Level Up Your Video Marketing Strategy: The Ultimate Guide

Video marketing isn't just flashy YouTube ads or viral TikTok sensations. It’s also not only about top-of-the-funnel content designed to build brand awareness. 

Done right, video is an incredibly versatile medium that can transform how you educate, engage, and convert your audience at every stage of their buying journey. In fact, according to recent research, 96% of B2B organizations say video positively impacts their performance.*

That might mean creating viral videos for social media, grabbing a prospect's attention with a dynamic demo reel on your homepage, or using personalized video messages in email nurturing campaigns. But it might also mean interactive self-guided product explorations, webinars with thought leaders in your industry, Q&A recordings, and video case studies.

The applications are endless. 

However, to actually leverage the potential of video across the customer journey, you need more than creative ideas. You need a well-designed, flexible, and effective video marketing strategy. 

This complete guide will give you a proven blueprint for video marketing that gets results. We’ll walk you through all the key steps to building — or improving — your video strategy, so you can boost thought leadership, pipeline, conversions, retention, and more.

How Video Marketing Can Boost Your ROI 

Let's face it: marketing is tougher than ever. Between budget constraints, limited resources, and all the competition, captivating audiences feels nearly impossible some days.

A strategic video marketing approach can help you get heard through the noise, connect with customers in moments that matter, and drive lead generation and conversions.

What Is Video Marketing? 

Video marketing refers to any video content created and distributed to promote a product, service, brand, or organization. This encompasses a wide variety of video types and use cases, from social media posts and ads to testimonial interviews, product explainer reels, onboarding tutorials, webinars, virtual events, and more.

What’s most important is that all of these video types are designed to achieve marketing objectives, whether that’s building awareness, generating pipeline, educating users, or retaining customers.

Benefits of Video Marketing

The proof is in the numbers when it comes to the immense potential of video marketing.

According to the 2023 Gartner Tech Marketing Benchmarks Survey, video is the top asset type included in 2023 marketing plans as well as the third best performing asset for generating marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for technology marketers’ organizations with between $10 million and $50 million in annual revenue.

Key plus points of video marketing include:

• Increased brand awareness and affinity
• Improved lead generation and pipeline
• Conversions — Wyzowl research shows that including video on landing pages can increase conversion rates by over 80%
• Higher user engagement and retention
• Improved SEO rankings and site traffic
• Greater thought leadership and trust
• Increased sharing and engagement through social media
• Opportunity to build emotional connections

With a strong strategy in place, you can bring all the right elements together for video marketing magic.

8 Steps to Build An Effective Video Marketing Strategy

By following our tried-and-tested steps, you can create a stellar strategy for videos that engage your audience and accelerate pipeline at every stage.

While these steps are outlined sequentially, video marketing requires constant testing and optimization over time. Expect to iterate continuously based on performance data and audience feedback.

Not every aspect will apply to every business or use case either. This framework helps ensure you cover all the key elements for video marketing success — but you should adapt the steps based on your unique goals, target segments, and resources. 

1. Define Your Goals and Audience

The first step in developing an impactful video marketing strategy is getting crystal clear on your goals and target audience. This focus will inform every subsequent decision from video types to distribution channels.

Start by outlining your overall objectives. Do you want to increase brand awareness among a new buyer persona? Generate more demo requests? Reduce customer churn? Drive event registrations?

Then, map your video strategy directly to those KPIs. For demand generation, you may want to focus on product explainer and demo videos, while if you want to reduce churn, you could prioritize educational video tutorials that support customers post-purchase.

Next, drill down on your target audience, buyer personas, and customer segments. Make sure you understand their demographics, values, personality, pain points, role in the buying process, and preferred engagement with content. 

Getting this level of insight will let you tailor your video positioning, messaging, length, visuals, and distribution channels so they resonate across the whole customer journey.

💡Pro tip:

‍We recommend taking a customer-first approach to engagement marketing, focusing on the emotional states that guide buyers at each stage as they move towards their desired outcome. 

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Here’s what that looks like: 

2. Decide On Your Video Types 

Different types of video content tap into the needs and emotions prospects experience at different moments. 

For instance, leads who are at the beginning of their journey, and feeling frustrated with current solutions not meeting their needs, may respond best to short videos that center on introducing your brand and solving their problem. 

Key video marketing examples at this stage include: 

• Short how-to videos optimized for social media platforms
• Explainer videos
• 30-second video ads
• Results-focused homepage or landing page videos

As they move towards curiosity, optimism, and confidence, you may want to focus on: 

• Longer product demo videos
• Q&A sessions that address any doubts
• Webinars
• Customer testimonials
• Case studies that show exactly how your solution helps 
• Videos giving extra insights into your brand and culture behind the scenes

By tailoring your video strategy to emotional drivers, you can influence every touchpoint on the path to conversion.

