Video Marketing in 2022: The Ultimate Guide

What a year it’s been so far! We have been pretty busy here at Kartoffel Films, having completed 20 video projects already. We think it’s about time to give our Ultimate Video Marketing Guide a little refresh, making sure to include everything you need to know about video marketing in 2022, from its earliest beginnings to coolest new innovations. If you are gathering information in the hopes of developing your own successful marketing video, you are in the right place!

So let’s get on with it…

What Is Content Marketing?

The term content marketing was first used in 1996 by John F. Oppendahl at a journalism conference, but the concept has been around for much longer.

In 1900 a tyre company called Michelin developed the Michelin Guide. Still published today, the guide details how drivers can maintain their cars and find lodgings and restaurants on the road. Nearly 35,000 free copies of the first guide were distributed to the French public, hugely increasing the demand for motor vehicles (and tyres!) across the country. 

Content marketing involves the development and distribution of content that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services. When undertaken efficiently, content marketing has the unique ability to convey your business’ expertise, message, products, and values to an ever-growing range of audiences. 

Consistently employing impactful content marketing leads to the establishment and nurturing of relationships within your business model, whether it be B2B or B2C focused. This leads to the formation of deeper relationships between consumers and businesses and a more successful and sustainable sales development. 

It’s hardly surprising that content marketing has seen a phenomenal global value rise at 14.7% each year, expecting to hit $107,540.6m by 2026. In 2021, Nike spent $3.11 billion alone on its content strategy, largely choosing to focus on the stories, achievements and challenges of those in sport rather than directly advertising the products that they sell. 

What Is Digital Content Marketing?

The digital age has levelled up content marketing. Organisations of all shapes and sizes can now harness its power. 

This can be through:

• Search engines 
• Email 
• Multimedia messages
• Social media 
• Other websites
• Video 

Every day in 2022 up to 5 billion people around the globe use the internet, this is well over half of the world’s population. The average user spends 2.5 hours a day online.

Digital content marketing is extremely common, so much so that the public now completely relies on it as a way to learn about brands and products. One of the most successful channels of digital marketing is video.

What Is Video Marketing?

Video marketing utilises various forms of video media to promote and market a business’s products and services. It aims to attract and educate audiences, retain their interest and convert them into customers. Its highly shareable nature also contributes to the success of video as a marketing tool.

Why Should Your Business Use Video Marketing?

A staggering 86% of businesses use video content as a marketing tool, this figure suggests that video, quite simply, works. It’s a long and ingeniously developed method to increase engagement, leading to a converted target audience. What’s more, from the people who don’t currently use video, 79% expect to start in 2022 – this is 10% higher than last year’s figure. It’s obvious why 85.7% of marketing directors rate video as their most effective form of content. 

If you are not harnessing the power of video content as a marketing tool, you can rest assured that your competitors will be. 

Video has proved it’s here to stay by time and time again outperforming other forms of marketing, it’s about time you started using it! 

Need more convincing? Let’s take a look at how video can enrich your marketing strategy.

Trust Builder

Trust is a force that should never be underestimated, it should be a key component in every brand’s relationship with its audience. In order to be successful as a business and increase sales, buyers must, before anything else, trust you. 

Video is a great way to build trust around your business. Viewers tend to perceive it as a more genuine medium than marketing collateral such as brochures or newsletters. 

There are several types of marketing video that can help your business build trust, namely testimonials and CSR films. We will define these later in this article. 

Authenticity Promoter 

Video can express authenticity unlike any other medium. It can feel more transparent to viewers than a piece of traditional marketing material, allowing them to glimpse into the real world of your business and the people behind it. 

Never dismiss the power an authentic production holds – a staggering 86% of customers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like and support.

Great Explainer and Educator

The action of watching videos stimulates the cognitive processes of thinking, reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to get too sciency! This simply means that video is engaging and exciting, making learning easier, even for the most complex of ideas. 

The average explainer video, despite being just 90 seconds long, possesses the ability to convey a mindblowing amount of information. After all, it is thought that if a picture is worth a thousand words then video surely must be worth a million.

No other format even comes close to matching video’s ability to communicate ideas, this is why explainer videos are used by around 45% of businesses on their homepage to drive sales. It clearly works! New data shows that marketers achieved 66% more qualified leads last year with the help of explainers.

SEO Champion

Search Engine Optimisation allows you to grow your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Ultimately, the higher your page appears on SERPs, the more traffic it will attract. People tend to click on the first pages that they see, this means more people will be exposed to your content, and more sales will be made. SEO has the ability to revolutionise your digital marketing strategy and can create an enormous number of conversion opportunities.

Although SEO is not an exact science, there are things you can do to boost your SEO potential. It is likely you have already inserted keywords, indexed pages correctly, and inserted images, but did you know that video is one of the most powerful tools to influence your SEO?

 

 

How Does Video Help Boost Your SEO Strategy Potential?

Google recognises pages that use different forms of media, using video correctly will allow your website to outrank competitors online and in SERPs. 

For about 26% of search results, Google shows video thumbnails next to search results with embedded videos. Users are far more likely to click such listings that are ‘rich snippets’, in other words, more visually appealing links. 

It is likely that Google prioritises search results with embedded video, whilst it hasn’t been officially confirmed, we are pretty certain it’s true. Studies have estimated that websites with embedded videos were 53 times more likely to rank higher in SERPs. 

Outside of improving SERP rankings, video also indirectly improves two other key areas of SEO. It tends to increase the amount of time spent on pages and improves backlinking. In fact, studies have shown that people tend to spend two times more time on sites with video than without. 

Social Media Master

Video has become one of the most dominant forms of content seen on social media. Take a scroll yourself and make note of just how many videos you see. Its intense popularity is only growing as Generation Z becomes the driving force behind social media sites like Youtube and TikTok. 

So why does video do so well on social media? There must be a reason why video gets 1200% more shares on social media than text sources.

Video is processed in our minds over 60,000 times faster than text, this means it immediately ignites personal connections that demand we keep watching. This increases the engagement level of video posts. Tweets with video see 10x more engagement than normal posts.

But wait, there’s more! Another advantage of using video to aid your social media strategy is that it can be repurposed across numerous major platforms, giving it a considerably wider reach. Greater reach means a much higher return on investment for your business. 

Mobile Friendly 

As of February 2022, 57.38% of all web traffic came through mobile devices. In 2021, it was 56.49%, the figure is on the rise and video must keep up.

But don’t fret, video is perfectly mobile-friendly. In fact, it is this growth in mobile phone usage that is driving new and successful innovation in video creation, accelerating the importance of the medium. 

It’s much more comfortable to watch a video on your phone screen rather than squinting to read tiny text posts or struggling to navigate around a non-optimised internet site. 

It is possible to effectively engineer your video content to be mobile-friendly by creating:

• Short-form video content 
• Gripping beginnings
• Vertically filmed video
• Correct aspect ratios
• Soundless optimised video

  

Sales Boosting

Video, combining all the above elements, has the power to:

1. Drive more traffic 
2. Convince customers to buy 
3. Convince customers to buy more often

These three points, when practised in conjunction, can exponentially increase the conversion potential of your business. 

