How to Develop a Social Media Video Marketing Strategy

Social media is the main channel for video marketing. All major social platforms support video content and ads. This gives organizations plenty of opportunities for generating leads, conversions, and sales.

Social media video marketing works best when it’s applied strategically. Otherwise it can lead to inconsistent results.

To learn how to develop your social media video marketing strategy, check out our short guide on the topic in the remainder of this post.

Advantages of Taking the Strategic Approach to Video Marketing

Video has a number of advantages that make it an excellent tool for marketing. Videos are:

• Cost-effective
• Easy to produce
• Informative
• Engaging
• Reusable

Another point in favor of video is the scale of demand, particularly on social media. Major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn have kept expanding support for video content for the past decade, creating an environment where users communicate by creating and sharing videos. As a result, marketing video content is very effective in such an environment.

How to Create a Social Media Video Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps

Contrary to what you might believe, you don’t need a business planning department to create a video marketing strategy. All you need to do is follow these 7 steps.

1. Define Your Marketing Goals

The first step is to define the overarching goal of your social media video marketing strategy. What do you want to accomplish with your marketing efforts? Do you want to increase sales, spread brand awareness, create engagement, gather subscribers, find influencers to work with, or some combination of these? If you can define these goals in terms of numbers, all the better – this will make it easier to perform analytics in step 7.

2. Determine Your Target Audience

Next, you must determine who is your target audience. These are the people you want to influence to perform actions such as ordering products, subscribing to services, or talking about your organization in various online circles. It’s important to find out as much as you can about your target audience. Knowing your audience’s geographical location, interests, and age is a good place to start, as this information is often publicly available on major social media platforms.

3. Select a Platform for Your Content

All major social media platforms have extensive support for video content and video ads. Each platform has slightly different video specs, so you’ll probably have to make slight adjustments to your content to reuse it on different platforms. As for the specificity of each platform, you probably know the gist of it:

• Facebook is mainly used by Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials, and covers practically every content demographic or niche.
• Instagram is mainly used Millennials and Gen Z, and is focused almost exclusively on images and video content.
• Twitter is mainly used by Millennials, and is focused on news and current events.
• LinkedIn is used by business professionals of all ages.
• TikTok is used predominantly by Gen Z, and is focused on ephemeral, short-form video content.

4. Choose a Video Type

Social media marketing videos come in several types. You can include every type in your video marketing strategy, but it usually best to focus on a couple of types that make the most sense for your business. Here are some of the possible types:

• Explainer video – for explaining a particular topic to a layman audience.
• Product video – for describing products and their uses.
• Branding video – for sharing company values, goals, and history.
• Testimonial video – for giving customers the opportunity to praise your brand.
• Event video – to share footage from event you’ve participated in.

5. Set up Production

Thanks to online video creation tools, making social media marketing videos is easier than ever. Most have an easy-to-use UX, free stock assets, tutorials, and access to customer support, so you can set up production quickly. If you want to go further, you can acquire additional equipment such as professional cameras, mics, and lighting. This costs more, but you’ll have a greater degree of control over the final product.

6. Create a Content Schedule

How and when you post content on social media matters. Posting at times when there aren’t many users online is less effective than posting during hours when most of your followers are actively searching for content. So you’ll want to keep track when you videos perform the best, and upload during those hours. Once you establish a pattern, you should stick with it – consistency makes it easier for viewers to fit your content into their content consumption habits.

7. Keep Track of Performance

A good social media video marketing strategy is one who’s performance can be measured. This means keeping track of key performance indicators, variables that accurately portray how your content is performing. These should be contrasted with vanity metrics, which are useful mostly as bragging rights. For instance, the number of likes you have for a Facebook video post is not a good performance indicator, whereas the number of shares is.

Conclusion

And that’s all there is to it. We hope this guide will help you get started with social media video marketing. If you want to learn more about similar video marketing topics, check out the rest of our blog.