1. Plan

As is the case with an ordinary marketing campaign, the first and most important thing to do when getting started with a video marketing campaign is planning. ✍️

Ask yourself some questions to help you figure out the direction for your campaign:

• What is the purpose of your video? (e.g. to create awareness of your brand, to interest potential customers, to sell a product/ service)
• What type of video are you going to create? (e.g. educational, explainer, promo? You can get ideas from other companies in the industry – but make sure you stay on brand)
• Who is your target audience/ ideal customer? (It may help to create a few personas for this)
• What platform will the video be published on? (Do some research into what platform is best for the type of video you’re creating e.g. educational videos will generally do better on LinkedIn due to the nature of the platform)
• What’s the budget? (Be realistic! Think about paid ads as well as costs for video production)
• When’s the deadline? (Be realistic!)
• What’s needed for this video? (Equipment, software, someone to be the face of the video etc.)
• How will you measure success for this campaign? (e.g. KPI’s)

After answering these basic questions about your marketing campaign, you should have more of an idea of what you want from your campaign and what is feasible. Once you do this, you can start to get creative! ?

2. Create a script and/ or storyboard

Make sure you create a script to follow for your video. Even if this only consists of several bullet points, it’ll give you a structure to follow so that you don’t ramble on and make the post-production editing process longer than it needs to be. 

When writing your script, ensure that it’s concise and that  you get across the purpose of the video at the very beginning – otherwise people probably won’t stick around! Make sure that you read over your script out loud multiple times before recording so that you get a hang of what to say and so that you can make it seem more natural and less scripted.

To help you with your script, you could either create a storyboard or a two-column script. Both will help you consider the image or video that will accompany the audio. Here is an example of a two-column script from Hubspot.

3. Get your equipment and set-up ready

Before you start filming your video, figure out what you’re going to record it on. It’s fine if you don’t have access to a professional camera just yet – as long as you have a mobile phone with enough storage, you’re good to go. Regardless of whether you’re using a mobile phone, a professional camera or anything in between, take some time to figure out how it works and how to use its settings – a bit of research goes a long way.

In terms of other equipment, it’s a worthwhile investment to buy a tripod, a microphone and some form of lighting, especially if you’re planning on making more video marketing campaigns in the future. Don’t worry about having to break the bank –  when you’re starting out, you can find plenty of basic equipment for under £20-30. 

In terms of your set-up, if you don’t have an aesthetic background available, you can always start off with a blank wall. It’s not the best, but it’s a start, and you can invest more in your equipment and set-up as time goes on. 

After getting your equipment and set-up ready, make sure the person in front of the camera is ready with their script and press record! Try to take cutaway shots and shots from varying angles to make your video look even better. As time goes on, you’ll also want to start thinking more about composition (e.g. the rule of thirds) so it would definitely help to do some initial research on this.

4. Edit 

If you don’t have the budget for paid video editing software just yet (e.g. Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro), there are some great free pieces of software you can use (e.g. iMovie and Shotcut, among many others). There are plenty of videos on YouTube that will help you figure out how to use whatever video editing software it is that you choose. ✂️

Don’t forget to include music in your video – it makes all the difference to the mood and your video could feel quite empty without it. ? Make sure you use copyright free or royalty free music in your video, otherwise you could end up being charged or even faced with legal action. Good places to find copyright/ royalty free music are YouTube Audio Library, Epidemic Sound, Audio Library and PremiumBeat, among many others. And of course – ensure the music fits with the tone of your video. You can choose whether you want the music to just be in the intro and outro of your video, or whether you want it to be on loop in the background at all times. 

Finally, make sure that you have a good thumbnail for your video as this is the first thing that people will see. You can create one by simply taking a screenshot of part of your video, uploading it onto a graphics design platform (Canva is a great free platform) and inserting text or images over it.

5. POST! 

Now that your video is edited and ready, it’s time to post it online for the world to see! ?

As YouTube is the largest video hosting platform and the second most visited website in the world, it makes sense to post your video on there. YouTube is also great for SEO, as 80% of the videos shown in Google search results are videos from YouTube – which means that your video will be way more likely to be seen on Google if you post it on YouTube. Make sure you include relevant keywords in both your video title and description to further increase the chance of it appearing in peoples’ search results.

After you post your video marketing campaign on YouTube, you can distribute it to other social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for an even wider reach.

6. Paid ads and track your performance

As well as reaching people organically, you could put some money behind your campaign to increase your reach EVEN further. ? You can use paid video ads on any social media platform, although it would be worth your while to do some research into which platforms are best for you to do so to ensure that you aren’t wasting your money. Once you’ve chosen a platform to put paid ads on, pay attention to which ones they seem to do best on and use this knowledge for later campaigns. 

To ensure that your future campaigns only get better, take advantage of features such as A/B testing and analytics to determine how successful your campaign is and what exactly is working for it and what isn’t. ?? Useful metrics to look at are:

• View count
• Play rate
• Interactions (likes, comments and shares)
• Video completions
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversion rate (if you have a desired action for visitors e.g. signing up to a newsletter)

You should also measure the campaign against the KPI’s and/ or measures of success that you decided on in the planning stage to ascertain how well it has done. Once you’ve taken the time to understand and analyse your metrics, you can use this data to continuously improve your future video marketing campaigns.

There you have it – 6 steps that you can use to get started with video marketing for your business. 

Want us to do the dirty work for you instead? No problem – send us a message and we can help you out.