What Is Conversion?

Conversion is the point at which a desired outcome is achieved. In marketing, this is most frequently when a potential customer turns into an actual customer through purchase, but can also be a lesser action for instance signing up for marketing emails. 

What Is the Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is the percentage of people that engage in your marketing content that end up converting. It is one of the most important data points for your business to consider.

To measure your conversion rate you need to participate in conversion tracking. This is using data analysis to work out how many of your potential customers you convert. 

If 80% of those who engage with your marketing go on to make a purchase then this is a great conversion rate. If just 8% go on to make a purchase this is a worrying conversion rate and likely means that your marketing strategy is highly ineffective. 

Do Videos Help Conversion?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a method of improving your conversion rate through monitoring the performance of your marketing content and engineering it to be more effective. It enables you to identify which areas of your strategy may need development in order to optimise your conversion rate.

If you are struggling to optimise conversions, it would be a perfect time to implement video into your marketing strategy or improve what video content you have already established. 

It is possible with a well-engineered video marketing strategy, that uses CRO, to raise your conversion rate by 80%. 

Planning, Production and Promotion

So, now you know the benefits that video marketing can bring to your business, it’s time to explore how to create your content. 

Some marketing teams tackle video planning, production and promotion internally, creating video production units and investing in expensive kit. But for the majority of organisations, it’s best to look for external help from an agency. 

This guide is designed to give an overview of the entire video content creation and distribution process.

Building Strategy:

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy encapsulates a business’s overall games plan for attaining and retaining its target audience through digital channels. 

Your digital marketing strategy should include several of the forms of the digital marketing methods mentioned above. Just to recap, these include:

• Video
• Social media 
• Email 
• Infographics
• Websites 

These formats should be used alongside each other in a measured way, each contributing to your business’s overall goal of achieving a sustainable competitive advantage over competitors.

What is a video content strategy? 

As part of your digital marketing strategy, it is worth developing a video content strategy. It should be used to create, curate and utilise video content as a means of marketing your products to your target audience.

Using an Agency to Help You

Here at Kartoffel Films, we understand that at the core of making great video content is a great video content strategy. With ten years of experience in strategy creation, we can streamline the complex development process for you.

So, what’s our formula for success?

We offer a consultative style of work bringing the knowledge and skills of those years of experience to each production. We have made award-winning content for some of the world’s leading health providers, education institutions, charities, and companies. 

Take a look at our tried and tested video content strategy development formula below.

Defining Your Video Strategy With Us

Like any aspect of business, to get the best out of video marketing, you need to formulate a plan. Your videos will be reflective of the effectiveness of your video content strategy so it is critical to get it right. 

Audience Research

Getting to know your audience is one of the most important steps in developing your video content strategy.

• Who are they?
• What are their demographics?
• What are their hobbies and interests?

These are the questions we ask when undergoing thorough audience research. One of our most effective methods is to create an audience persona. 

An audience persona makes up both the visualisation and profile of an imagined person who represents your ideal individual customer. Almost all marketing efforts should be catered to them to ensure your target audience is receptive to your campaign. 

Competitor Analysis 

It is essential to analyse what sort of content your closest competitors are using and how successful they have or haven’t been in doing so. We will make sure that your strategy builds on the lessons learned by the endeavours of others through quantitative research.

Measures

Within competitor analysis it is important to undergo qualitative research. This means forming a deeper understanding of the success of projects, not just the stats. This can be handled using interviews, focus groups, comment sections, and feedback forms. Looking ‘beyond the numbers’ helps Kartoffel Films to build up the kind of detailed understanding of the client’s market that’s required to build an effective marketing strategy. 

Identify Content Gaps

Undergoing competitor analysis allows us to identify content gaps. This is what competitors are not doing. Identifying this means we can try out targeting a specific social media channel or even a new target audience that has not yet been trialled.  

Content Types 

As our team starts to accumulate a better understanding of your goals and challenges, we start piecing together the most effective ways to build your unique marketing strategy.

We do this by using the ‘Hero, Hub, Hygiene’ model. It provides a simple way to think of different types of content and the way they can work together to fill gaps and build an effective video content strategy that builds a brand over time.

Here’s an overview of the content types:

Hero:

These are the big one-off launches, campaigns, and announcements. This content is designed to be something special, it must stand out across a broad range of social media platforms and further hosting sites. 

Typically hero video content will have a larger budget than your normal content. Supermarket Christmas commercials are a great example of hero content. The content is often linked to an inspiring human story, a notable achievement, milestone, or anniversary of an organisation.

Hub

Hub content is focused primarily on engagement, for this reason, it should intend to resonate strongly with your target audience. Ideally, it will fill a gap that the market research has identified, for instance through modernising a campaign or using animation. 

The general aim is to build engagement and improve the brand awareness of the client. It speaks the ‘language’ of the audience and finds ways to create a human connection – appealing to their interests and addressing the issues, hopes, and anxieties they may have.

Hub content should be produced much more regularly than hero content, for it encompasses the types of video that draw audiences into your marketing funnel and encourage them to convert. It includes video tutorials, basic adverts, and behind-the-scenes videos. 

Remember to keep your hub content industry-focused and trend-led. 

Hygiene

Hygiene content is simple and aims to ‘pull’ people in. It should be aimed at your core audience and placed on your own channels to help those who are not familiar with your brand stumble across it online. 

Hygiene video content should be created based on the searches that are carried out by your audience, for this reason examples of hygiene video content are instructional and FAQ videos that answer ‘how to?’ questions.

Hygiene content doesn’t need to be flashy, it’s the most practical form of marketing which makes it quick, cheap, and simple to create. It is possible for this content to be handled by your in-house team. Whilst seeming purely functional, it actually comprises the foundation of your content strategy and can have an enormous effect on the success of your business. 

The Three H’s

Hero, hub, and hygiene content, when produced together combine to create a powerful video marketing strategy. Each element has its own unique part to play.

Hygiene content is the foundation of your business marketing strategy, for this reason, you should spend the most time creating this type of content. This being said it is unlikely to be your best work, don’t worry if you don’t win awards with your hygiene content, that’s what hub and Hero are for!

Hub content engages wide audiences and encourages them to form a relationship with your brand and fall deeply into your marketing funnel. To best supplement your hub content, schedule video releases at regular times and align it to the aims of your audience, this will keep people engaged. Why not even use cliffhangers or a longer storyline to encourage audiences to retain their interest even more. 

Hero content is built on the groundwork established by hub and hygiene, Without the structure below to create search engine relevancy and to establish and nurture an audience, hero content is liable to receive little traction.

Hero, hub, and hygiene, when interwoven within your marketing strategy can produce great results. We can help you with the process of creating your strategy and creating your content.

Building Your Video Marketing Strategy

Devise

This is the creation stage, where we use all the data collected to bring your content strategy to life. Remember the most important thing to us is that your strategy is reflective of your overall goal.

