Why You Must Focus on Video-First Marketing to Engage Audience

You already use videos as a marketing medium; you don’t need me to tell you how they work or how effective they are. However, you need to know about video-first marketing, what it is, how different it is from traditional video marketing, and why it’s effective now.

Let’s break down video-first marketing from different angles.

Video Marketing vs. Video-first Marketing

Simply put, video marketing is when you use videos to promote your brand and offerings; it’s primarily focused on growing and engaging your audience. It doesn’t emphasize each component of the buyer journey, nor does it focus on customization according to different touchpoints and customer segments.

On the other hand, video-first marketing is about using videos as a primary ingredient in the granular levels of marketing. It considers the entire cycle, from awareness to purchase to retention; that’s how leads at each stage of the buyer journey are served with tailored & relatable videos, thus easing the road to conversion. Moreover, in video-first, videos are shared across touchpoints, including blogs, emails, and websites, besides social media and other video-sharing platforms.

Why Is Video-first Marketing Taking the Forefront?

Videos, a culmination of visuals, sounds, and content, significantly impact the audience. Even the most complex topics can be broken down into simple, digestible levels using videos. When the same video medium is reinforced with audience psychographics, thought leadership, buyer journey data, etc., and leveraged as a primary marketing strategy, wonders happen for brands.

As discussed in the Global Virtual MarTech Summit APAC Track, the following reasons contribute to the adoption of video-first marketing in the current scenario:

• Videos are dynamic and personalized based on a lead’s position in the consideration cycle
• Specific videos discuss specific product needs and target focused pain points
• The process works based on buyer intent, affinity, and psychographics, so making videos more relatable is the key.
• Boosts up SEO (more on this later in the article)

How to Nail Video-first Marketing?

Since video-first marketing is about integrating videos in every marketing move, it calls for the right strategy, implementation, and optimization. Let’s lay down the essentials of video-first marketing, one at a time:

• Understanding your audience to the core enables you to strategize your videos by learning and addressing the pain points; it even helps you present your products/services and how your audience would relate to them.
• Mapping out the entire buyer journey so specific videos can be catered to particular prospects at different journey stages.
• Embedding videos across touchpoints, including blogs, white papers, websites, etc., to make a maximum impact even on the audience with the least attention span.
• Including Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in videos to inject authority, credibility, and weightage.
• Focusing on consistency while maintaining quality. 

Mr. Rahul Bibhuti, Marketing Director at Reckitt Indonesia, says that, “Marrying the 3 M’s, namely Message, Messenger, and Medium creates Magic in Video-first Marketing.” He also stresses that strengthening your marketing basics is a prerequisite before adopting video-first marketing strategy.

Video-first Marketing and SEO

Videos and SEO go hand-in-hand, and when you follow a video-first strategy, your SEO results boost because you share videos across multiple touchpoints. Your videos rank for keywords your audience is more likely to search about.

Mr. Henry Dalziel, Head of SEO at YesStyle.com, shares some rare tips on SEO and video-first marketing; here they are:

• Identify the keywords most relevant to your target audience, and if there’s no video reflecting on search results, instantly make videos on that keyword, as it’d be easier to rank.
• Spot the most trending videos in your vertical and use the transcripts to create other content, e.g., blog posts and articles.
• Embed videos in blog posts, articles, websites, white papers, etc.

Takeaway

The video-first marketing approach is a formidable strategy when you have to capture your audience’s attention and make your point in a fleeting moment. However, it’s significant that you ace your marketing basics and precisely define your goals to make the most of video-first marketing by targeting the desired audience.