Creating A Social Media Video Marketing Strategy

Social media is a craze that has taken the digital world by storm. Everyone and their mother (and most likely their grandmother too) have some form of social media on the go on a daily basis. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Twitter. No matter your poison, you can rest assured that you are most certainly not alone in your obsessive scrolling habits (that’s the whole point really).

Due to this, companies have increased their emphasis on the need to market their brands across social media channels in recent years. Competition for space has become fierce on each and every platform, with companies vying for the attention of their target market. As such, innovative new ways of grabbing said attention have come to the fore. Most notably in the form of video marketing.

Our recent whitepaper revealed the extent to which video marketing is used as an influential tool by marketers in a variety of industries, with 42% of professionals agreeing that video is the most effective means of helping users understand a product. And in reference to social media in particular, it can constitute a vital aspect of the company’s video branding efforts. In fact, 93% of brands say that they have landed a new customer thanks to social media video marketing.

Social is an excellent platform to show off your latest campaign videos. But you won’t get very far without a structured social media video marketing strategy. As chaotic as the social space may seem, it is actually structure and planning that helps brands to capture the attention of their audience. But how can one prepare such a strategy? Here are some helpful tips.

Outline Your Goals

The first question to ask is a simple one – what is it that you are looking to achieve from this social media animation video campaign? Is it an increase in website traffic? A boost in sales? Or perhaps even introducing a new product or concept to your customer base? Whatever it may be, it is important that your goals are clear from the outset to ensure that all your content is pointing in the right direction.

Once you decide on what it is that you are looking to achieve, you can start to organise the rest of your strategy, primarily the genre of video content that you wish to produce. Looking to introduce a new concept? Maybe an explainer video would be best. Showing off your new branding to the world? Then perhaps some slick brand animation would work best.

It is important that your videos are helping usher customers towards your end goal in order for your social media video marketing strategy to operate smoothly. However, in order to achieve this end goal, you need to decipher what exactly constitutes success…

Decide On Your KPIs

It’s difficult to know whether a marketing campaign is a success if you aren’t 100% clear on what actually constitutes success in a given context. Deciding early on what your KPIs (key performance indicators) are goes a long way towards understanding whether your campaign is in fact a success.

For example, if you are looking to gain more followers then set yourself a monthly follower increase target. Or for driving more people onto your website, aim for an increase in CTR on your video content. This also helps you mould the campaign itself into a structure that will help you achieve the goals that you set. So, going back to our latter example, if it was an increase in CTR that you wanted to achieve then it may be a good idea to include a more enticing call to action within your video content. 

Choose Your Platforms

While they may indeed be similar, social media platforms all entice a different kind of crowd. For example, if you were looking to attract the attention of a female crowd, appealing to Instagram users (57% female) may be more fruitful than focusing your content on Twitter users (32% female). Likewise, those looking to appeal to the younger generation could opt for TikTok, given that over 50% of its users are 24 years old or younger.

Take our project for Absolut, for example. We were tasked with animating for a young adult target audience, who were predominantly living in major cities. As one of our outputs, we worked with well known radio host and influencer Ronan Kemp to push an Instagram ‘teaser trailer’ on his profile. This project was highlighting safer, alternative ways to get home from nights out in the busy period leading up to Christmas.

There is also the obvious consideration of what the platform is primarily used for. Users on LinkedIn are likely to be more reciprocal to business-focused video content than those in Instagram, for example. Selecting which platforms to focus on and tweaking your content to appeal to their user base is a surefire means of optimising your social media video marketing strategy.

Learn From Your Results

It’s all well and good setting up a video campaign and scheduling all your posts before sitting back and watching the views roll in. However, this is not going to achieve the greatest results possible for your social video campaign. What you should be doing is using analytics platforms such as Instagram Insights to analyse results and adapt accordingly. 

This means evaluating what works best on your social platforms in terms of the style of the content or when it is published. Learning from your mistakes and adapting accordingly will see you reach KPIs more often and ultimately help you build your social media presence into the influential behemoth that you want to see it become.

You can also use video SEO techniques to stay up to date with the latest trends and increase interaction rates with your content. Attacking your social strategy from all possible angle will see all bases covered and ultimately a more successful social presence as a result.