A draft treatment will be written up that details your strategy in a practical and achievable way. It will include:

• Types of content
• Production schedule 
• Release times

This should give you a clear roadmap of the progression of your strategy. Have any tweaks, changes, or suggestions? Let us know and we can implement them at this stage! Once we agree on a final plan and the client and agency know the exact steps and requirements to meet it we can move forward to the execution phase. The exciting bit!

Execute

Following your strategy and turning great ideas into even better video content is what we specialise in here at Kartoffel Films. Our amazing team can transform dreams into reality with our state-of-the-art process. From shoots, writing, and animation to casting and location finding, we follow a robust process of pre-production, production, post-production, and delivery to create fantastic content for all along your content marketing journey. The best thing is we handle it all! There’s no need to worry or stress about an unfamiliar process, we’ve got you covered so you can get on with developing other areas of your business!

Review

We see a video marketing strategy as a never-ending cycle of progress and development. As your journey progresses we can use metrics, data, and feedback to improve your content. As your strategy grows with time, we are able to form a comprehensive understanding of what your audience is most excited by, this means we can create even better targeted content. 

This approach is what allows us to develop a strong long-term partnership with your business as we continue to improve the quality and effectiveness of your content to keep up with the successes of your business. 

Kartoffel Films has been the key video content marketing partner of Age UK, the UK’s leading charity for the elderly, for more than seven years. We’ve produced more than 300 pieces of varied content that have helped to enrich their online brand by generating hundreds of thousands of views.

Types of Marketing Video for Your Strategy

Brand Videos

A brand video should communicate what your business is about, not necessarily what it does.

Consider the following questions when formulating your brand video:

• What is your story?
• What is your mission?
• What do you believe in?
• What drives you?

You should aim to connect with the audience emotionally – think back to some of the greatest Superbowl ads – these are brand videos. Utilise breathtaking cinematography, famous actors or celebs, and inspiring stories to bring your brand to life through video.

Interviews

Video recorded interviews, whether by your company founder, product designer, industry professional   or a recent graduate recruit are a great addition to your video marketing plan. Businesses can utilise them both internally and externally to enhance brand expertise and corporate culture. It’s a straightforward and adaptable approach that can pack a powerful punch. They have the ability to inspire and connect without a significant budget or a lengthy production schedule.

Educational

Educational marketing videos answer questions asked by audiences. It means that instead of trawling through FAQ sections, audiences can quickly attain information in a clear, concise, and engaging manner. 

You should use educational videos to provide audiences with important information whilst also promoting your product and building your brand reputation. 

Explainers

Explainer videos intend to explain and draw attention to the most important aspects of your company’s product or service in a clear and concise manner. They must show what problems your product or service solves, whilst also providing enough information to evidence that it can do so effectively. 96% of people report watching an explainer to learn about a product.

An effective explainer will be able to cut through the jargon and find a simple yet engaging visual way to communicate with its audience.

Testimonials

Testimonial videos give potential consumers the confidence to consider your product or service. Growing your trust through honest and accessible user evaluations is the key to success in a world flooded with products and a population that is rightfully sceptical of them.

Of course, the most crucial aspect of a testimonial film is the testimony itself. A testimony is when an existing customer of your business discusses their positive experience in order to persuade other potential customers to try or buy your products or services.

Whether they are a B2B customer, long-time supporter, or first-time user, interviewees should express their genuine feelings about your company, product, or service. It’s difficult to find somebody who can better market your product than a happy, devoted customer, so take advantage of this and make a wonderful testimonial video.

Intercutting footage of your product or service’s top characteristics in testimonial films will assist consumers in understanding the descriptions of your interviewees. This also helps to build trust because you’re able to back up their claims with visual evidence.

Testimonial films could be showcased on your ‘case studies’ website page.

Recruitment 

90% of the job market today is candidate-driven. This means that if employers want to attract the right talent – and hire them before their competitors – they need to create the type of content that will best speak to their candidates. 

A recruitment video lets you ‘blow your own horn’, demonstrating why the best talent should be drawn to your company. They should show your human side, especially the corporate culture within the company’s team and what your brand stands for. These points would not be effectively portrayed in a text-based job advert.

Did you know that video-based job postings have a 34% greater application rate than those without videos?

Meet the Team

Meet the team videos provide an exciting behind-the-scenes look at the characters behind your organisation. They resonate strongly with the viewer and promote authenticity by showcasing a colourful glimpse at some of the key figures at all stages of your business operations. 

Do you want your business to come across as corporate or quirky? You can sculpt your meet the team video to portray your company in any way you like. Just remember authenticity sells!

Social Media Video

The average amount of time spent on social media by US users climbed from 54 minutes to 65 minutes in 2020, a startling increase that has remained consistent through 2022. During the pandemic, new social media apps exploded in popularity, with TikTok proving to be the most successful. In the United States alone, TikTok’s annual growth rate hit 85.5 percent in 2020, and now, in 2022, it has 1 billion active users who watch a total of 167 million videos per minute. 

Thousands of marketers have used TikTok to promote their brands, products, or services since it provides a wonderful platform for showcasing emerging marketing trends and reaching a larger, often younger audience. TikTok audiences demand content that is authentic, creative, and collaborative. Nike, Skittles, Calvin Klein, and Fifa have all had success through TikTok to engage with their consumers. The site has also aided the success of much smaller firms marketing activities; the hashtag ‘#smallbusiness’ has received over 34 billion views.

Social media video should be optimised for the use of mobile and should also take advantage of user-generated content, influencer talent, and viral trends.

Lead Generation

Lead generation videos have a very strong focus – they aim to sell products or services. There are many different ways to orchestrate a sales video depending on the product you wish to sell. The main thing to remember is a strong call to action. 

A Call to Action (CTA) encompasses any instruction that you give to a potential customer so they perform a specific action immediately. They should be clear and concise, leaving no ambiguity for the customer.

CTAs are needed to inform potential consumers what their next actions should be, in most cases directing them further into your sales funnel. 

Commercials 

Commercials are typically shown during TV ad breaks and more recently on streaming services like Amazon and Youtube. They are used to promote your brand or product by attracting interest through creative and innovative video concepts. Frequently they form part of a series with a continuous message displayed in each successive production.

Video Podcasts 

Podcasts allow brands to captivate audiences with longer form content. Listeners are rewarded with detailed information, creating value and encouraging their engagement. There are already 30 million podcast episodes out there with numbers climbing every day. It’s a great time to start incorporating video podcasts into your strategy.

Promos

Promo videos act as teasers for upcoming occasions or product launches. They should provide an example of what is to come to drum up interest and support for the event. 

Make sure to employ a strong call to action in promo videos to encourage viewers to sign up for an event or receive more information on a launching product.

Video Emails

It is highly likely that your marketing team already has a mailing list. Why not reach out through video. A video email lets you boost the effectiveness of these connections with integrated or linked videos.

