Online Video Marketing: Essential to Digital Advertising
Video content has become integral to digital marketing strategies. Online video allows brands to visually engage their target audience and communicate their messaging in creative and memorable ways. With platforms like YouTube and the rise of video across social media, implementing online video marketing should be a priority for businesses looking to succeed in today's digital landscape.
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The Power and Reach of Online Video
Video has an unparalleled power to inform, educate, entertain, inspire action, and contribute to brand recall. Some key advantages of online video marketing include:
- Engagement: Viewers are likelier to watch a video in its entirety than reading an article or blog post. Videos also prompt more shares and comments.
- Virality: Compelling, interesting, funny or informative videos can spread rapidly through social media. Over 1 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each day.
- Storytelling: Live-action and animated videos allow brands to tell stories that create an emotional impact. Stories communicate messages and meaning in a more relatable way.
- Flexibility: Brands can create content tailored to objectives and platforms, from quick social videos to more polished commercials. Shorter vertical videos work for mobile, while landscape videos provide more production value.
As consumption of online video grows exponentially year after year, all signs point to video becoming only more central to branding and advertising efforts moving forward.
Video Marketing Goals and Objectives
Implementing online video serves a variety of goals for brands and businesses. Before creating videos, identify your overarching objectives:
Build Brand Awareness
Creative, entertaining or educational videos allow brands to be discovered by wider audiences that may not have been exposed to your products, services or mission. Increased visibility and recall set the foundation for interest and future conversions.
Engage Your Audience
Well-produced videos focused on solving problems, addressing pain points, or speaking to your audience's passions can prompt viewers to subscribe, follow, comment, or share, which is critical for cultivating customer relationships over time.
Promote Products and Services
Demos, testimonials, events and behind-the-scenes videos give viewers an inside look while conveying the value of offerings. Clear calls-to-action can route audiences to purchase pages and lead generation forms.
Establish Thought Leadership
Interviews, presentations, case studies and informational videos position individual leaders and companies as trusted authorities on industry topics to attract, nurture and convert high-value prospects.
Developing an Online Video Strategy
An impactful online video marketing strategy examines previous brand content and identifies current goals. Key actions include:
Audit Existing Video Assets
Take stock of the videos you have produced across owned channels and campaigns, assessing performance metrics like views, completion rates and conversions generated. This benchmarking informs content gaps.
Map Out Audiences and Buyer Personas
Which existing and aspirational audiences are most essential for you to engage? Detail their demographics, challenges, interests, and preferred content formats so that new videos speak to their preferences directly.
Set Expectations and Goals
Tie video concepts back to business objectives focused on awareness, consideration, education, lead gen or sales. Defining success metrics for each video and series allows accurate tracking towards goals.
Plot an Editorial Calendar
Account for video content types, subjects, styles and platforms over a three or 6-month horizon—factor in product launches, promotions, seasonal topics and event-driven videos.
Integrate With Existing Strategies
Ensure video ideas align with overarching branding, advertising and social media strategies for consistent messaging and maximum exposure across paid, owned and earned channels.
Creating Compelling Online Video Content
Once the strategy is locked down, emphasis shifts to production planning, creative development and video creation.
Know Your Platforms and Formats
- YouTube: Long-form videos that are optimally 5-7 minutes long promote channels, creators, and brands.
- Instagram: Short videos under 60 seconds, with the first 3-5 seconds being most impactful.
- TikTok: Concise videos, often less than 15 seconds, with viral trends and challenges.
- Facebook: Videos under 2 minutes perform best, driving engagement and shares.
- Email / Website: Customer testimonials or video headers are often embedded, adding an interactive element.
Craft video content tailored to specs and audience behaviours per platform. Optimise each video description for SEO, including target keywords.
Focus on Storytelling and Emotion
Tell compelling stories focused on people and emotion vs overt branding and selling. Highlight user challenges and how products provide solutions. Feature engaging employees, brand advocates and influencers. Attempt viral trends and topics by adding your unique spin. Humour and entertainment connect with viewers on a more relatable level.
Mix In Key Brand Messaging
Work in essential branding, messaging and calls-to-action without removing the enjoyment and flow of video content. The most effective videos strike an intelligent balance between storytelling and promotional elements based on campaign goals.
Leverage Influencers and Employees
Influencer and employee-created video content comes across as more authentic to audiences. Give creative license to respected creators and internal advocates to share their stories and perspectives aligned with brand values. Videos with interesting personalities prompt more organic views and engagement.
Ensure High Production Quality
Today’s viewers expect polished videos aligned to commercial standards. Invest in experienced video production pros and equipment needed to properly light, frame up, record audio and edit video pieces or series. Poor production value reflects poorly on brand image.
Promote Videos Across Digital Channels
Distribute videos natively on owned channels, plus amplify reach and exposure through paid ads. Retarget engaged viewers with additional videos they are likely to enjoy. Feature videos prominently on landing pages and link to the latest uploads from email, social posts and other brand touchpoints.
Video Ad Campaigns and Promotion
Setting up dedicated video ad campaigns for brands investing in video creation is critical to optimise cost per view (CPV) while reaching the most relevant audiences.
