Adults spend 103 minutes on average per day watching videos on their devices. 85% of social media users want more video content from brands. Connect with potential customers where they’re spending their time with a social media video marketing strategy.
Video marketing is impactful, but knowing where to start can be intimidating. Are you creating the best type of content for the right audience? When you create video content, do you have a plan to promote it properly on social media?
In this guide, the Philadelphia social media experts at Forge Apollo take you through our proven video strategy for social media.
Set Goals for Video Marketing
Goals are the guiding force of your social media video strategy. You can craft a plan to reach your goals by defining what you want to achieve. They also allow you to evaluate your results and optimize your strategy over time. Did you hit your goals? What can you change or try to meet them better next time?
When creating goals for your social media video content, make sure to create them for each stage of the marketing funnel:
- Awareness – In this stage, the viewer is aware that they have a problem but may not know the cause or what exactly can remedy it. Videos should call out pain points and explain the root issue.
- Consideration – In this stage, the viewer starts researching potential solutions for their problem. Videos in this stage should educate them on your brand’s offered solution.
- Decision – In this stage, the viewer is aware of several potential solutions and is trying to decide which to choose. Videos should call out what makes your brand the best choice.
As you make goals for each stage, ensure they’re SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. SMART goals offer clarity for both planning and performance evaluation.
Define Your Audience
Once you have some goals in mind, define the audience that you’re trying to reach. A defined audience will help you decide what content to make and where to post it.
If you have buyer personas, this is the perfect time to reference them.
It’s helpful for all your marketing efforts to create buyer personas if you don’t have them. You may have a few buyer personas to cover different segments of your business. To get started, here are a few basic questions to ask about your typical customer:
- What’s the age range of your average customer?
- What’s their job title and industry?
- What are their challenges/pain points?
- What are their goals?
- What are their interests?
You can dive deeper to make your persona as detailed as you want. Those questions should give you a solid point to start from, though.
Choose the Best Platforms
Now that you know your goals and audience, you can choose which platforms align best. Social media platform demographics can help you determine which platforms your audience uses the most.
For example, here are the average age demographics for some of the most popular platforms and the percentage of the audience that age group makes up:
-
- 25-34 years old (31.5%)
- 45+ years old (41%)
- Instagram
- 18-24 years old (31%)
- 25-34 years old (31.2%)
- TikTok
- 10-19 years old (25%)
- Twitter
- 18-29 years old (42%)
- LinkedIn
- 25-34 years old (58.4%)
- YouTube
- 15-35 years old (highest reach)
That’s not to say that other ages don’t use those platforms. But, if you’re trying to reach 18-year-olds, you probably shouldn’t base your whole strategy around Facebook.
Understanding the purpose of each platform can also guide your strategy. For example, a B2B SaaS company might succeed more on LinkedIn than on Instagram.
Plan Social Media Video Creative
Planning your video creative will be the bulk of your strategy. Some of the many steps of the production process include:
- Creative brainstorming
- Choosing shoot location(s)
- Casting
- Production (shooting the content)
- Editing videos
Luckily, an experienced Philadelphia video production team like Forge Apollo can help guide you through the entire process.
Factors to Keep in Mind
There are several important factors to keep in mind when planning out content production and editing, including:
- Type of social media video (educational, entertaining, demo, etc.)
- Desired length and aspect ratio of videos
- Budget
- Timeline
Produce Social Media Marketing Videos in Bulk
Forge Apollo’s bulk shooting strategy allows you to get the types of videos you need at their desired length and aspect ratios on your budget and timeline.
We’ll plan one shoot that provides the content you need for months. From a two-day shoot with our client MADabolic, we produced over 70 videos that covered 6+ months of social media posts.
View this post on Instagram
For another client, AMR Breathless Resorts & Spas, Forge Apollo produced 245 pieces of content from one shoot. This strategy allows you to maximize your ROI while minimizing the time spent on shoots.
Post and Promote
Now you’ve reached one of the most fun steps–sharing your content! Decide whether you’d like to post live or schedule posts. Several tools help you schedule posts ahead of time, like Later, HubSpot, and Hootsuite.
Once your post goes live, ask your team to engage with it to encourage the algorithm to share it with more users.
Download our free social media content calendar template to start planning!
Analyze the Results
Once your post is live for a while, it’s time to see how it did and compare its performance to your goals.
How many people watched your videos, and for how long? How did they engage with the content? If you’re posting ads for social media–what was the ROI?
These social media analytics provide invaluable insights and help you refine your social media video marketing strategy moving forward. If your content did well, set higher goals for next month. If it undershot your goals, consider which factors you can adjust for better performance.
Partner with a Video and Social Marketing Agency in Philadelphia
There’s no doubt that video content is vital on social media in this day and age. Creating your video strategy for social media might seem like a lot. But with an experienced Philadelphia marketing agency like Forge Apollo, it can be simple. We not only help with video production, but we can also help you create the entire social media strategy. Contact Forge Apollo today for award-winning video production and an engaging social approach.