Aside from the obvious clear benefits of video, the metrics provided by an email let you see exactly what’s working and hone the type of content that you share.

CSR Video 

Corporate Social Responsibility is a holistic, self-regulatory business model with pro-social objectives. It allows companies to be aware of their economic, social and environmental impact on a local or global scale. CSR requires businesses to positively contribute to today’s society without taking away from future generations, this is often called future-proofing.

CSR videos can feed the public information relating to your company’s sustainability strategy, whether it is already a success or a promising plan for the near future.

At Kartoffel we hold our CSR strategy close to our hearts. Check out our CSR video below. 

Animation

Innovative, eye-catching, engaging, cost-effective. Animation is a form of video that allows for unmatched versatility and unbound creativity. In the wake of the pandemic, animation has risen to become one of the hottest trends in content marketing, yet it still feels underemployed in the tech industry.

Animation is incredibly flexible as a creative medium, not only allowing for remote working in times of COVID restrictions but also in its processes. It has increased longevity in comparison to live-action due to its reusable and malleable nature. It also possesses the ability to reduce complex information into memorable bite-sized chunks.

Animation has been dubbed by 83% of marketing professionals as a medium that is rapidly growing in importance. Research shows that using animation on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 85-90%.

Placing Your Videos

The characteristics of the various types of marketing videos outlined above vary, making them appropriate for different stages of your marketing campaign. Using your sales funnel and customer journey map this can be worked out most effectively.

What is the sales funnel?

The sales funnel is a visual tool and strategic model used to dissect the phases of marketing from the moment a consumer becomes aware of your brand to the point of sale and beyond. 

The most complete sales funnels consist of the following stages:

• Awareness (very top of the funnel)
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty
• Advocacy (very bottom of the funnel)

The funnel shape of the tool demonstrates visually the marketing tactic whereby businesses intend to catch more interest than convert. Marketers know that many who have been drawn into the funnel are likely to drop off somewhere along the process. To ensure a high level of conversions, and target-reaching bottom-line sales, a high level of resources should be assigned to the top level of the funnel.

What is a customer journey map?

Customer journey maps utilise sales funnel stages to highlight the customer experience rather than the aims of the marketer.

They identify the movements made by customers both inside and outside of the sales funnel through specific ‘touchpoints’. They help marketers spot the barriers, worries, pain points, goals, questions, and motivations of their target audiences.

The journey of a customer, whether they complete their purchase, or drop off in the consideration stage never really ends. Businesses are pulled to, pushed away from, forgotten about, remembered, spread through video marketing, or whispered in conversation. Marketing is a journey of ups and downs, the best way to clearly display this is through customer journey maps.

Transform your marketing strategy by examining your sales funnel and customer journey maps, note where the weak spots are, and add video to enrich them! 

The Execution: Making Video Marketing Content

Let’s take a closer look at the intricacies of our creative process.

To develop a video for your marketing strategy we have several different stages to undergo. These are:

1. Pre-production 
2. Production
3. Post-production
4. Delivery & hosting
5. Promotion 

Pre-Production:

The most complex and important part of the video production process happens long before anyone picks up a camera. Pre-production is the work we do before production, it involves developing a brief and building a production schedule. Your production runs the risk of becoming messy if there is no committed pre-production stage that robustly sets the foundations of your project. 

Our experience as a video agency is what really counts here, we can identify and tackle potential issues before they turn into costly production problems. The benefits of a committed pre-production stage ripple throughout the rest of your production process, confident communication and effective planning allows everyone to work towards a common goal. More than anything it helps to strip away the stress and make it a creative and enjoyable process that delivers the best possible content.

Key pre-production stages are:

• Briefing
• Follow-up meetings
• Creative pitches
• Scriptwriting
• Moodboards
• Storyboards
• Production schedules
• Talent casting
• Resource collection
• Call sheet development

Let’s break these down for you:

Briefing:

Just like creating a new product for your company, the brief is the first stage of any production project. As the client, you will write this document, but don’t worry we will be here to guide you through it. 

The best marketing briefs provide an agency with a clear focus while leaving enough room for them to guide the creative process. It’s the start of a conversation – one that allows both sides to understand the end goal and to find the best way of getting there

A great brief should cover these six key areas:

1.  Goal

What is the goal of your video? This is the most important thing to think about when embarking on a video marketing campaign. Having a cool idea isn’t enough, you must know what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it. 

If you want the viewer to subscribe to a service or buy a product, your video will have a different feel to one that is raising awareness for a cause or developing your brand image. 

Whatever your goal, it should be made clear in the brief. This allows the creative process to have a clear sense of direction, which is likely to give rise to a suitable end product.

2. Audience 

The audience target is another hugely important section of your brief. You need to carefully consider who your video should be appealing to. Are you speaking to an existing customer or someone who has no idea about your brand?

Having a clear idea of your target audience will allow us to create a video that is specially tailored to connect with the correct demographic.

3. Key info

What are you trying to communicate? This could be anything, from explaining how a product works to introducing a new team member – but it must be clear. A marketing video may cover multiple areas but you need to think about the key takeaway. The more focused and simple this message is, the better the chances of communicating it will be.

4. Style 

Do you already know what the style of your video will be, know the cinematographic and musical tone of your intended piece? If so great! Include it in the brief so we know how to bring it to life. If you have no idea, that is also not a problem. In fact, in some cases it’s fairly helpful – it’s important to keep a fresh perspective and open mind when creating video content. Allow us to suggest the best ways to achieve your video’s objective through style. 

5. Intended use

Are you going to embed your video on your website or share it via social media? It pays to consider this from the start because it allows the production process to cater for each eventuality. We can create different versions and formats of a marketing video to suit different uses. It’s much more cost-effective to cover this during the production process rather than trying to retrofit video content for a completely unsuitable purpose.

6. Budget and timeframe

A brief must set out the key parameters that an agency needs to work within. This includes spending, delivery times, location requirements, accessibility needs, and general stipulations. This information helps us as a video agency to determine if what you are asking for is achievable on the budget. If it isn’t, it allows for collaborative negotiation to take place to find a mutually acceptable compromise.

Briefing Follow-up

If you are partnered with Kartoffel, we can arrange a follow-up meeting once you have sent over the brief. This of course can be in person or over Zoom, whatever works best for you!

This meeting is a chance for the team to get a real feel for your project. We can also fill in some of the points that you may have missed or are unsure of.

Creative Design:

Once you have agreed on a path to production, the agency’s creative team will take this information and start to explore ways to achieve the brief goals. We will assess what has and hasn’t worked with similar content in the past to assure that your production will be completely aligned to your goals. This includes looking into different styles that will appeal to your specific audience whilst in keeping with your budget and timeframe. 

They will then filter this research down into a treatment. A treatment notes the general feel of a project and is designed to evolve alongside it. If this is the first project with a client, we will most likely communicate this in the form of a pitch. If it’s part of an ongoing campaign, then it’s more of a collaborative creative design process.