YouTube Video Ads
- TrueView ads play before or within video content users opt into
- Bumper ads are 6-second videos ideal for channel subscriptions
- Ad placement on searches, related videos and display network
Social Video Ads
- Instagram Reels interested viewers between Stories
- Facebook / Instagram Stories appear full screen to engage
- TikTok offers TopView and Brand Takeover ad formats
- Pinterest video pins displayed among regular content
Connected TV (CTV) Ads
- Hulu, Roku, and Amazon Fire serve video ads on internet-connected TVs
- Allows geo, device and behavioural targeting for precision
- Ideal for 15/30/60 second brand awareness creative
Compare audience insights to determine the perfect platforms for each video campaign. Test different ad formats, placements and audiences to collect learnings.
Video Ad Metrics and Optimisation
Key metrics to track campaign success include:
- Video views/reach
- Click-through-rate
- View-through-rate
- Audience retention
- Subscribers driven
- Website traffic referrals
- Online / offline conversions
Continuously optimise targeting, bids, and creatives based on performance. Build sequels and new content informed by the performing videos.
Driving Video Commerce and Transactions
Beyond brand-focused videos, retail and eCommerce businesses leverage video to influence buyers further down the funnel, capturing sales directly via embedded shoppable video content.
Product Videos
Short videos showcase product features, styling and usage scenarios. Native checkout links under the videos ease impulse buying.
| Product Video Examples | Ideal Length |
| Apparel on models | 30-60 seconds |
| Electronics demos/Unboxing | 1-5 minutes |
| Beauty tutorials | 3-10 minutes |
Shoppable Live Streams
Brands host live streams showcasing products while viewers shop for featured items in real-time via links. Useful for launches, demos and limited offerings.
| Live Stream Examples | Ideal Length |
| QVC-style product showcases | 15+ minutes |
| Hauls/unboxings | 10-20 minutes |
| Interactive demos | 10-60 minutes |
Behind-the-Scenes Content
Give customers exclusive interactive access to business operations, manufacturing and team insights to reinforce brand connection and affinity.
Leverage User-Generated Content
Compile and showcase authentic customer reviews, unboxings, demos and product usage videos shot by consumers. Obtain consent to potentially re-share UGC.
Key Video Marketing Statistics
- 78% of people watch online videos every week, 55% watch every day [Source]
- 90% say videos help inform purchase decisions [Source]
- Videos generate 1200% more shares than links and text combined [Source]
- 87% of online marketers use video content as part of content strategy [Source]
- Viewers retain 95% of a message from videos compared to 10% reading text [Source]
- Videos under 2 minutes have the highest engagement [Source]
Video of all types and formats will continue rising across every digital platform. Brands should actively embrace online video as core to advertising and customer engagement in today’s visual age.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Online video marketing represents a massive opportunity for brands and businesses to establish meaningful connections with modern audiences. As retention rates and conversion impacts confirm, video content has become indispensable.
With billions of video views occurring daily across social and YouTube, the absence of videos is forfeiting visibility and engagement to competitors who opt-in. Video production is more affordable and accessible than ever. Even introductory videos recorded natively on smartphones can drive impressive results for local businesses and budget brands when paired with essential editing apps and targeted distribution.
For organisations with bigger budgets, the sheer variety of online video formats, styles, ad placements and interaction opportunities ensures any brand objective can be met through tailored video strategies.
The epic rise of short-form vertical videos presents a parallel creative playground. Setting aside highly produced commercial spots for concise Reels and TikToks featuring products, employees, or advocates nets considerable awareness and viral potential.
As platforms shift more content into video-first feeds and augmented reality layers in new dimensions to online engagement, managing an ever-evolving video presence moves from nice-to-have to fundamental imperative. Brands refusing to play the video game risk fading into digital obscurity.
Video Marketing FAQs
What are the main benefits of online video marketing?
Increased brand awareness and visibility to wider audiences.
More engagement, shares and conversions compared to static content.
Telling compelling stories to forge emotional connections with viewers.
Producing a variety of videos tailored to different platform specs and audience behaviours.
Promoting thought leadership and influence through informative videos.
What types of videos perform best on social media?
Authentic videos under 2 minutes leveraging helpful tips, surprising stats, entertainment, humour, Useful demonstrations, employee personalities, and influencer collaborations also engage social audiences.
How much of a budget do I need for professional video production?
For new businesses and bootstrapped brands, creating introductory videos natively using only smartphones and editing apps is entirely viable to start. Investing just a few hundred dollars into video ads can generate meaningful brand lift. For commercial quality productions with high-end filming and editing, budgets often range from $5,000 to $30,000+ per video based on the complexity and talent involved.
What video metrics indicate marketing success?
Key performance indicators include view counts relative to audience size, watch time and completion rates demonstrating strong retention, positive sentiment within comments, click-through and conversion rates to the site, increases in followers and subscribers and sales influenced by any embedded shoppable video content.
How can I make my product videos drive more direct sales?
Some best practices include keeping videos short and engaging. Showcasing product features and visual details in attractive lifestyle settings, using graphics or on-screen text to highlight specs and pricing details and embedding ecommerce links within the video so viewing immediately triggers in-the-moment purchasing opportunities.
