What is video marketing is, and how do you make it effective?

To develop a solid digital-marketing plan, the team, marketers, and video pros alike must bring video into the fold. Although the concept of "video marketing" could be easy to understand (essentially including videos in the marketing strategies you are running), it is difficult to figure out the best way to go about actually doing it effectively.

What is the importance of video marketing?

With the rise of sites like and YouTube and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter are now including video as well as dramatic improvement in the streaming quality itself (bye bye, buffering, the dreaded thing) Videos are now appearing throughout all the stages of what's known as the funnel of marketing. The funnel that is traditional appears like this: You introduce someone to your company (awareness stage), educate them about the benefits (consideration stage) to justify the benefits of your offer (decision stage), and retain customers (delight stage).

So how do you do video marketing right?

Let's bring life to a standard video-marketing funnel by using a real-world (but really a made-up) illustration. WebThyme is a (imaginary) software company which assists people in creating and host websites, and Jenn is a prospective customer.

• A good prospect Jenn is about to start a health and wellness website. WebThyme's intended audience are small business owners.
• The correct channel: Jenn Googles advice on starting a business, and stumbles across WebThyme's video clips in the form of a blog article which tells an entrepreneur's story. Enthusiastic, she joins WebThyme's emails as well as they send Jenn weekly emails that contains helpful information.
  
• The right action:Jenn clicks on a newsletter link that takes her to a landing site, that includes a video that delves into WebThyme's latest features for entrepreneurs with small businesses. The button she taps will take her to a free trial -calling to move -- and chooses to try it.

It's just one instance of an conceivable video-marketing scenario. What happens when you play it out at a more specific and actionable scale? What are the top video-marketing strategies for the most important channels such as emails, social media and even your own web site? Let's dig in...

Exploring social media

Why does social is so beneficial in promoting growth? When your existing followers are able to like, comment on, or share your posts, they essentially expose the content to their contacts and acquaintances, some of them may begin following your page too. One method to get more potential leads from this market is to include the email capture form, that is included in Business and Business Plus, allowing you to collect viewers" information directly in the embedded player. You can then seamlessly import those email addresses to email marketing tools like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, as well as Constant Contact.

Perhaps you'd like to drive your viewers on a page that lets them discover more. This is also possible! Business allows you to add clickable CTAs which allows you to send people exactly to the place you'd like to direct them.

It is also possible to increase your reach and gain more followers via paid social media. In accordance with the site you are using that you are on, you may be able to target specific groups, and also advertise your content by putting it in pre-roll positions or promoted posts.

Let your email campaigns flourish

If it's about emails, videos are crucial to consider all the in time. They could boost click-through rate by 200-300 percentage (that's hundreds of percents or individuals) in addition to reducing the number of un-subscribers. However, many email applications aren't able to handle video that are embedded directly in emailshowever, it's possible to solve this problem by adding a play button to a still image of your video leading to a landing page that has the whole thing.

It's relatively easy to accomplish with the systems for marketing via email that we discussed above, as well as in marketing automation systems such as HubSpot. It's also an excellent way to A/B test which video thumbnail is most effective for rate of clicks. And as a general rule of thumb, you can enhance your campaigns" conversion rates by tailoring the design and content to correspond with the landing pages they drive to.

Your website, packed with stunning videos

 Home Page

A majority of businesses create an overview video to use on their home page, a video that explains what the brand's mission is, why what you do matters, and what problem that you're addressing. It's a huge influence the way you're perceived in the eyes of someone just coming across your company's name. For instance, take Canary as an example.

 Pages that land

Your homepage can serve many purposes for a wide range of people, your landing pages can be great for informing specific segments of your audience about the great things you have to offer as well as entice them to take your desired decision. Marketers drive to landing pages via online advertisements, social media, blogs, and search engines. These videos can help turn these leads into customers. For instance, take an look at our Business pages.

 Blog

It's a major source of visitors to your site -- especially when your posts include helpful info, industry news, and thought leadership regarding topics that people are interested in, since they're likely searching for the topics they're interested in on Google. This is also an excellent destination for sharing product and business news, special events, and best practices with your audience. Need an example? What you're reading is (hopefully) more engaging with videos scattered throughout.

 Product and FAQ pages

Putting everything together

If your strategy for video marketing is implemented well, you create an incredible network that can grow your company: your social videos are drawing new fans and enthralling existing ones; your video-filled blog posts rank top in search results and your emails -- with gorgeous video thumbnails are directing users websites that are your landing pages and those boast pertinent videos that have distinct CTAs, all of which have been optimized to bring leads and increasing the conversions. And all of that is trackable, measurable and can be adapted as time passes. Speaking about...