At Kartoffel, our treatments will give you a clear idea of our collaborative creative direction, if it suits then you can give us the green light to move on, if not we can tweak it until it’s perfect.

Scriptwriting

The script details every aspect of our combined creative direction. This includes not only the dialogue but also sound, movement, and even motion graphics. For this reason, it is likely the most important document in the video production process.

Editors refer to scripts to turn raw footage into compelling narrative adventures, they are important at every step of the production journey. Scripts will contribute to a final, polished video you can be proud of. 

Mood Boards

Mood Boards are used to capture the intended visual style and theme of a video. These can be in the form of bespoke visuals or preexisting content. As a client, when you view your moodboard, your dream really starts to become a reality.

Storyboards

As your idea develops and your narrative structure solidifies, the next step to complete is your storyboard. This is where your video narrative is presented scene by scene, often through sketches or simple graphics. It helps you to understand shot and movement choices and how they individually intertwine with your narrative.

Keep in mind that storyboard viewing tends to be one of the final stages where production changes can be communicated before extra costs start to apply.

Production Schedule

Now all the creative elements are sorted, it’s time to move on to the practicalities of the shoot. Production schedules intend to transform creative elements of your production into a realistic road map. 

Production schedules include information regarding:

• The allocation of resources
• Operations management
• Shooting location and time
• Casting 
• Risk management

Throughout the production schedule, sign-off points will be indicated for you, the client, to make sure the project is headed in the desired direction.

Talent Casting

Finding the right people to play the roles in your video can be a stressful process, you need it to feel just right. At Kartoffel Films we have been working with casting agents and actors for many years and have formed a great working relationship with them. We know who to trust and who will be able to transform themselves to represent your brand authentically. 

Perhaps you would like some of your company’s employees to feature in your video, we can even help you with that! Over the years we have developed an eye for camera-confident people and can identify individuals who will best represent the brand. 

Resources, Permits, and Locations

The production team will take on the complex task of arranging the intricate web of location agreements, permits, and equipment to assure the production runs smoothly. It’s the behind-the-scenes stuff like this that really makes a difference to shooting experiences. The smallest things are considered and planned for, if it rains you’re covered, equipment doesn’t work, don’t fret – there are spares. 

Call Sheets

The last puzzle piece of the pre-production process is the development of call sheets. Every single person involved in a shoot or audio recording session will be sent a call sheet. It provides basic logistical details such as contact details, equipment lists, meet locations, and call times.

A call sheet keeps all the crucial shoot information in one easily accessible place and helps the shoot run smoothly.

Production 

Things are about to get very real, very quickly. The ideas and plans formulated in pre-production are about to take life. Production is a very exciting stage, but it can be the most daunting. 

Production is where the building blocks needed to formulate the final film are collected. Everything needs to be in place so the final project can be completed in the post-production stage. That means shooting the interviews, grabbing location and b-roll footage, recording voice overs, and creating animations.

This process can be complex, there are so just many elements to construct! Having a video agency that understands the potential production pitfalls to guide you along the way would be extremely beneficial. Don’t stress too much though! If the pre-production process has been completed to a high standard, it should pan out to be a relatively smooth ride. There will always be a few bumps along the way but nothing a robust production schedule can’t handle.

Key production stages are:

• Cameras, sound, lighting
• Location shooting
• B-roll footage
• Interviews 
• Voiceover recording
• Animation

Cameras, Sound, Lighting

The higher the value of production, the more set-up we will require to ensure that the cameras, sound, and lighting are all in place and ready for the shoot. The proper rigging of a set can mean the difference between a shoddy film and a masterpiece.

Location Shooting

We will scout any location before the shoot. It means that we can plan everything to ensure a smooth-running filming schedule – parking, permits, mains plugs, and contingency plans for bad weather if it’s an outdoor location.

B-roll Footage

This is all the additional footage that supports the main shots. B-roll gives the editors options in post-production with general footage to link sequences, cover visual gaps, or create montages

Interviews 

So you have an interviewee at the ready. The most important thing you can do is make them comfortable. Interview them in a place where they feel most confident, this is particularly crucial if they have little experience in front of a camera, as it can be a daunting task. Putting interviewees at ease allows people to present themselves in the most authentic way possible. 

Voiceover Recording

Voiceovers need to be recorded in a sound-controlled environment. Make sure to send the scripts to the reader beforehand as this will allow them to flow naturally in the recording. 

We will usually record multiple takes to provide options in the edit. If the voiceover requirements are particularly complex, we may use an external studio.

Animation 

The production stage of animated video mostly involves the creation of main sequences. Signed-off storyboards and scripts will form the basis of these. Checkpoints can be built into the production schedule to provide you with a work-in-progress snapshot of the animation’s progress.

Post Production

Post-production gathers the content blocks developed in production and begins to build with them, ultimately constructing the final video piece. The video producer and editor work closely to assess and organise the footage in the best possible way to effectively deliver the brief. 

It’s a vital phase of the process, one that can take some time to complete. At Kartoffel Films, we always provide realistic estimates of how long it’s likely to take but if something needs a quicker turnaround, extra staffing can be allocated to help speed up the process.

Key post-production stages are:

• Reviewing footage
• Editing footage
• Draft approval
• Finishing touches
• Final approvals

Reviewing Footage

The sheer amount of footage needing to be trawled through in post-production is a challenge in itself for the producer and editor. To effectively refine this footage, logs and timestamps are used to tag the footage and ensure nothing is lost in the process. 

The interview footage is also examined at this stage, where the best takes will be identified. An experienced editor will be able to spot those small moments that can bring a video to life – a funny or off-the-cuff remark.

Editing 

Once the footage is reviewed and logged, the editing process can begin. To block out a rough narrative structure, we import the chosen footage – we will then revise and tighten this. We place establishing shots, add interviews and use b-roll footage to link and cover gaps. It can be an exhaustive process with milliseconds often making the difference between an edit feeling smooth or clunky. Experience helps to reduce this time, a good editor will instinctively know what’s going to work and what isn’t. When the edit is near completion, a version will typically be shared with the client.

Finishing Touches

After we have been given your draft approval, we make any final adjustments to the video. This includes checking for consistent colourisation which stitches the different segmented clips together into one video. Without this final stage, videos may feel incomplete, with little errors that take away from their quality. 

Final Approval  

As all requested changes will have been made previously, this stage is more a formality than anything else. Once we have been given the thumbs up, we will send over the finished product in the agreed format. You even get access to the reels of unused film footage for future edits. 

Job Done!

Well, there you have it! An overview of our entire production process. The exact handlings involved will of course change to cater to the specific client but the processes more or less stay the same. 

The end-to-end crafting of a video is time-consuming and often exhausting work, but it’s also one of the most rewarding experiences ever! 

We have made more than 2,000 video productions at Kartoffel Films, but the satisfaction of delivering quality content never ceases.

To find out even more about our video production process, click here.

Delivery and Hosting 

So, now your production is complete and ready to be put out into the world, where will you host it and how will you deliver it? There are countless options available to you for hosting, but it is important to pick the right one for your video.