Once customers have converted, you’ll want to make sure your video strategy includes content that drives retention and turns them into true partners. 

That might mean:

• Continued customer education and onboarding videos, especially for new features
• Thought leadership video content
• Virtual events for knowledge-sharing and networking 
• Videoed product launches

💡Pro tip:

‍Showcase your company values as well as your solutions. 

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Large-scale research shows that potential customers are 4 times more likely to buy from companies they feel are purpose-driven — and 4.5 times more likely to recommend the company to friends and family.
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Using video content to highlight a company culture of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) is a great way to do this. 

3. Define Your Messaging and Content Plan

Defining your messaging and content plan is like setting the blueprint for your video marketing strategy. It determines how your brand voice and message will be communicated across different video formats and channels. 

This will make sure that all of your video content aligns with your brand identity, marketing goals, and audience expectations.

Start by outlining the core themes, talking points, and positioning statements you want to communicate to each audience segment. Remember to align your content themes with your audience's interests, pain points, and emotional states at different points in their journey.

Then map out specific video content types to support those messages. 

For example, if a key message is based on helping your audience to understand the value of a complex SaaS product, you may want to develop an animated explainer video and run webinars with Q&A sessions.

If building general thought leadership is the goal, a weekly video podcast, LinkedIn Live discussion, or interactive webinar may work well.

Specific industries may want to channel their messaging into different forms of video content. For instance, a healthcare company might focus on short social media videos around the latest research and best practices, longer educational webinars, and Q&A videos that show how your products or services meet healthcare industry needs and regulatory requirements. An education provider may want to think about virtual campus tour videos, professional development video resources, and video case studies. 

4. Select Your Video Tools

The right tools and technologies lay the foundation for video marketing success. 

Key elements of your video tech stack include:

Streaming and Recording — For webinars, virtual events, interactive product videos and more, look to purpose-built video engagement solutions like Demio (a Banzai solution 👋). Demio makes it easy to create compelling live, automated, and on-demand video experiences with engagement features like polls, Q&As, downloads, and featured actions. You’ll also get robust analytics on focus time, engagement, completion rate, conversions, and more — so you can refine future video content and segment leads. 

Video Hosting and Distribution — Upload videos to Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, or a customized video portal on your website.

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Editing Software — User-friendly programs like Camtasia or Adobe Premiere Rush help edit footage and add graphics or visual effects.

Marketing Automations — Integrate platforms like HubSpot or Marketo with your video marketing solution so you can incorporate viewer data and improve your lead scoring. See a full list of Demio integrations here. 

5. Set a Timeline and Budget 

Your timeline and budget are crucial for keeping your video marketing strategy on track. A well-defined timeline helps coordinate production and distribution, while a carefully planned budget means you allocate your resources effectively, maximizing the impact of every dollar spent.

To set your timeline, break down your video strategy into phases by assigning deadlines for each stage of production — from scripting to filming to editing to distribution. Make sure you factor in time to review the data from your videos so you can use it to better understand your viewers and inform your strategy going forward. 

A good tip is to plan a content calendar to help ideate fresh video concepts that resonate with your audience. Look for seasonal hooks, upcoming conferences and events, or new features/products you can create videos around and work them into your timeline. 

Then, estimate costs for each phase. Think about factors like equipment, software, talent, ad spend, and organic marketing.

Monitor your spending and adjust your budget allocation as needed based on available resources and performance metrics and ROI (i.e., allocate more budget to types of videos that have shown higher engagement rates or conversion potential).

You can also start out by repurposing clips from existing footage to test video marketing without huge upfront investments. 

A dedicated tool like Demio can help you repurpose live webinars into on-demand or automated videos.

6. Create impactful videos 

Production is when your video strategy truly comes alive. Great video content captures attention, conveys your message clearly, and resonates with your audience, prompting them to take action. 

Follow these best practices for creating stellar videos that captivate and convert:

• Focus on storytelling and emotion‍
  • Make sure your script builds a narrative, uses imagery effectively, and evokes feelings for your viewer. Incorporate elements that trigger emotional responses, like real, relatable stories or surprising facts, to increase viewer connection and recall.

• Keep videos short and consumable‍
  • 30-90 seconds is optimal for social media and explainers can generally be around 2 minutes. Webinars and video podcasts can be longer, generally 30-60 minutes.

• Use on-brand graphics, color schemes, and logos‍
  • This builds familiarity and trust and gives your content a polished feel. 

• Clearly showcase benefits and value‍
  • Show customers you understand their pain points — and exactly how your product or service can solve them. 

• Let viewers experience your solution‍
  • For product-focused videos, use screen recordings, annotations, and zooming to walk through the interface from the user’s perspective, including lots of real-life examples and use cases.

