You don’t have to have the chops of George Lucas to produce an effective video marketing campaign, but you do need a solid strategy.

Step 1 – Creating a Blueprint through Research

Knowing how your audience searches for you, and where keyword phrases fall in the buy cycle, is extremely important to the success of your campaign.  For the best visibility, you need to (at a minimum) properly target organic search and social media-based traffic among every aspect of your campaign – not just video.

Your research into your audience will help you determine how they find you as well as their interests.  Your competitive research will show you what other companies are doing to find their way into the top 10 on Google.

From there you can determine whether or not you have a budget in place to compete.

For the best results, work with a firm who can deliver top research, effectively providing a complete marketing blueprint designed around your budget.  A quality firm can provide

  • Primary, supporting and synonym-based keywords with a history of converting to sales/leads
  • Competitive intelligence
  • The scope of content you need to compete
  • The volume of links you’ll need
  • Ideal structure for your site content
  • Internal link structure

And more – essentially working with you to develop your site and sales funnel the way Google would develop it.

Step 2 – Idea Generation

The worst kind of marketing is video that includes what the marketer assumes the audience wants to see and hear.

Market research provides you with insight into what you should target and how to approach your audience.  Use this research to start building out ideas for your video marketing.  Look at industry related content and start with questions like these to determine what your audience wants:

  • Which videos have the most votes, comments and shares?
  • What topic gets the most retweets?
  • Should your content be funny, professional, educational, satire?
  • Can you deliver your message in a single video or is a series more appropriate?
  • Does your audience prefer a face for credibility or are digital effects more engaging for them?

Learn from the success of others within your industry, or operating in a similar vertical, to help you reduce the amount of wasted effort.  In the end, you’ll find your audience to be a lot more receptive.

Step 3 – The Quality of Your Message and SEO

You should always develop your content with value in mind, but do so while crafting your video content based around an SEO strategy.

With the keyword strategy in place from your research, you can begin crafting your story (or script) that utilizes the most important keywords that reflect and leverage your research.  Since Google transcribes the audio into text, how you word your message is extremely important to your visibility.

  • Include your primary keyword within the first 5 – 8 seconds
  • Use the keyword with a density of 1% or less.
  • Add supporting visuals, graphics and/or animation
  • Aim for HD quality video
  • Create a soundtrack
  • Edit and render your video

Good production value goes a long way and should be applied through the entire process, but the content and your message ultimately decides how effective your video campaign is.  It is more important than ever to work with a company that understands how all of these production elements come together.

Step 4 – Automated Distribution of Video Content

Most people are familiar with YouTube and a handful of other similar (but lesser-known) sites.  However, there are countless video sharing sites that bring in hundreds of millions of unique visitors each month.  Manual distribution is time consuming and makes tracking extremely difficult.

Automated distribution broadens your reach to engage as much of your audience as possible, while also providing a diverse spread of content for SEO purposes.  With an automated system, this level of distribution:

  • Eliminates manual distribution
  • Saves you time
  • And provides in-depth analytics through a central hub for easy tracking and review.

Step 5 – Social Media Distribution and Social Buzz Building

If you recall, social media is a key factor to improving traffic, building search rank and spiking awareness.  This is due to the fact that content on the web is a popularity contest.  The more popular your content, the more likely it is to be viewed and shared.

Unfortunately, you cannot just post a video into some social profiles and expect it to take off.  Most people want to see what others think before they jump in.  A large following can provide some support, but the best option is to work with a tool that naturally generates social buzz for your videos.

That covers the 5 steps to building a video marketing campaign that will deliver results, but there is another area that people tend to forget about – analytics.

Reviewing and Refining Your Investment

No matter the approach you take, marketing is an investment.  It’s not something you launch and walk away from.  You may see some traction with a video or three, but it will quickly fall off if not maintained.

You must continue to tweak your marketing for better results.  To do that, you turn to analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign efforts across multiple platforms including:

  • Social media
  • Video sites
  • Landing pages and micro sites
  • Your website
  • Search

It is ideal to find a single system that merges this data into a single dashboard so you can see what is working, and what is not.  Without key performance indicators and data, all your efforts are wasted.