The place a video ‘lives’ affects its levels of accessibility and shareability. Use a video content strategy to identify the best options for your productions before they are even made. This ensures their best possible return on investment.

The most important decision to make is whether you will self-host your video or use a third-party hosting service. Let’s take a look at how you can make this decision…

Self-hosting

Self-hosting is simply when your web server stores your video. Most frequently this is the same place as your website. When people view the video, it is your online infrastructure that delivers the video to them. 

Pros:

• You maintain total control and don’t have to compete with algorithms. 
• Advertisement free, no external adverts or pop-ups can impose on your content.
• No external brandings (logos or external markings) will appear on your content. 

Cons:

• Server bandwidth – if a video becomes popular, your server can struggle and even shutt down.
• Performance can be negatively affected, this includes slow loading, stuttering playback, and size limitations.
• There is a lack of community with no inbuilt search or sharing tools.

Third-party video hosting

This is where you host your video on a site that is not your own and embed/ share it elsewhere (like your website). Youtube and Wistia are examples of third-party hosting providers. When people watch your video, it is the third-party host company that provides the complete online infrastructure surrounding it. 

Pros:

• With high levels of scalability, there are no limits on views, bandwidth, or performance.
• Simple to use, no need for internal IT support.
• Easy access and distribution to a wide global audience.

Cons:

• You lose control of your video and have to accept the rules and conditions of the provider.
• You have very limited control over adverts and pop-ups appearing on these services.
• Your SEO can take a hit, as it is the third-party website that receives the clicks.

Which One Is Best?

For most organisations, the technical limitations and performance issues that come with self-hosting will make a third-party solution the best option. Remember, even if you are using a third-party hosting site, you can still, quite freely, use your videos on your website without hosting them through embedding. 

Most users don’t really care where you choose to host your content; they just want it to work.

Third-party Hosting Options

If you do decide to go down the third-party route, you have another set of choices to make. There’s a bewildering number of hosting sites available. Here’s a look at some of the most common options:

Wistia

We recommend Wistia for any videos that are intended to be embedded on a website. It does have a free version, although it has limitations. For most users, the paid service delivers the most suitable features. There are never any ads, pop-ups, or links to other content, it also gives you much greater control over the style and branding of a video player so that it matches your website. An added benefit is flexibility with Calls to Action, Wistia lets you place them anywhere in a video. Along with all of this, there’s the in-depth set of reporting tools that the service provides. It lets you easily track the performance metrics and find out what’s working and what’s not. Another nifty feature is the ability to bundle videos together using playlists.

Youtube

Let’s be honest, this platform needs little introduction, everyone knows about it. It places your content within a massive community connected to a search engine that works similarly to Google. The size of the potential audience makes it a marketing tool you can’t ignore (it reaches more 18-49 year olds in an average week than all cable TV networks combined). This being said, the lack of control you have over a video once you’ve uploaded it onto their free servers can present a problem. There are restrictions on how and when you can use a Call to Action and you also have YouTube branding. But perhaps the biggest issue is that you have to accept adverts and pop-ups appearing in your content. It is possible to remove ads but this does mean limiting or even completely eliminating any monetization potential. 

Vimeo

Vimeo is a paid option, providing completely ad-free videos and a range of customisation options to adapt your player to your themes. The server also allows access to plentiful stores of stock footage and offers a range of packages with more advanced features. One great advantage of Vimeo is that it allows you to update content without needing to create a new URL. This means if you edit a video that already has lots of views, you can keep that precious data without having to start from scratch. Whilst the service does offer analytics, they are not particularly advanced and there is not much community within the site.

Facebook

Another free option, Facebook shares a lot of its pros and cons with Youtube. The main difference is that content is only accessible via your channel or through viewers liking, sharing, or boosting it with a paid promotion. It does provide access to a massive potential audience but it’s somewhat ‘throttled’ to ensure boosting a post delivers a benefit. You also have the same loss of control as YouTube with ads and links to other content appearing on videos. For a free service, it provides a decent range of metrics. For certain types of content, it’s a good option for engagement.

Vidyard 

Vidyard is fairly similar to Wistia and caters mainly to businesses and marketing professionals. It does have a free package but most users will pay for the additional features of the upgraded service. It provides unlimited storage for videos, even in 4k with no pesky adverts or pop-ups. Additionally, it allows customisation of the video player and allows you to place Calls to Action throughout. It features a good range of analytics and performance tracking options. It has distribution tools but lacks any kind of internal community or social network to help promote your videos.

Which Hosting Platform Is Best?

Really, this depends on the type of marketing video you have produced, consider its use, and who the intended audience is. Generally paid services are best for website embedding, whereas free services tend to do better in terms of engagement and social reach.

Can I Use More Than One?

The obvious solution might be to just use both types of video hosts – a paid and free service to cover all bases. This is possible but it’s worth considering the potential consequences. One of these is that if a video appears on your website and YouTube then you could be losing out on traffic. The YouTube version will often rank higher than the one that appears on your website. By having two versions you also risk losing out on the more advanced analytical data that a paid service provides. A good video marketing agency will be able to weigh up these factors and identify what’s going to work best for you.

Promotion

Now you have decided where to host your video content, all you need now is for people to see and share it! Your method of doing should already have been worked out in your video content strategy, but let’s quickly cover it again. 

Effective promotion requires an understanding of your audience and platform. Although it is tempting, remember, it is not useful to push content out on every platform, just as it is not useful to appeal to every audience type, focus on the promotion that is going to deliver the best results. 

The Kartoffel Films team will guide you through the process of building a social media strategy – advising you how, where and when to share your content. After a while as you witness the metrics and responses, you should start to get a feel for effective promotion yourself. Over time, you’ll be able to perfectly focus your social media promotion efforts on what works best for your audience. 

So, what are the social media options for video content promotion?

Youtube

Launched in 2005, Youtube is now the second most visited website in the world with users watching more than one billion hours of video per day. The scale and popularity of YouTube make it one of the easier platforms to use.

This being said, without an understanding of the way Google works, it’s a place where great content can be buried. Great video titles and thumbnails contribute to preventing this. YouTube also tends to be used in a similar way to Google. People will type in questions in the search for answers. This makes ‘how to’ style guides and educational content particularly well suited to the platform. The YouTube algorithms also like channels that are consistently putting out new content, so it benefits from having a long-term strategy rather than sporadic uploads.

Facebook

One of the biggest sites for social media video, Facebook has the ability to dramatically increase the number of people watching your content. So much of that potential, however, comes from viewers liking and sharing your content. Unlike Youtube, videos on facebook are not instantly available to those who search. Your video will only gain views from those who follow your channel, and like and share your content. For this reason, by far the content that works best is that suited to a very specific target audience.

Instantly engaging videos like those that have incredible imagery or pack an emotional gut punch are destined to do the best. 

