As a full-service digital marketing agency, we can’t overstate the importance of video content on social media. Videos hold the attention of consumers better than any form of content. In fact, 62% of 3,010 consumers in the US, Germany, Colombia, and Mexico pay close attention to video, and skim or multitask other media.
However, video marketing on social media needs careful planning. Your videos must be relevant to your business, or they make come off as inauthentic.
Like other forms of content, your videos must educate, inspire, or entertain to attract and retain your target audience. To that end, we put together five video marketing tips to help you get the most from your social media video content.
These social media tips come from experience, as our content creation team has mastered creating videos that heighten brand awareness and generate qualified leads for our partners.
Let’s get started with a marketing basic:
Discover What Your Target Audience Wants
Do you know what your audience wants?
Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) is a fundamental step in any marketing campaign, even ones for videos. Having an ICP, or multiple ICPs, will narrow down the topics and kinds of social media video content that you business can focus on.
Social listening tools such as Brandwatch and Hootsuite can help you discover what customers and prospects think about your brand, and what they are looking for. Or you can strap your boots on and dig through your social accounts manually to scrounge up original data!
Once you’ve narrowed down the topics and kinds of videos you want to make, it’s time to organize your social media content calendar.
Optimize Your Social Media Content Calendar
A social media content calendar is where you organize the deadlines for the ideation, production, release, and promotion of your social media posts. It allows you and your team to communicate clearly on what needs to be done for your social accounts.
Your calendar also allows you to monitor high-performing social media content. This calendar also lets you find out the best times to post for engagement and conversions.
Lastly, it lets you track the number of times you promote a post. This way, your videos can remain fresh, topical, and highly visible to audiences who want to view them.
Most social media platforms have a built-in calendar for teams. This comes in handy, as you can platform guidelines within the same space.
Observe Best Practices for Social Media
Not all forms of social media video content are welcome across platforms. For example, Instagram forbids any content that promotes hate speech, graphic violence, and other sensitive materials. In another instance, Facebook prohibits distribution of copyrighted content on its platform.
Understanding best practices for social media platforms will prevent untimely takedowns of your videos. Make sure you or your social media team reads the TOS and community of the platforms you’re most active on!
If you have any videos on the pipeline, proof them for any possible violations before publishing. But even if they pass the test, you might still want to review them to ensure they offer something of value to your target audience.
Create Value-Added Social Media Video Content
Creating video content for social media revolves around value. Your target audience won’t engage with your videos if they don’t add value to their life, or solve a problem. That problem can be something as simple as boredom, or more pressing like a DIY need.
In general, these value-added videos fall under these types:
- Tutorials/DIY/How-To’s
- Announcements or news
- Product/service features
- Demos
- Promotions and offers
- Events
- Behind-the scenes clips
- Interviews and Q&A’s
- User-generated content
Your business doesn’t need to produce all of these videos. You should pick the ones that apply the best to your brand. To give you an idea, let’s look at the videos a plumbing company, dental clinic, and automobile service can release.
The plumbing company can drum up interest in their service through tutorials on fixing simple faucet leaks. Promotions and offers can bring in traffic for the dental clinic. As for the automobile service, they can highlight their cars and service at the same time with videos about their recent events.
Now, just because you’ve created great content doesn’t mean people will come flocking to it. You still need to ensure your social media video content reaches the most eyeballs possible. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
Use SEO to Improve Your Online Visibility
Did you know that over five billion videos are watched on Youtube everyday? With that much competition, how can you make your social media content stand out?
As mentioned, SEO is a free and great solution to this problem. SEO allows people to find your content through keywords and keyphrases—or in the case of videos, hashtags and great media captioning.
Hashtag generators, such as Flick and Kicksta, can help you find high volume, low competition tags to bring you closer to your ideal audience. Most social media platforms also let you see the volume of hashtags in their search functions.
Your social media content calendar can help you keep track of your hashtag strategies. By auditing which hashtags work, you can lock in on the tags that boost your social reach and engagement.
These social media tips will help you start, or improve, your current video marketing plans. But what if you don’t want to leave your success up to chance? What if you want to partner with a digital marketing agency who understands what social media video content will be a hit with your target audience?
Responsive Cleveland SEO and Content Creation Service
Advanced Digital Media Services has a dedicated content creation team prepared to transform your social media presence. Our content creation team can craft videos that attract qualified leads to your brand, and remain loyal until they’re ready to convert.
We’re not limited to content creation either. We also offer Cleveland SEO services. Pairing our content creation and SEO methodologies can improve your social media presence, and your overall online visibility. Connect with us and discover how we can help grow your business.