Video Marketing Strategy 101: A Step-by-Step Guide

A video marketing strategy is a plan to create and distribute videos promoting a brand, product, or service. Here’s how to build your own.

Video marketing has become an increasingly popular component of successful content marketing campaigns. In fact, 90% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads.

Video enhances search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and paid search (or PPC marketing) efforts.

However, effective video marketing is only possible with a strong video marketing strategy in place.

As content marketing managers at HawkSEM, we wanted to take a moment to outline simple steps you can take to build your own video marketing campaign to attract, engage, and convert new and repeat customers alike.

What is a video marketing strategy?

A video marketing strategy is a blueprint that outlines how a business will use video to promote its brand, product, or service. The strategy should cover:

• Who your target audience is
• What kind of videos to create
• When to launch your video campaign
• Where you will host and distribute your videos
• Why you want to invest in video marketing (in other words, the key performance indicators, or KPIs, you’ll use to measure success)

How to build a video marketing strategy

1. Conduct research and set campaign goals
2. Determine (and set) your timeline and budget
3. Outline your messaging and choose the right video type(s)
4. Plan distribution platforms
5. Determine which metrics to track

1. Conduct research and set campaign goals

If you have an existing digital marketing strategy in place, you probably built out buyer personas and identified business goals already.

Here, however, we want to reframe our goals around video specifically — what do you hope video marketing can achieve for your business?

Even if you have a strong understanding of your target audience, narrow in on who is most likely to consume video and where.

Let’s break it down:

Goal setting

Whether you’re looking to attract new prospects or nurture existing customers, identifying your primary goal is the first step of a video marketing strategy.

Think big picture: What stage of the sales funnel should your video serve?  You may consider:

• Brand awareness
• Engagement
• Conversions
• Nurture brand loyalty

Build a target audience

Your target audience is your intended customer base, or who is most likely to want your product or service. Identifying who they are will help guide your strategy.

If you don’t have a target audience already, we have a complete guide to help you. In short:

• Review your website analytics for data on your existing visitors
• Analyze your social media followers
• Conduct market research (hypothesize who you think you want to serve, their main pain points, and where they are online)
• Research who your competitors target and where
• Build a customer persona

2. Determine (and set) your timeline and budget

A video strategy puts guardrails on your broad vision to keep things on track.

It’s easy to let resources add up with video production, so set boundaries on how much you’re willing to spend on your project.

Typical video production timelines

Typically, you can expect each phase of the pre and post-production process to take up to two weeks, with the actual production taking a day or two.

That means you may need to budget about two months from creative planning to distribution, depending on the type of video you want to produce.

Typical video production costs

The price of video production varies greatly depending on the type of project.

Simple DIY or live videos may cost virtually nothing, whereas full production with heavy video editing may range anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000.

3. Outline your messaging and choose the right video type(s)

With your goal and target audience in mind, narrow in on the main message of your video. What’s the takeaway? What type of video best supports this message?

Different types of video

There is a wide range of video types marketers can leverage.

Here are some of the most popular to consider for your video creation:

Brand introduction video
Brand videos introduce the audience to a business. These can be documentary-style, behind-the-scenes videos, or a more high-production depending on the brand’s vision, style, and messaging.

Explainer videos
Explainer videos educate people in the research phase on the basics of a product or service.

Product demos, tutorials, and webinars
Product demos or tutorials are more in-depth educational videos that showcase the functionality of the product or service for those further into the sales funnel. These can be high production quality or more DIY how-to videos.

Customer testimonial videos
Testimonials or case study videos work as a powerful tool for social proof, pushing people to take action and boosting conversion rates.

User-generated content (UGC)
Often as short-form videos shared on social media like Instagram Reels, UGC videos are created by consumers or content creators to help potential customers see a product or service in action.

Although known primarily as social media videos, websites and email are also video platforms that also greatly benefit from UGC.

Video ads
You can repurpose any of the videos above into video ads, but you may also decide to create a video with the intention of using it for search or social ads or an ad for a streaming service. These ads are often published as YouTube videos first.

Video styles

While we’re at it, consider the different types of styles you may want to use in your video campaign.

What is your business’s tone and aesthetic? What is the primary message of your video?

Different styles might include:

• Animated videos
• Live streaming
• Full production
• Documentary style
• DIY (phone camera and minimal production)

4. Plan distribution platforms

Where you share your videos is key to your overall success.

During the initial research phase of your marketing strategy, consider where your target audience is most likely to consume and engage with video content.