Reports have shown that a staggering 85% of Facebook videos are watched on mute. Commuters are one group that frequently watch silent video content. It is worth remembering this when advertising B2B. Silent video has become the new indisputable standard and marketing campaigns must be aware of this. When captions are provided, 37% of viewers said that they are encouraged to turn the sound on because the videos seem more interesting, and 29% said that even with the sound off, they were better able to understand the video because of captioning.

It’s also worth noting that the Facebook algorithm prefers video content that’s uploaded to the site over content that’s linked to it.

Twitter

Twitter is an incredibly fast-past platform and sharing video material on the site can seem daunting, even pointless at times. Try not to be disheartened, Twitter has numerous standout areas that make it well worth the struggle. The site has much less ‘filtering’ than most other platforms. This means the most effective content tends to be authentic, personal and snappy over lengthy corporate productions.

Twitter provides a fantastic opportunity to ‘ride the wave of trending topics and even bag yourself a viral video!

Talking of viral videos…

TikTok

A relatively new arrival that has taken the social media scene by storm, TikTok now has a colossal one billion monthly users worldwide. To put this into perspective, it took Twitter six years from its launch to gain the same number of monthly users that TikTok has amassed in three. 

Marketers are drawn to TikTok has it upholds key social media trends of creativity and collaboration, especially amongst younger audiences. Its super faced paced nature keeps users engaged for considerably long periods, with the average user spending 52 minutes per day on the app.  

In the past year TikTok has increased its maximum video length from 15 seconds to 3 minutes. This brings even more value to the platform, allowing users to upload a wide variety of marketing video content. Even better is the fact that content on the site can achieve millions of views with no previous following thanks to its personalised user-centric algorithm.

LinkedIn

Described as the ‘world’s premier professional social network’, LinkedIn has a slightly different feel to the other social media platforms we have discussed. It’s much more serious and aimed towards corporate style advertising. This doesn’t however mean that it’s an unfriendly place to share video content, with 774 million users, it would be a mistake to underutilise it.  

It’s the most useful place to share business related content, whether it’s B2B advertisement or a video discussing industry-relevant issues. Using the site to its fullest potential can improve brand awareness, build your network, boost leads and increase revenue. 

Here’s a fun fact for you, LinkedIn generates leads 227% times more effectively than Facebook or Twitter. With new features such as ‘trending’ topics and hashtags being added all the time, this number is likely to increase even further!

Learning and data

To understand which of your hosting sites and social media platforms are delivering the most productive results, you need to track performance. 

Data analytics delivers a wealth of digital data and information on each video and it is an important part of your content strategy. It should identify the type of content and platforms that work best for your audience. Without the know-how, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of data. Kartoffel Films will help steer you through this process by identifying the metrics which matter most for your videos. Once you have learnt the skills to interpret the data, you can repeat the process for all your content, this will help to sharpen the focus of your video marketing efforts. 

Lets take a more in depth look…

Data Monitoring 

Most video hosting services will provide a range of basic data tools that let you track metrics. They will enable you to see how many times your audience has viewed and shared your video, along with some additional information like the types of people the content has attracted. 

Using a hosting service designed for business users, like Wistia can provide you with much more detailed data. Kartoffel Films has found Wistia to be the best all round third-party solution for data analytics. It provides all of the feedback needed to improve a video marketing strategy. Once a video is uploaded to Wistia, it will start tracking and storing a wealth of information. It generates the best kind of data analytics to generate an idea of how your content is performing.

Review

View count

The most basic metric for any video content is the view count. This doesn’t mean however that it is not important, in fact, it’s quite the contrary. After all it doesn’t matter how brilliant, witty, informative or emotional your video is if nobody is pressing play.

View count gauges how well something is being ‘sold’ over the quality of the content itself. This is why the number can be so variable across your strategy. View count is impacted by factors such as headings, titles, thumbnails and video length.

This number can be boosted on sites such as Facebook with sponsored payments, and with influencers who draw viewers to your content. Both of these methods are definitely worth considering if you are wanting to up your view count.

Engagement

Engagement tracks the performance of the video content itself. The metric records how long a viewer watches a video before they stop it or scroll on.

As the engagement rate tracks the percentage of a video that has been watched, you should be aiming for a higher percentage as this means people have been glued to it for longer. 

A low percentage engagement rate largely suggests that a video is failing to connect with its viewers, but it can also mean that you are attracting an audience that is not suited to your content. An example of this is so-called ‘clickbait’ tactics in which content lures viewers into clicking on something which often isn’t what they thought it was.

Pay close mind to where you are placing your Call to Action, if it comes at the end of the video and not many viewers stay until that point, how can you expect to convert? Consider placing your CTA in a different part of the video, or work towards increasing overall engagement. 

Play Rate

Play rate allows you to track the number of people who have watched your video in a specific location, like a webpage. It lets you monitor where the best place to put vidos may be, for instance at the bottom or top of a page, or in a blog.

Using play rate metrics allows you to find the optimal way to place your videos on a website. Factors influencing play rate include:

• Placing videos in prominent and visible areas.
• Embedding videos on more popular pages.
• Altering the size of a video to make it more eye-catching, using an intriguing thumbnail can also do this. 

Small tweaks like these can deliver major metric boosts. It is particularly important to carry out these processes for your most important website locations such as home, sales, and sign -up pages. 

Heatmaps

Heatmaps, by combining several other metrics, provide a second-by-second view of how your audience has chosen to engage with your content. It’s a geographical representation of the viewer’s journey using a colour-coded timeline to show their interactions. 

It shows what sections of a video have been skipped and what bits have been rewatched. Sections that are regularly skipped show that there is work to be done, parts that are repeatedly watched are doing their job well!

The heatmap information will also pull together details on where the viewer is from, what device they’re using to access the content and whether they have previously watched any of your other videos. With all of this combined, it provides an effective way to get a feel for the video’s engagement level.

Conversions

This keeps track of how many viewers are ‘converting’ as a result of having watched your video. Converting could mean subscribing to a service, signing up to a mailing list or purchasing a product. For promotional content, this is the most important metric there is.

Wistia provides two distinct ways to measure conversions:

Lead Generation:

The system lets you add verified leads into a database directly from your marketing video. This can include a form to fill out before a viewer can play the content. The more leads being collected, the more effective the content is at connecting with your audience and building the level of trust that’s required to share personal contact details.

Call to Action:

Integrating a CTA into a video, at any point in its duration can encourage viewers to click a link, ultimately leading to their conversion. Google UTM codes can track these links with the data added to Google Analytics. These tracking methods are best used with specific sales videos where the audience expects to be given the option to purchase or sign-up.

A/B Testing

A/B testing allows you to analyse the perfomance of alternative forms of video content. It lets you create two pieces of content with the system randomly selecting which appears for each visitor. By doing this, you can quickly create data to help compare and contrast, seeing which version works best.

This method can test:

• Video formats
• Video lengths
• Thumbnails
• Calls to Action

For each video, it will simultaneously track all the basic metrics – play rate, engagement and CTAs. Once you identify the ‘winning’ version, you can make it permanent while removing the alternative.

