized event, thus leading to optimizing user engagement. Also, with the option of the "share" button, viewers can promote your marketing videos with this function, which then becomes a promotional function on its own.



4. Ad Space for Streaming Services

Another factor into the decline of TV, specifically cable TV,  is the rising popularity of streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video as well as many, many other services. Although streaming services such as Netflix and HBOGo typically do not display adds, services like Hulu do. Although ad space for other streaming services cease to exist within TV mode, many internet browsers display some form of ads within the page that is streaming the movie or TV show. 



Though Netflix is currently the most popular streaming device with over 69.17 million subscribes worldwide, other streaming services like Yahoo is still supporting ad revenue by selling out ad space for live streaming of sports games, such as the N.F.L. To reiterate, selling ad space to streaming services can become complicated. With research, you can find the right streaming service that suits your video's marketing needs. 


5. Specify Branding 

The final helpful tip in the maximization of your marketing video is to specify your branding. How are your products or services going to make an impact on viewership? Will your marketing videos be individual clips that are a separate entity from the overall marketing campaign? or will you create an on-going, episodic campaign that builds upon the marketing videos that preceded it? 



By understanding your marketing videos and the way in which they will be implemented, you can assert your brand's presence in the digital age. Other factors to consider are genre, such as whether you want your video to be humorous or dramatic and the length of the videos, either 30 second segments, or longer. 


The possibilities of maximizing your marketing videos exceeds more than the 5 ways listed above, and with intensive research, you too will be able to fully maximize your marketing video's potential in little to no time at all.