It is hard to maintain a strong brand presence without video marketing. Whether local or national, brick and mortar or eCommerce, goods or services, video content is crucial to success in the current marketplace.

Here are some recent numbers from an Animoto study to put this into perspective:

Basic Stats

• 93% of marketers report that they reach new customers through the use of video content
• 73% of consumers say that social media content has made an impact on their buying decisions
• 45% of consumers say that video is their preferred form of social content, with image, link and text content coming in second, third and fourth, at 22%, 13% and 10% respectively
• About a third of consumers will review a brand’s social media content before deciding whether to go to their website in the first place
• 45% of consumers report that their first encounter with a product or service is through video

So this clearly establishes a couple of things.

1. You need to pursue video content marketing through social media to maintain a strong brand presence in the modern age.
2. Everyone is doing it. So it’s going to be hard to stand out.

Video content is necessary, but all it accomplishes on its own is that it puts you in the running. Producing video content earns you a shot at getting seen, but it won’t guarantee that you are seen in a crowded marketplace. What does it matter that your videos are making thousands of impressions if nobody’s clicking play?

How do you produce the right kind of video content?

It’s all a process of narrowing-down. As in any data-driven marketing decision, you take your options, cut them in half, cut them in half again, and again, and again until you are getting the most effect for your efforts. You’ve probably taken a look at your analytics and found that certain kinds of content will perform better when posted at certain times of day and on certain days of the week. The same sort of thinking applies to the process of developing, producing and posting your video content.

This begins with…

Categories

The Animoto survey found that three types of video content comprised the vast majority of views:

1. How-to videos
2. Videos about sales and promotions
3. Top 5’s

One of these categories is probably on-brand with your product or service. If it’s not immediately apparent, you can try testing content in each category and gauge their performance. Sale-announcement videos are always a good idea, but you might find that your target audience prefers how-to’s to top 5’s, or vice-versa, and produce content accordingly.

Where Are You Posting?

The Animoto survey suggests that Facebook and Youtube lead the way for video views, but Instagram is the clear winner for sales-per-view. People are specifically on Instagram to discover something new, whether it’s a content producer or a new ice cream shop. This means that your viewers are already in the right frame of mind to discover whatever it is that you’re offering them. Users on Facebook and Youtube are generally looking for content that they’re already familiar with, favorite game streamers, keeping up with friends and family and so on.

This does not necessarily mean that you will have the most success with Instagram. Every brand attracts a different audience, and while more brands than not may enjoy more engagement on Instagram, you might have more success on Facebook if your demographic is a little older, or even Pinterest, which trails far behind the video leaders, but might be perfect if you’re after an arts-and-craft audience.

Calibrate And Refine

All of this data can set you off in the right direction, but getting the most out of any social media content is a process of constant calibration and refinement. Almost nobody gets lucky and hits the target dead-center on the first try. You might post a dozen videos and get fewer than one hundred views on each one. But one of them is going to be an outlier, one of them is going to have a few views more than the others. So you produce a dozen more in that direction, and, again, you have an outlier, one that produces twice as many engagements as the runner-up, and you keep following the outlier and following the outlier until you get a sense for exactly what catches the attention of your target viewer.

There’s no secret formula for producing attention-grabbing videos in a crowded marketplace, because every brand is different. But if you keep testing and adjusting your aim appropriately, you will discover exactly what your customers are looking for.