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5 Types of Videos for Every Video Marketing Strategy

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5 Types of Videos for Every Video Marketing Strategy

To create a successful video marketing strategy, you need to create many videos. This is easy to figure out.

The tough part to figure out is the types of videos you should be creating to keep your audience engaged

Videos are everywhere and people are devouring them in every shape and form. Why wouldn’t they? Videos are interesting, easier to connect with, easy to remember and less hard work. But, for a company, marketer, educator or any content creator for that matter, it’s an uphill task to figure out what videos they should include in their video marketing strategy.

Sure, you can go gung-ho and try creating as many types of video content as you can, and then wait to see which one sticks with the viewers. The problem with this strategy is that you end up spending a lot of time on fruitless pursuits. In other words, you create videos that fetch a low number of views and engagement.

Instead, what you should be doing is focus on the most important types of videos, stay consistent in producing them, and, once you have an audience, experiment with more video ideas.

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How to find the right type of videos for you?

To have a full-fledged understanding of what types of videos are right for you, there are three main areas where you have to concentrate – your business, your audience and your competitors.

Your business

No one knows your business better than you. You don’t have to be a big-shot entrepreneur or a Harvard-educated MBA for that. You may be an independent content creator, but only you can determine your goals. The same goes for your video marketing too – start by identifying the marketing goals

Identify marketing goals

Having a goal is like giving direction to your marketing strategy. What is it that you want to achieve with your marketing? Do you want to create more awareness for your product? Or, is it the conversion that you want to achieve? Your videos should resonate with your goal. For example, if you want to create more awareness about your product, your strategy should prioritize creating short videos related to your company, team, product and its variants.

Learn more about your product

Knowing your product gives you more confidence to make videos and makes them more convincing for the viewers. You should know what are the strengths of your product. How you can use them in the videos. For example, if you sell cloth bags online that are eco-friendly and sustainable, then use such keys to differentiate your product from competitors. Talk more about the advantages of using eco-friendly bags and why more people should adopt them

Your customers

Your customers are your target audience for your videos. You have to take care of likes and preferences while making videos. And, to find your audience’s taste, here are the two things you have to keep in mind

Find out the buyer’s persona

A buyer’s persona is about building the worldview of your target audience. It includes their demographics like age, gender, income & geographic location. It also includes their likes, interests, challenges, and goals in life. A buyer’s persona doesn’t give the microscopic details of every buyer’s life, however, it’s an immensely powerful tool to learn about your audience. Once you know the buyer’s persona, you can experiment with video content that will be liked by your audience

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Know the buyer’s journey

Similar to a buyer’s persona, is the buyer’s journey. A buyer’s journey is made of steps that a buyer takes before finally deciding to buy a product or service. There are four major steps that a  buyer goes through – Attention, consideration, evaluation and decision. This journey looks like a funnel with the wider base referred to as the top-of-the-funnel buyers. At this stage, the buyer is aware of their challenges and is looking for a solution. The lower part is referred to as the bottom-of-the-funnel buyers, as only selected buyers decide to stay on the journey and continue to show interest in your product. Videos play an important role in keeping your audience informed at every step of the journey. For example, at the evaluation stage, where buyers are evaluating your product along with competitors, you can make their job easier by making a video on what makes your product better than others

Your competitor

There’s no doubt that you have done extensive research to find out how you can make your product better than your competitor’s. Great! But, don’t just stop there. Stalk their video marketing strategy. You have no idea about the potential of generating ideas from your competitor’s video marketing plan.

Here are the two broad areas where you should be looking –

Check their video distribution channels

You can watch videos on multiple platforms. It’s not just websites or YouTube where you’ll find videos of different brands. Check where your competitors are more active. This will tell you where you should be concentrating to build an audience. You can have a separate series of videos specifically planned for this type of platform to take advantage of its popularity.