Social Media

Social media metrics track how users are sharing your content across platforms. Monitoring this can be tricky as different social media sites employ a different set of metrics. Whilst they do cover a similar set of stats, it makes it hard to keep track of peformance across the various sites. For this reason, it is best to only track one or two sites at a time. This allows you to keep focus.

Each social media platform has its quirks and rhythms that you can become familiar with over time. Even small things like posting times can make a big difference to the number of views a video gets.

Our three strategies to boosting social media shares are:

• Give clear ‘shout-outs’ to share, either in the content itself or using ‘sharing’ icons. 
• Create tailored content for a specific platform. What works on TikTok may fail on Facebook.
• Make use of graph tags, snippets of HTML code that allow you to create more social media friendly content.

Conversions 

This tracks the interactions that you have with customers and clients on a particular topic relating to a video – whether it be emails or support calls. This is particularly valuable for video content that intends to explain or provide how-to information. Ideally, the sharing of this content should coincide with a significant drop in the number of related queries and support requests. Similarly, if you’re receiving frequent requests for information or support on a topic, it’s something that can help guide video content creation. It’s also worth keeping an eye on the ways that viewers interact with instructional videos. If they are having to repeat certain sections, it could be a sign that something isn’t clear enough or they don’t have enough time to absorb the information.

Site Metrics

Site metrics keep track of visitor actions and behaviours across a website. When linked with video data, it helps you to formulate a complete picture of what the experience of visiting your site is like. 

Ideally, you should be building up a process that attracts your target audience and then gently moves them to those areas of the website that matter the most – typically, where sales and sign-ups take place. To achieve this you must constantly review to find what works best. You will rarely get it right the first time and the more data you acquire, the more informed decisions you can make.

Let’s take a look at two key site metrics:

Bounce Rate:

This provides a percentage of the number of visitors to your site who do not explore multiple pages. For this reason, a low bounce rate is a bad sign, particularly for hubs like the home page. Ideally you want people to arrive at your site and have a look around other pages on your website, but this isn’t always the case.  A page linked to a particular promotion or campaign can have a low bounce rate while still being extremely effective – helping to attract people for a specific Call to Action without requiring them to visit any other pages.

Time On Page:

How long are people spending on a particular page? This is particularly important for those pages that have video content embedded. If a video is doing its job, then people who visit will have their attention held by the content. It’s this that allows video content to deliver a significant boost to a website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The longer people stay on a page, the higher Google will rank your website.

If you find that a page has a low bounce rate, video may improve this metric. By combining the video play rates, A/B testing and Time Spent on Page, you can monitor the positive changes that occur when you add video.

Comments

Comments left by video viewers are a priceless and often undervalued form of feedback. They provide qualitative feedback on the video content. What type of engagements does it provoke? What kind of conversations are the commenters having? How does it elicit emotions or spark discussion?

While it’s not nice to receive negative comments, they are just as important as positive reactions. They can help to identify problematic aspects of your content or adjust the tone of your content to better please its audience. 

Summary: Minding Your Data

At first, content metrics can seem daunting, but behind the acronyms and data, its all really quite straightforward way to maximise the benefits of your videos. Although it is clear that there is a wealth of data available, most businesses will focus on just a few areas. Working with an agency will allow you to identify and combine all your metrics to culminate a comprehensive view of the success of your content marketing strategy.

The Learning Process 

Having accurate and dependable ways to track the performance of your marketing videos gives you the opportunity to improve your strategy, but how do you actually do it?

Let’s take a look at some of the most common problems encountered throughout a video marketing campaign and how they can be resolved. 

Early Drop-offs

As soon as a viewer clicks on a video, they are formulating an opinion on whether it is worth their time. If you fail to grasp them in the first few seconds, the metrics will display them as an early drop-off. Shuffling the video timeline to include the most enjoyable or intriguing moments at the start is a way to counteract drop-offs. 

Poor Video Marketing Results

Creating great content is only half the battle of your video marketing campaign. If the objective of a video is to sell products, no matter how popular it is, if it doesnt increase sales, it has not been successful. 

When this happens, it’s time to review your CTAs, should they come in earlier, be more assertive or plentiful? Small adjustments can make all the difference to the effectiveness of a CTA and your overall conversion rate. 

Poor Video Views

One of the most basic problems that will be faced, a lack of views surprisingly doesnt always mean that there is a problem with your content. Placement on the wrong platform or issues with promotion can also cause a low view count.

Use data to track down where the problem lies. Once you have done so perhaps try testing out more topical content, improve your promotion or rethink your hosting site. Previously dead videos can be revived with a fresher approach to marketing. 

Incorrect Indexing

An important area to review when looking to improve performances is the way Google indexes your videos. This is the meta-data that allows search engines to correctly categorise and index your content. Without this, content may get lost amongst the blizzard of new videos being uploaded every second. Therefore, tweaking this information can significantly improve the reach of a video. This includes reviewing headings, ensuring descriptions are thorough and keyword rich as well as checking tags and hashtags used.

Audience Problems

Perhaps your video isn’t doing as well as you hoped because it is attempting to engage with the wrong audience. This may be why its getting loads of views, but few conversions. Improve your results by switching to a platform that attracts your audience, for instance if you are after Gen Z engagement, TikTok is your saviour. An effective and professional marketing strategy should prevent this from happening in the first place by making sure that video content, promotion and distribution are aligned with the common behaviours of your audience.

Exit points

A dry interview or a frustratingly dense ‘how-to’ video segment may present itself as an exit point. These are the places in a video where viewers loose engagement to the point of stopping the video. Drop off metrics flag these areas and allow you to adjust them accordingly. 

You can tighten up long segments and review frustrating sections where your audience loses interest. The fix isn’t always about making cuts – for something like an explainer video it can be to include more of an explanation and more ‘space’ for the viewer to absorb the info. The feedback also helps to guide the creation of future videos which avoid some of the identified pitfalls.

Lack of Shares

Shares play a crucial role in the success of marketing videos. Develop something that people love to send to family, friends and colleagues and you have a potentially global audience. For this reason, it can be frustrating when viewers receive your video well but don’t share it. Improving this can be a question of creativity and finding content with the qualities to go ‘viral’. Sometimes it’s best to swallow your pride and ask viewers to share your video in the form of a CTA. There’s a reason why just about every YouTuber will end a video with the all-too-familiar ‘remember to subscribe’ message. It’s because, without that reminder, many people simply don’

Conclusion 

Woah, that was a lot to take in! But don’t worry, agencies like us at Kartoffel Films are here to do all the work for you anyway! 

With over 2000 videos worth of experience, both animated and live-action, we can sort out all of the difficulties and logistics associated with the planning and execution of your video marketing strategy. Want to find out a little bit more about our current processes? Take a look at our ‘Whats New in 2022’ article. 

Forget any hassle or stress on your part, you can simply sit back, relax and watch the video magic happen. Interested? Contact us to get our creative partnership started.