What is video marketing? And how do you make it effective?

To develop a solid digital-marketing plan, the team, marketers, and video pros alike need to bring videos into the fold. While the term "video marketing" may seem self-explanatory (essentially, adding videos into your marketing campaigns), it is difficult to figure out how you can go about successfully implementing this strategy.

The importance of video marketing

With the rise of sites like and YouTube and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter now incorporating video, and dramatic improvements in video streaming's quality (bye bye to that dreaded buffering), videos now appear throughout all the stages of the funnel of marketing. The funnel that is traditional looks like this: you intro someone to your business (awareness stage) to educate them about it (consideration stage), justify your offering (decision stage) and then keep them (delight stage).

So how do you do video marketing right?

Let's give life to the typical funnel for video marketing using a real-world (but really a made-up) illustration. WebThyme is a (imaginary) software company which assists people in creating and manage websites. Jenn is an aspiring customer.

• The right prospect: Jenn is about to start a health and wellness website. WebThyme's primary target market is entrepreneurs from small companies.
• The correct channel: Jenn Googles advice for starting a new business and comes across one of WebThyme's videos on the form of a blog article which tells entrepreneurs' stories. Enthusiastic, she joins WebThyme's email list which send Jenn a weekly newsletter filled with useful information.
  
• The right action:Jenn clicks on a hyperlink in a newsletter that leads the reader to an online landing page which features a video delving into the latest WebThyme features available to small-scale business owners. Clicking on the button will lead to a no-cost trialcalling to decision -- and then decides to give it a go.

This is only one of the examples of a possible video-marketing scenario. How does it play out at a more specific or actionable basis? What are the most effective video marketing strategies for the most important channels such as social media, email, and even your own web site? Let's dig in...

Social media exploration

What makes social media so efficient for growth? If your current followers share, like, comment or share your articles, they essentially expose your videos to their own acquaintances and friends, a few of whom may start following your page too. One method to get more leads within this community is by incorporating the email capture form, that is included within Business software, which allows you to get your viewers" contact info directly within the player embedded. After that, you are able to effortlessly import these email addresses into marketing email services such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact.

Perhaps you'd like your visitors to go to a landing page to discover more. This is also possible! Business allows you to add clickable CTAs which allows you to guide people precisely where you want.

You can also expand your reach and acquire new followers at larger scale by using sponsored social media. In accordance with the site you are using, you can target key audiences, and advertise your content by putting it in pre-roll positions or posts that are promoted.

Let your email campaigns flourish

When it comes to emails, videos matter big time: they can improve click-through rates up to 200-300% (that's many percentages, users) as well as reduce the amount of people who don't subscribe. However, most email programs can't handle videos that are embedded directly into emails -- but it's easy to solve this problem by overlaying a play button on an image that is still that you've created, leading to a landing page that includes the entire video.

It's relatively easy to do with those systems for marketing via email that we discussed in the past and also in marketing automation software like HubSpot. It's an excellent method to determine which thumbnails get you the highest rate of clicks. As a rule to follow, you can enhance your campaigns" performance by customizing your design and copy to match to the landing pages they lead to.

Your website, packed with incredible videos

 Homepage

The majority of companies make an overview video to use on their website, which describes what you're all about, why what you do is significant, and what issue you're solving for. This vastly impacts how your brand is perceived in the eyes of anyone who is just observing your brand. Consider Canary, for example.

 Pages that land

Although your website serves many purposes for a wide variety of users Your landing pages are great to educate specific sections of your customers about your wonderful offerings as well as entice users to take the desired decision. Marketers drive to landing pages via online advertisements as well as social media blogs, websites, and search engines -- and videos can help turn the traffic to leads and customers. For instance, take the time to visit our business page.

 Blog

This is an important source of traffic inbound to your website -- especially when your posts include useful information, news from the industry as well as thought leadership regarding topics that your audience cares about as they're likely to search for those subjects on Google. This is also an excellent place to share product and corporate news, events and best practices with your community. Do you need an example? This article is (hopefully) much more enjoyable with videos sprinkled throughout.

 Product and FAQ pages

Putting it all together

If the video-marketing approach you have chosen works well it creates an amazing environment that helps grow your company by attracted by new customers and are engaging those who already follow you; your videos-loaded blog posts are ranking highly in results for search engines; your email campaigns -featuring stunning video thumbnails will direct users websites that are your landing pages with relevant videos and clear CTAs All of these are optimized for generating leads as well as increasing conversions. All of this is trackable, measurable and able to be improved as time passes. Speaking of...