Social Media Marketers: 3 Key Actions to Take for Your Video Marketing Strategy

As a Social Media Marketer, you might be surprised to learn that social media videos get 1,200% more shares than text and images combined. Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. It is time to use VIDEO in your content marketing strategy.

As a graduate student in the Northwestern University Medill IMC program, who has an interest in how to develope effective video marketing strategy, I have found two articles on how to develop video content marketing along with some great examples.

The first article is Content in 2017: How video is transforming social marketing from Warc. It introduces the point that the rapid growth of video is transforming social media marketing by turning social platforms into broadcast media. In addition to regular videos, live video as an emerging format is expected to drive high interaction and customer engagement (mainly indicated by sharing rates). Many brands have concluded that the quality of video is more important than quantity, so they are trying to make less, shorter, but better videos. Moreover, influencer-focused videos are proved to be effective as complements to traditional channels. 

The second article is How To Incorporate Video Marketing Into Your Communications Strategy, in which Elizabeth Fay shared her knowledge on how to incorporate video into communications strategies based on her work as a content producer and strategist. She introduces readers through a four-step approach: 1) identify your goals - what you want to accomplish with your video, what actions you want the viewers to take and how you will measure success (KPIs); 2) create with intention - develop visual story ideas that support your goals; 3) distribute the videos - think carefully about when and through what channels you want to distribute your videos; 4) analyze and optimize - track your KPIs and analyze results to gain insights and improve. The whole set of methodology leads to effective creation of video contents.

Based on my review of these two articles and the work that I have done at Northwestern about social media strategies, I have developed 3 key action items marketers and companies should do now. They are:

o    Great Timing = Big Profits - The success of a video marketing campaign relies greatly on the timing of the content release in terms of how many audiences it reaches and how well it collaborates with other marketing events.

o    Content drives Performance - In order to achieve high level engagement, companies have to emphasize quality over quantity in video content creation to achieve high performance.

o    Optimization makes Success - It is important to measure the results and figure out what worked and what didn’t for the purpose of optimizing video marketing campaign.

Social Media Marketers, the next time you are planning a social effort, keep in mind the 3 key action items and add videos!

Yiling Feng
Northwestern Medill IMC 
Graduating in Dec 2017

As a Master's student studying Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University (Medill), I am very interested in digital & social marketing, and marketing analytics. I post about these topics on twitter (Yiling Feng @mochiii_rei). Please connect with me on Twitter, and LinkedIn!








Citations
Fay, Elizabeth. “How To Incorporate Video Marketing Into Your Communications Strategy.” Web blog post. Forbes Community Voice. Forbes, 8 Nov. 2016. 20 Jan. 2017.

Ware, Florence. & Kelly, Saoirse. “How video is transforming social marketing.” Web blog post. Warc Toolkit 2017. Warc, 7 Dec. 2016. 20 Jan. 2017.