Why should businesses use videos for content marketing? Is the time and effort of hiring content creators, copywriters, and graphic designers worth it?

The answer is yes. In a media-filled world, video marketing content grabs consumers’ attention, showcases the product you are marketing in action, and builds trust with your target audience. In turn, they share that video.

By creating video content for marketing purposes you accomplish three main things: You create a shareable marketing tool, you establish higher levels of brand trust, and you can increase sales. By creating a shareable marketing tool, you allow your customers the opportunity to do some of the work of marketing for you.

Establishing increased brand trust by making quality video content cements customers' expectations of your brand and product. Combining brand trust and shareable content creates a marketing tool for your customers to generously share the products from your brand that they love. Thus, you gain efficiency even in your marketing strategy.

Creative Video Content Ideas to Grow Your Sales

One of the biggest tools at your disposal as a brand is continuity. Using creative briefs to define brand voice and sending those briefs to contracted creatives ensures your brand voice stays the same in new marketing content that is created. Below you’ll find 5 awesome ways you can use video content to increase sales.

1.  Establish Brand Continuity on YouTube Channels

One of the best tools for any brand but especially newer brands is a YouTube channel. Here you can create stand-alone videos or a playlist of videos explaining your brand, company culture, and the products you want people to fall in love with and share. There are four great ways to start a YouTube strategy with basic video content. Let’s look at each separately.

Vlogging vs. Blogging

Blogs these days are everywhere, and when done correctly they are a great marketing tool. When it comes to YouTube, we are talking about video blogging or vlogging. Research shows that vlogging significantly increases the perceived trustworthiness of the vlogger. A key to making this tool effective is consistency. If you are using a vlog on your YouTube channel for building trust, a regular upload schedule is key. 

Culture Behind the Brand

As much as we all wish it could be a formula, brand culture is the way employees help to bring your brand to life. Sharing this culture with your target customers helps them to see that your employees love working with and using your brand, and it goes a long way to build market trust.

Brand culture includes performance awareness and encouraging and helping your employees and customers thrive. Companies should be forward-moving while keeping employees and consumers in mind. Brand culture includes not being too rigid in your definitions and keeping growth options open. There’s much more, but that is for you to learn at another time.

Cross-Channel Video Engagement

You can add videos from YouTube right to your website so that you can create cross-medium content. Receive audience engagement on your website and YouTube channel at the same time by driving traffic from one to the other. To create your YouTube channel content you have a lot of options including DIY video apps or even hiring someone to manage your content.

Webinars

Webinars are live video conferences that allow the host or hosts to connect to viewers worldwide at the same time. During a webinar, the host can choose to show video of themselves, present slide shows and demonstrations, and even invite guests to join the video. This allows people from multiple locations to be present at an event at a low cost to all parties.

Webinars are an excellent way to increase brand education. In tandem with teaching and selling, you can also host live interviews with leaders in your brand’s niche, which shows a commitment to cooperation with other brands. So whether you are seeking education, or you're an expert looking to increase awareness, webinars are a great marketing tool.

2. Post Videos on Social Media

Social media is the biggest way to use video content for marketing. You can increase your brand awareness using video ads on social media, you can keep your target audience engaged with your brand, and you can even sell items on social media.

Webinars

Similar to hosting webinars on YouTube, webinars are frequently hosted on social media. This allows you to educate, engage, and grow your target audience where they are already spending time browsing while waiting in line or on their lunch break.

Event Compilations

If your business frequently hosts events, video compilations are an excellent choice to engage your audience and consumers. It opens their eyes to see what events with your company look like, and it creates a possible desire for them to be at the next event.

3. Real-Time Connection, Live Video on Social Media

Once unconventional and cumbersome, live video streaming has become a must-have as a part of your social marketing strategy. Customers have gotten to the point of expecting live video.

As many as 82% of surveyed social media users expect a live video from a brand, and as many as 62% of people will react negatively to poor video quality from a brand on a live stream. Enjoyment of a video increases sales intent by 97% and brand association increases by 139%. 

Social Media Live Video

The best live videos feel like a conversation with a good friend. You might want a team of people to help you by operating the camera, monitoring sound quality, and managing questions that appear on the live feed in comments.

The professionals even work out a system so that questions submitted by your followers are addressed on air. This often includes copying and pasting into a Google Doc and having multiple laptops during filming. Be sure to spend a little time working on your video description ahead of filming. Important information and links should be there when you go live.

Be sure to promote your live video ahead of time to ensure the best audience engagement possible. It is an excellent idea to do a test run before going live. Posting links in the live feed is also a way to help engage audiences during the video feed.

Live Event Coverage

Just because we watch live streaming online instead of live TV doesn't mean live event coverage is dead. It just includes new mediums of broadcasting. Live event coverage allows audiences that are not able to be in the same location to participate with your brand and engage, even if they cannot attend an event in person.

Live Product Releases

Posting to social media about a new product being released grows anticipation and can even promote social engagement. Often it can grow your brand awareness as a side benefit. Be sure to post regularly leading up to your live product release, and post all the relevant links in your video description, so your audience can engage with your live video

4. Instagram Stories as Videos

Social stories are an ever-rising mode of marketing. Once posted, stories last for 24 hours and offer the ability for your target audience to share on their own social story, meaning your engagement gets extended. You can post video stories to Instagram and copy them to Facebook stories, or you can post separately and use A/B testing to see which style is the most effective.

If you are using stories to post videos, learning how to use the feature that allows continuous video and then splits into segments for stories is a must. Another tip is to save your stories so you have a history of marketing content and can retain continuity.

Posting Videos to Instagram Stories

A few ways to increase your marketing power on Instagram stories is by adding relevant hashtags. If you are really savvy, you can even hide a few hashtags by matching colors on the image, thereby increasing views and having uncluttered images and video.

Posting Videos to Facebook Stories

If you are using Instagram to create stories, you can also post the same story to Facebook right from Instagram. However, social engagement and strategy are often different on each social platform.

It is perfectly acceptable to post different content on each version of social media. By doing so, you set up another A/B style test to see which content engages more people. This gives you metrics that help craft future marketing content.

5. Tutorials

Tutorials are another great way to post about your products and increase sales. You can post tutorial videos on all the various forms of social media. It is a great way to educate and engage with your customers, increase sales, and build consumer trust. Make sure you add links and calls to action in your tutorial descriptions.

Many More Options for Video Content Marketing

While this list includes some of the most popular, researched, and effective ways to increase your sales through video content, there are many more options for ways to use and create video content that will increase your sales. Figuring out what might work for your brand could take some research, but that’s where the ideas you read about here can come in handy.

Once you research and start using video marketing to your advantage, you’ll be glad you put in the work. Your business only has great things to gain by adding videos to your marketing strategy.

Whitney Creath is a copywriter at Earlylightmedia.com. Her desire is to write innovative, honest, and engaging copy that helps businesses and blogs thrive. Creath has written for several companies and enjoys the freedom of being a freelancer. When not writing, she enjoys art, music, spending time with family, and the beach. Contact her on Facebook @creathwriter and Twitter @CreathWhitney.