In 2024, how should overseas brands formulate video marketing strategies?

Nowadays, immersive short videos have become a form of media that users spend the longest time on. Video marketing plays a very good role in promoting overseas brands. So how do you formulate a video marketing strategy?

Today, immersive short videos have become the content format that domestic users spend the most time on. The same is true overseas, where video has been the most popular and effective form of media for four consecutive years.

In this era of short videos, brands going global can no longer rely solely on pictures and text to promote their products and services. According to Wyzowl statistics, 88% of all marketers believe that video content marketing is an important part of their marketing strategy, and 91% of companies use video as a marketing tool.

Pic fromwyzowl.com

The importance of video marketing cannot be overstated. Whether it’s to increase brand awareness, promote a product or service, or drive traffic to your website, video marketing is effective in reaching and connecting with your target audience.

If you want to get started, or want to adjust your current video marketing strategy, don’t worry. After reading this article, the “2+2+5 rule” will help you create a successful video marketing strategy in 2024.

1. Two questions that must be clarified before doing it

1. What is the purpose of your video marketing?

When considering or initially planning to do video marketing, don’t blindly follow the crowd. If everyone else does it, you may end up spending money and budget but not seeing any results. If the team doesn’t have clear goals, it will waste a lot of valuable time. You need to think clearly about the purpose of video production and the effect you want to achieve, which will affect the video production itself.

Think clearly about your goals, set specific measurable goals and define KPIs. The key indicators for the success of your video marketing efforts can be views, engagement, click-through rate or conversion rate, or even the number of new customers and transaction volume.

2. How much budget are you willing to invest in video marketing?

The annual marketing expenses are limited, and the company will also assess the specific ROI. If you invest too much in the video budget, then you will have no budget to spend on other channels, and vice versa. If the ROI is too low and does not meet expectations, it will be difficult to continue. Even strategic budget investment cannot be unlimited. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the budget that can be invested and how the budget is linked to the transaction assessment indicators.

2. Two essential surveys to find advantages and determine core positioning

1. User portrait analysis

Once you have determined your goal, you should consider who you want to reach. Not everyone is your target audience. The essence of video marketing is marketing, which is inseparable from marketing and operations.

Typically, I create a Persona to represent my ideal customer: I analyze customer data and conduct market research to understand the demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points of my target audience.

Also take a moment to think about your target audience:

• What are their interests and pain points?
• What content are they engaging with on social media and video platforms?
• Where does your target audience spend most of their time?

2. Industry trend research

The result of blindly making videos is that the videos you spent a lot of time and energy on will not have any views at all. You need to research the popular video content on different video platforms/industries/companies.

• Platform research : What content is popular on the existing popular video platforms? Keep watching videos to develop your online sense.
• Industry research : At least sort out the top 50 popular videos in your industry, analyze the video type, video length, background music, shooting techniques, and analyze why the video became popular.
• Competitor research : What are the popular videos of your peers? The time dimension should cover: history, current year, recent period. And make tracking the popular videos of your competitors a routine. Key point: You must continue to track regularly!!!

3. Start your video marketing in 5 simple steps

1. Plan video publishing content

Plan video topics, schedule release dates, and ensure steady content.

By planning ahead and scheduling the content and topics of your video releases, you can maintain consistency in your content and avoid gaps in your release schedule.

For example, at the beginning of the month, I will plan the monthly video plan, Tiktok, YouTube videos and live broadcast frequency in advance, which is conducive to arranging work in advance. PS: The picture below has been anonymized, FYI.

As for how to finalize the video content, I won’t go into details here. I will write about it when I have the chance. B2B companies are more suitable for: webinars, case studies, tutorials, corporate brand videos. However, consumers usually watch product demonstrations and how-to videos.

Here are some things to consider when creating your calendar:

• The type of video you are producing (e.g., product demonstration, customer testimonial, behind the scenes)
• Live broadcast
• Release frequency (e.g., once a week, twice a month)
• Publishing Platform

2. Choose the best platform to distribute your video

Before you start making videos, be sure to consider the platform you want to distribute them on. This will affect the content of your videos. The distribution mechanisms of different platforms are different. Currently, the most people consider Tiktok and YouTube, so here we will focus on comparing the two platforms:

In terms of content:

• Content characteristics →TikTok focuses on fun, YouTube focuses on professionalism;
• Target audience → TikTok is younger, YouTube is more widespread;
• Algorithm logic → TikTok is personalized, YouTube focuses on audience;

Tiktok platform pushes traffic very quickly in a short period of time, and adopts a "decentralized" mechanism and an information flow funnel algorithm:

When you upload a video, it will be pushed to 100+ users (especially your fans) after being reviewed by the system. The system will randomly select your fans, people with similar viewing preferences to you, people in your geographical vicinity, and random information for push. Based on the initial playback feedback, especially the completion rate, like rate, comments and forwarding , if the first wave of audience feedback is good, the video has the hope of being detonated and the chance of entering the next traffic pool is higher.

The original intention of designing YouTube's recommendation algorithm was to continuously increase the viewing time of users on the YouTube website and recommend videos based on the viewers' preferences. In short, YouTube's focus is not on the content of the uploaded videos, but on what videos the audience is watching.

YouTube's recommendation mechanism takes into account the following factors: user interest, viewing time, likes, and region:

Instead, YouTube looks at the following metrics for its recommendation algorithm:
● Do people actually watch it? When a video is recommended, do people actually watch it, ignore it, or click “not interested”?
● How long do people watch it? The YouTube algorithm looks at both the view duration and the average percentage viewed to inform the ranking.
● Did viewers like it? Likes and dislikes are evaluated, as are engagement rates and post-watch survey results.
● What is your regional context? The time of day and the language you speak also influence the YouTube algorithm.

In terms of video format, we need to consider:

• Average viewing time
• Size and sound restrictions: Tiktok shorts and YouTube shorts are the same size, but YouTube long videos are of another size; in addition, many users now turn off the sound when watching videos, so subtitles are also important to increase coverage.
• Budget

3. Optimize video search engines

Whether you are posting on Youtube, Tiktok, or on a website, you need to take SEO into consideration.

To increase exposure and reach on your videos, it's important to optimize your video metadata :

Write eye-catching titles, detailed video descriptions, and relevant tags: YouTube SEO optimization reference "How to optimize the SEO of YouTube videos without spending money?" On Tiktok, you should pay attention to your tags and video descriptions.

In addition, you can use other platforms and websites, such as Quora answers, or embed video content on existing websites to achieve the effect of backlinks.

Through the power of video search engines, increase video exposure and have the opportunity to attract more viewers.

4. Multi-channel distribution to maximize marketing

Creating wonderful content is only half of success. Different platforms have different promotion policies, and promotion should be carried out in combination with the platforms.

To maximize the growth of your channel, actively promote your videos, try sharing on social media platforms, interacting with your audience, collaborating with other creators, and even reaching your existing users through email marketing. Here are some effective and simple ways:

• By using EDM emails, we regularly send updated videos and series of themed journals to users, which not only provides users with useful content but also increases the viewing time of the videos.
• Repost the video on social media such as Instagram, FB, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. to effectively reach your audience.

5. Continue to focus on video data, analysis and improvement

Regularly analyzing video data and performance is critical to growth.

YouTube needs to focus on key metrics like views, watch time, engagement, and subscriber growth to gain insight into what content is working and what needs improvement.

Tiktok needs to focus on playback volume, completion rate, user interaction data (likes, comments and shares), number of fans, etc.

Author: Echo Yan