Video marketing can be very effective. Videos are extremely shareable, which means that they are incredibly useful for increasing brand awareness and delivering your brand’s message. They are also a great way to connect and engage, which helps nurture leads and inspire purchases.

Before you begin posting just any old video to your website, it’s important that you create an effective video marketing strategy.  A good video marketing strategy will help ensure your video is delivering the right message to the right audience, in the most effective way.

The following are eleven tips that will help you to create a successful video marketing strategy:

1. Do Your Research

Your video marketing strategy will be much more successful if you have a strong understanding of video marketing in general as well as video production. Looking up how the basics of video production work isn’t too difficult. You can also get a great sense of what works and what doesn’t by simply watching the video content produced by other companies within your industry – including those by your competitors.

2. Identify Your Audience

As with all content, you need to know who your audience is before you can begin creating video content. Without an idea of who your audience is, you won’t know what your content should be about. You’re trying to use video content to reach your target audience so figuring out what their needs, wants and problems are will go a long way in helping to guide your video marketing strategy.

3. Define Your Goal

What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to engage your current audience? Are you trying to increase awareness of your brand? Or are you trying to build brand authority? Determine what your goal is – not only will this help drive your video marketing strategy in the right direction, but it will give you something to measure. If you don’t have a goal, how will you know if your videos are effective?

4. Hire a Professional Video Marketing Agency

The difference in the quality of a video produced by an amateur compared to a video produced by a professional video production agency is extremely wide. If you’ve done your research, you’ll be able to spot one from the other with ease. A professional video production agency will work closely with you to create video content that is not only high in quality in terms of production value, but that will also be effective in helping to deliver your message and meet your goals.

5. Create a release calendar

Consistency is essential if you want your video marketing strategy to be effective. Your audience will expect content from you on a regular basis. If you release videos sporadically, they’ll lose interest. Create a calendar to help streamline all of your video content – it will also give you a clear picture of your strategy in addition to making the timeline for all your video content clear.

6. Create a Variety of Video Content

Variety is the spice of life!  Don’t limit yourself to just one or two types of video content. Depending on what your goals are, you should utilize a variety of video content, such as interviews, product demonstrations, step-by-step tutorials, Q&A sessions and more. If you keep releasing the same kind of video content, there’s a risk that your audience will grow bored.

7. Keep Length in Mind

The length of your videos cannot be overlooked. If you’re posting videos to your blog, then you should probably keep them under four minutes or so – especially if you plan on sharing them to social media. Any longer and your audience simply won’t have the patience to sit through it all. However, if you’re offering videos as downloadable content in return for opting in to an email list, then longer form videos are appropriate – especially if they go in-depth. Consider what you plan on doing with the video and what the content of the video is when determining an appropriate length.

8. Don’t be Overly Promotional

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is to only use their video marketing strategy as a way to produce commercials for products or services. While this is certainly one way to use video, remember that not every one in your audience wants to watch an ad. Most want content that is helpful or informative to them in one way or another. This is why video tutorials are so popular.

9. Showcase Your Company’s Personality

Your brand personality can be communicated throughout your video content with various elements: spokespeople, script-writing, music, color schemes and more. It’s a good idea to decide what elements of your brand’s personality you wish to show, and decide on ways to do this consistently across all pieces of video content.

10. Decide Where to Put Your Video Content

Figure out where your video content will be most effective. You can post your videos on your website, video hosting sites or social hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo. From there you can also share them to your social media pages, with emails or on your blog.

11. Plan to Promote Your Videos

Promoting your videos will help drive viewers to them. So how do you promote your videos? You can post links to your newest videos on social media, you can add social share buttons to your videos so that viewers can easily share your content to their own social media pages as well. You can also use PPC ads to generate more traffic to your videos, or use email marketing to direct viewers to your videos.

Video marketing can be extremely beneficial, but the true potential of your videos are unlocked with a well-thought out video marketing strategy. Following these steps and hiring an expert video production agency will help ensure that you’re using the best content and producing successful results!