14 Tips For Businesses Looking To Ramp Up Their Video Marketing Efforts

Video marketing has already shown, time and time again, why it’s such a successful technique. Studies have demonstrated that people engage with video far more readily than they do with other online media. This fact makes video marketing a priceless addition to a business’s marketing arsenal.

Unfortunately, many companies have only dabbled in video marketing with varying degrees of success. To get the most out of video marketing, businesses need to increase their investment in this marketing category. Fourteen experts from Forbes Communications Council provide their thoughts on how companies can increase the intensity of their video marketing with a focus on engaging their core audience.

Members explain how to boost your video marketing efforts.

1. Highlight Your Satisfied Clients

The key to creating engaging videos is to keep the content relevant and concise. Because there’s no better advocate for a business than a satisfied client, my team created short video case studies (no more than three minutes) detailing how/why clients used our services, as part of our regular content. These videos always achieved high engagement rates. – Cynthia Washington

2. Educate And Tell Stories

In today’s environment, it’s important to make natural-looking videos that feel authentic and don’t have a lot of branded splash advertising. Most consumers don’t wake up each morning and go find and watch your branded commercials on social channels. They are more interested in educating themselves about non-branded subjects or hearing compelling, engaging stories. Be authentic, lead, and educate with better videos. – Kenneth Kinney, Ai Media Group, Inc.

3. Focus On Building Human Connection

One of the main reasons why videos are so popular and effective is because they help build that human connection, especially now more than ever since we are all working from home and craving human interaction — video creates that link. Companies looking to add a video to their marketing strategy should create videos that are conversational and authentic, and play on that human connection. – Anusha Shankar, The Spur Group

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4. Be Mindful Of Your Intended Audience

When a brand is thinking of using video as a storytelling tool, be mindful of creating for your audience. Some brands make videos that speak to themselves, lacking language, imagery, and nuance that could provide real value to their intended audience. Before you put a video asset together, be mindful of what you’re offering that will earn the two minutes of time you’re asking for from people. – Megan Rokosh, Havas

5. Don’t Insist On Making It Perfect

The most important thing to remember when it comes to video marketing is that “perfect is the enemy of good.” When you are making a video, you can edit it to death. You can dig in so deep that every pitch of audio is adjusted and every transition is overly edited. The video still has to be quality — don’t get me wrong, but having a lot of good content is more important than having a little bit of perfect content. – Brian Gallagher, Milestones

6. Talk About Benefits, Not Features

Talk benefits, not features! Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and make it relevant to them. How does it fit into their busy lives? Does it enrich their lives in some way? Does it solve any of their problems or increase their overall happiness? Then present that product or service you are selling in a compelling, engaging narrative. Be direct, creative, and, most of all, human. – Astrid Pocklington, Enghouse Interactive

7. Just Speak From The Heart

Press record! It can be easy to wait for the perfect moment or to spend tons of time crafting the message. When you do this, it is easy for this task to get pushed aside. Turn the camera on and speak from the heart. Your audience will forgive you for a less than perfect video, and it will get easier the more you do. – Brandi Holder, NGA 911 LLC

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8. Aim To Create Emotional Impact

Keep your storytelling succinct and your message clear — you only have a few seconds to grab and hold attention. Convey emotion. You want to create an emotional impact on your customer, so show how their lives are enhanced by buying your product. – Danica Twomey, ienjoy Home

9. Prioritize Authenticity Over Quality

Good high-quality video is always something to shoot for, but it can be daunting for companies who are trying to get off the ground with a video program. In today’s world, people are looking for authenticity over quality. Start out with recorded Hangouts/Zoom interviews or tutorials, or Facebook Live. Pro tip: be sure to add closed captions for accessibility and to supplement your audio. – Tracy Sestili, Fountain

10. Keep It Short And Clean

Short marketing videos that are less than 30 seconds are more likely to hold your audience’s attention and capture better audience engagement than longer videos. Make your marketing video content concise and clean, yet memorable. Don’t forget to link an information page to the video so that viewers who are intrigued can learn more about your product, service, or you. – Hanju Lee, IDEALS Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Education

11. Take A Mobile-First Approach

Always ensure you’re taking a mobile-first approach so that your videos are optimized for mobile. Mobile video consumption is growing at an exponential rate, and it’s not slowing down. – Brad Rosenfeld, Biz2Credit & Biz2X

12. Leverage Personalization Technology

Leverage personalization technology and data to make video ads relevant to your audience. Using automation, marketers can deliver relevance by creating thousands of variations of the same video to specific individuals in hours or days, driving more engagement and an increase in ROI. Brands that leverage this tactic have seen a 19x increase in click-through rates compared to the industry average. – Anna Luo, Jivox

13. Use Customer Testimonials

Start first with customer testimonial videos. They are in high demand from your potential customers and can have relatively basic production quality. – Richard Flynn, The Spur Group

14. Hire Talented Filmmakers

Consumer preferences are shifting. Poor production quality is no longer an option for growing brands. Build your video content strategy and hire talented filmmakers to lead the strategy. With the ability to shoot, edit, and produce your own in-house content, a team should also be able to produce content with outside contractors. In the coming years, filmmakers will be a key hire for any growing brand. – Nick Runyon, PFL.com