This is paired with the type of video you create (a webinar vs. a short-form UGC product review video, for example). Some examples of distribution platforms include:

1. Social media

• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Pinterest
• Snapchat

2. Websites

• Your business website
• Third-party sites

3. Email marketing
4. Search ads
5. Streaming platform ads 

The “distribution marketing trifecta”

Lemonlight has a great description of what they call the distribution marketing trifecta to help review your options for effective video hosting and distribution:

• Owned media: website, email, social media pages
• Paid media: search and social media ads
• Earned media: Social media sharing, reviews, influencer marketing

Ideally, your distribution strategy should have the right balance of channels to best meet your target audience where they are.

5. Determine which metrics to track

Refer back to the initial marketing goals you set to determine which metrics are most important to track to measure success.

While it can be tempting to obsess over your view count, focus on metrics that are most pertinent to your goals. These can include:

Awareness and reach metrics like views, play rate and replays, shares, and impressions.

Video engagement metrics such as likes and positive reactions, dislikes and negative reactions, comments, video completion rate, time-on-page, and watch time.

Conversion metrics such as CTR, traffic sources, buyer and behavior metrics, and viewer demographics.

Here’s a quick overview of common performance metrics to consider:

• View count
• Play rate
• Watch time or completion rate
• Engagement
• Social shares
• Clicks or click-through rates
• Conversions

It can be tempting to obsess over your view count when it comes to videos. But there are plenty more helpful metrics to be gleaned. (Image: Unsplash)

Video marketing mistakes to avoid

Video marketing is an exciting marketing tool to leverage — and it’s easy to get wrapped up in the thrill of ideation and creation, letting some important details slip through the cracks.

Here are some common mistakes to avoid during the planning process:

No call to action

Each video has a goal. Therefore, each video should provide some sort of call to action (CTA) to support that goal.

For brand awareness, plan to encourage viewers to like your profile on social or subscribe. For product videos, push a CTA for viewers to “get yours now,” with a clear path to purchase.

Make sure your video marketing efforts are gently nudging your audience toward your goals.

Promotional videos only

Conversely, your content strategy should never be solely based on self-promotion.

When spending money on content marketing, we have a tendency to skip the high-funnel content and learn toward more promotional messages in an effort to maximize our ROI.

The thing is, top funnel content, like brand videos and helpful guides, is critically important to build the trust it takes to push people to take action later on. With content, you can’t skip steps.

Too many messages

Like a landing page littered with different CTAs or a website with a mish-mash of value propositions, having more than one clear message is confusing and causes users to bounce.

Keep your video message simple and clear.

Top 10 video marketing statistics

Online video has erupted in recent years. Here’s a glimpse of the state of video marketing:

1. 90% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads
2. Videos under 90 seconds have a 50% retention rate
3. Compared to image or text-only emails, emails with an embedded video can yield a 300% higher ROI
4. 66% of video ads are under 30 seconds
5. Mentioning the word ‘video’ in an email subject line increases the open rate by 19%, resulting in an eye-catching 65% increase in CTR
6. More people are watching videos with closed captions Yahoo
7. Short-form videos (under 90 seconds) have a 50% retention rate
8. In 2023, 91% of businesses leveraged video for marketing
9. Short-form videos have double the engagement rates of long-form videos
10. The average active user spends over 45 minutes watching YouTube daily

What are the benefits of video marketing?

Whether we’re checking email on our desktops or scrolling social platforms on our phones, there’s so much competition for our (and our customers’) attention.

The easy-to-digest format of video gives people’s eyes a break from textual information.

Video also gives people a real-life picture of events, and can be easily shared across multiple platforms.

And, particularly on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter), it fits seamlessly and unobtrusively into timelines.

Video is accessible (to watch and produce) to anyone with internet access. Thanks in part to the meteoric rise of TikTok, the best videos don’t have to be feature film-level quality to be successful.

But most importantly, video marketing is effective, bringing in more customers and revenue for businesses everywhere.

There are plenty of options when it comes to affordable applications and software solutions that can help you create video content professionally and quickly. (Image: Unsplash)

The takeaway

The creation and implementation of a successful video marketing strategy takes time and effort.

But apart from making high-quality videos, you must also understand how to ensure they resonate with your target audience, attract leads, and ideally convert to sales.

Aim to make videos that represent your brand, provide insight to your audience, and connect with your customer base to build long-term loyalty. Video helps boost your SEO strategy, and today’s customer expects it.

If you need help with your video marketing strategy, the experts at HawkSEM have the know-how and experience to make it happen. Get in touch.

This post has been updated and was originally published in November 2020.