• Include clear calls-to-action‍
  • Give viewers compelling next steps to drive conversions. Place your CTAs at strategic points in your video, make them visually appealing, and use compelling, action-oriented language. 

• Make sure you have an eye-catching thumbnail and title‍
  • The thumbnail and title are the hook that either draws viewers in or pushes them away, directly impacting your click-through rates.

• Ensure high production quality‍
  • Clear visuals and audio give a professional impression and minimize viewer frustrations — which maximizes engagement 

• Make your video content accessible‍
  • Include closed captioning and transcripts, use alt text, accessible fonts, and color contrasts, and give your viewers the option to pause, rewind, and slow down pre-recorded content.

• Get interactive‍
  • Interactive and gamified video elements drive viewer engagement and spark curiosity. According to neuroscientific principles, even just anticipating a fun activity like a poll — and wondering what others will say — triggers the release of dopamine, increasing viewer focus and satisfaction. Tools like Demio offer engagement features like surveys, polls, Q&As, downloads, and featured action CTAs — for both live and pre-recorded, on-demand video content. 

7. Distribute Your Videos on the Right Platforms

Choosing the right multichannel marketing platforms is key to ensure your content reaches your intended audience — and gets the most visibility and engagement possible. 

First, you’ll need to know where your audience spends their time online. Think about all stages of the customer journey here. Platforms like LinkedIn or industry-specific forums might be ideal for deep-dive video content, but depending on your audience, you may also want to use YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook to make sure your most important thought leadership videos have a wide reach. 

Your website is also a crucial distribution channel for video content. Include a variety of different video types on your site, from short product demos on your homepage to gated video content like on-demand webinars. 

8. Get Eyes On Your Videos

Once your videos are distributed across the right platforms, the next step is promoting them to increase visibility and attract a larger audience.

You can leverage SEO by using relevant keywords in your video titles, descriptions, and tags to drive traffic from Google or YouTube search.

Consider using paid advertising on platforms like YouTube or Facebook to boost your video's visibility to a targeted audience. You’ll also want to cross-post your videos on all your social media channels, encouraging followers to view, like, and share.

Another useful promotion tactic is including videos in your email campaigns or newsletters to engage your subscriber base and drive traffic to your video content. 

Personalize your videos to match the interests and past behavior of your email segment: current customers might be most interested in teasers for thought leadership content and product videos demonstrating new features, while leads deciding whether to convert might benefit from customer testimonial video or case studies. 

💡Pro tip:

Engage with your audience by responding to their comments on your videos and encouraging viewers to share their thoughts. Interactions increase video visibility and foster a community around your content.

Harness the Full Potential of Video Marketing

Video can build brand awareness, spur emotional connections, educate users, build thought leadership, and drive engagement marketing results.

But realizing the immense potential of video marketing requires strategy. You’ll need clarity on which video types — and platforms — work for your goals. Confidence to cost-effectively create stellar content. And systems to fit production and promotion into packed marketing schedules.

The good news? With the right approach, any marketer can build a high-impact video strategy that pays dividends.

That's where leveraging the right video marketing technology comes in.

We recommend Demio, part of Banzai’s range of engagement marketing solutions. With Demio, you can easily create interactive video formats that align with buyer needs at every stage — and capture all the analytics you need for effective marketing outreach. You’ll save on setup time and be able to run live and automated webinars, product demos, and more, all with rich engagement features, from polls, Q&As, and surveys to downloadable resources and featured actions. You’ll get deep-dive analytics on focus time, engagement, completion, and attendance rates, which help you segment leads and target your follow-up. With easy integrations to your CRM, you’ll be able to take your lead gen and pipeline efforts to the next level. 

Embrace the power of video to shift perceptions, spark meaningful connections, and fuel your marketing success — with the right tools in your corner.

Frequently asked questions about video marketing strategies

What makes video marketing successful?

Truly, what makes video marketing successful isn't just about hitting the 'upload' button and waiting for views to roll in. It's about strategically aligning your video content with your marketing goals and audience needs. Success comes from crafting content that resonates on an emotional level, tells compelling stories, and provides value — whether it’s educational, inspirational, or entertaining. Additionally, your success hinges on how well you distribute and promote your videos, ensuring they reach the right people at the right time. And of course, continuously measuring and tweaking your strategy based on analytics is key; what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow, so you need to stay flexible and responsive.

How can you optimize videos for search engines?

Optimizing videos for search engines is a bit like SEO for your website but some unique twists. Start with keyword research to understand what your audience is searching for, then strategically use these keywords in your video's title, description, and tags. Transcripts and closed captions can also boost SEO, making your content accessible to a wider audience and indexable by search engines. Don't forget about the thumbnail and video quality — engaging visuals encourage more clicks, which can improve your video's search ranking. And, of course, embedding your video on your website or blog can also drive additional traffic and improve dwell time, another positive signal to search engines.

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