Measure engagement metrics

Along with checking where your competitors are posting more videos, you should also concentrate on how the audience is engaging on the videos. Is there a particular type of video that is garnering more likes, comments or followers? If yes, then you need to start creating them too. These are some low-hanging fruits that you should take advantage of while making your video marketing strategy

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Five types of videos you can’t miss including in your video marketing strategy

The previous section of this blog was to tell you how you can find the types of videos that will work for growing your brand. But, you know what, things slip through the cracks. Even when you have followed all the above steps, you can still miss out on some important videos. So here is our list of the top 5 types of videos that you can’t miss including in your video marketing strategy

1) Product videos

Product videos talk about your products. These types of videos showcase the strength of your product and tell your target audience how it can solve their challenges. Product videos need not be very long. Of course, it depends on what you’re including in the video. For example, if it’s a product walkthrough video, it will be more lengthy as it goes to the depth of your product. This type of video works great when you’re launching a new product line. Or, an advanced plan for customers that require a customized product. Moreover, product videos are also very effective for audience who are at the awareness stage of the buying journey and are not very familiar with your product

2) Short-form videos

1649368438 660 5 Types of Videos for Every Video Marketing Strategy

This is 2022, and you have to include short-form videos in your video marketing plan. People don’t have the patience to watch long videos, they want more information in the least amount of time. This is particularly true for social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram & TikTok. For example, the maximum length of videos on TikTok is 15 seconds. But, an average TikTok user spends 26 minutes every day. This is also good news for your business because 68% viewers will happily watch business videos if it’s less than 1 minute in length

3) Explainer videos

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Explainer videos tend to be shorter. They’re great for highlighting single features in your product that every customer should know about. A bit of context on how it works, how customers can access it and how it solves the problem does the job. You can also include explainer videos in your blogs and help documents as a visual aid to whatever the user is reading. Explainer videos are effective for prospective customers who are in the consideration or evaluation stage of the buyer’s journey. These types of videos help them to explore more exciting features that they could’ve missed in the initial part of trying out the product

4) User-generated content

User-generated content are videos created by users after they have liked using a product. Think of it as a customer testimonial in a more raw form. These types of videos create great publicity for your brand because they come from your customers directly. This acts as a social proof and more potential customers find your brand trustable. Although this type of content is created by your customers, you can always encourage them to record their experiences of using the product and sharing them on social media. Your participation will be minimal in this case, so the content still remains genuine and doesn’t look like a propaganda or corporate promotion strategy

5) How-to videos

How-to videos focus on telling the viewer on how to perform an action or complete a task. It’s made with a specific objective and the intention is to serve the details in the shortest time possible. A how-to video often gets mixed up with explainer video, but there is a difference. An explainer video is about how a feature or a module of a product works. Whereas, a how-to video is more about how you can use the feature to perform an action. There are many ways of making a how-to video. You can use demonstration, animated videos or a screen recorder to record simple screen and webcam videos with the help of your computer

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BONUS: Use a video content calendar

It can get a bit overwhelming while making a video marketing strategy. There are multiple types of videos with different platforms to focus on. In such a case, your ideas can clash or your video ideas might run dry very soon. In that case a video content calendar can be very useful.

A video content calendar helps you to keep track of video ideas for weeks, months and years. This keeps your team informed and you can plan your activities accordingly. In addition to that, you can keep adding ideas to the calendar, and then brainstorm with your team on how to get working on it.

To help you get started with a video content calendar, you can download it for free from this ultimate guide on video marketing strategy. This calendar comes pre-filled with video ideas for different platforms that we discussed above. So that you can get started with video marketing without spending time procrastinating.

Link to above image: https://www.vmaker.com/ebook/video-marketing-strategy#downLoadDiv

1649368438 192 5 Types of Videos for Every Video Marketing Strategy

It’s time for action

So what are you waiting for? You know how you can find the right type of videos for you, what are the five most essential types of video, and how to get started with video marketing using a video content calendar.

The only thing that you have to focus from here is being consistent with creating videos. Video marketing is for the long-haul. Your results might come slow at the beginning, but if you put in the effort consistently, results will start showing up.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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