Seven steps to a successful social media video marketing strategy

Business

Love to grow your social media followers and engagement – and your brand awareness and sales? Discover seven steps to a successful social media video marketing strategy.

Social media has completely transformed the way companies promote their brand and offerings. Today almost 92% of companies in the US – which is the world’s largest market in terms of marketing – use social media for marketing purposes. And there is very little to no doubt that this trend will last for years to come.

You don’t need to be a marketing expert to understand the key reasons making social media so attractive to businesses worldwide: with billions of active users, it offers great exposure and conversion rate and at the same time, it doesn’t require many resources to produce content.

Now that the social media benefits for business are evident, let’s move on to how exactly you can implement a marketing strategy via social platforms. There are many ways you can do this, however in this article we’ll particularly focus on video technique and how it can help your brand.

So let’s have a more detailed look on the seven initial steps you need to follow to create your social media video marketing strategy.

1) Detailed strategy with action plan

Some people view social media platforms and videos as a creative intuition-based industry and prefer to post on a whim, without sticking to any plan or schedule.

However, we believe that a clear-cut and precise marketing strategy supplemented with a detailed step-by-step action plan with expected objectives, performance indicators and timeline is a must, especially if you are a newbie.

In other words, before actually proceeding with any actions, you should have a concrete picture in your mind’s eye of the goals you want to achieve and how you are going to do that.

2) Post professional quality videos only

The quality of your video makes a big difference, and there are no exceptions to this. Of course, the content of your video is crucial too, but if the quality is poor no one will watch the full video to be able to appreciate your wonderful content. So it won’t matter how good or relevant it is!

Even if you plan to make your video look home made or amateurish, it still has to be professionally produced. There are two solutions to achieving quality videos. Firstly, you can opt to create your own in-house video content from scratch, which is a very time and money consuming process. Or, secondly, you can make use of premium-quality stock video combined which can often work well for beginners and small businesses.

3) Make your videos short and sweet

Even if you still nature a childhood dream of becoming an Oscar-winning film director, social platforms are not the place to attempt to live out this fantasy.

We’re used to a fast-paced world today, and often lose patience if videos aren’t as short and to the point as possible. So, the baseline is – make sure the videos you use are short, and that the message you want to get through to the audience is evident and easily understandable.

If the concept you plan to cover is complex and sophisticated, then consider going for a series of connected short videos. Importantly, every such video should end with a cliffhanger to compel users to continue watching the other videos.

4) Focus on the beginning

Unlike other videos where the climax is normally at the end, social media videos must be captivating from the very first few seconds. In an extremely competitive environment such as social media, to be successful your media must capture the user’s attention immediately, ideally within two to four seconds. If not, they’ll quickly scroll by.

Bu ensuring your message is upfront you’ll also ensure that, even if someone skips your video without watching it to the very end, they will still get the idea of your brand.

5) Jump on trends and popular hashtags

Make maximum use of the advice that social platforms provide, because nobody knows users’ preferences and interests better than the platforms themselves. For example, TikTok makes regular posts about the most popular current trends and tendencies.

The more you know about what people kind of content people are consuming on a particular social channel, and the hashtags they’re using to find and share it – the more you can ensure that your videos will be relevant and interesting to people (and more easily found).  

6) Deliver what you promise

You know the saying: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me? Bear this in mind when creating and sharing video content for your social channels, and ensure that your videos actually deliver what you promise.

So if you share a video with the promise of ‘The funniest thing you’ll see today’ or ‘An amazing revelation…’ or ‘The best tip ever’ make very sure you actually create content that lives up to your claims.

If not you’ll irritate people and make them feel like they have been duped and wasted their time. So not only will they not take the action you hoped as a result of your video, they’re unlikely to every trust or engage with your brand again.

7) Measure performance

As with all your marketing activities, it is essential that you continual measure the performance of your social media videos. This will tell you want kind of content people most like to consume and share, how long they watch videos for, and what times of the day (or days of the week) different types of content performs best.

By testing your strategy, measuring performance and revising your activity, over time you’ll gradually do more of what works, and get better results – and a higher return on your investment.

Ready to start creating social media videos?

We hope this article has given you a good idea of how to get started in creating social media videos – and some of the pitfalls to avoid. If you’re ready to start creating video content, you may find these articles helpful too:

Katherine is the SEO manager of crello features, a copywriter and digital marketing specialist currently working with competitive niches and specific geo.

Photo by Surface