But what IS video marketing is, and how do you do it well?

In order to develop a successful digital marketing plan, the team, marketers, and video pros alike should bring video content in the mix. Although the concept of "video marketing" could be easy to understand (essentially the inclusion of videos into your marketing campaigns), it is difficult to figure out how you can go about effectively implementing it.

What is the importance of video marketing?

The rise of websites like and YouTube and social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter have now added video to their platforms, as well as dramatic improvement in the streaming quality itself (bye bye to that dreaded buffering), videos now appear across all stages of what's referred to as the marketing funnel. The traditional funnel appears like this: You intro someone to your business (awareness stage) and then educate them on the benefits (consideration stage) to justify the benefits of your offer (decision stage) and then keep them (delight the stage).

So how do you do video marketing right?

Let's bring life to a typical video-marketing funnel through a real-world (but really a made-up) instance. WebThyme is a (imaginary) software company which helps users create and manage websites. Jenn is an aspiring customer.

• A good prospect Jenn is set to start a health and wellness site. WebThyme's intended audience are entrepreneurs from small companies.
• The best channel to go with: Jenn Googles advice regarding starting a business and comes across one of WebThyme's video clips in a blog post in which they tell entrepreneurs' stories. Enthusiastic, she joins WebThyme's newsletters as well as they provide Jenn a weekly newsletter filled with useful information.
  
• The right action:Jenn clicks on a hyperlink in a newsletter that leads her to a landing page, with a short video, which delves into WebThyme's latest features for entrepreneurs with small businesses. She taps button linking to a free trial -calling to move -- and chooses to try it.

This is just one example of a possible video-marketing scenario. But how does that play out on a more granular or actionable basis? What are the top video-marketing practices for key channels like email, social media, and your company website? Let's dig in...

Investigating social media

What makes social media so efficient for growth? When your followers who already follow you are able to like, comment on or share your articles and share the content to their friends and connections, some who may decide to follow your blog. One method to get more leads within this community is to include email capture forms, available with Business software, which allows you to gather the viewers" details directly inside the player embedded. After that, you are able to easily import the emails into marketing email services such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, as well as Constant Contact.

Maybe you'd like your visitors to go to a landing page where they can learn more. It's possible! Business allows you to add clickable CTAs that allow you to send people exactly to the place you want.

It is also possible to expand your reach and acquire new followers on a larger scale by using the use of paid social media. Depending on the specific site that you are on, you may be able to target specific groups, and also advertise your content through pre-roll placement or sponsored posts.

Let your email campaigns flourish

If it's about emails, videos play a significant role. time. They can increase click-through rates of 200-300% (that's so many percents or individuals) in addition to reducing the number of un-subscribers. However, many email applications can't handle videos that are that are embedded directly in emails- but it's easy to solve this problem by placing a play button over an image that is still of your video and driving to a landing page which has the whole thing.

This is fairly easy to accomplish with the email marketing systems we mentioned up there along with marketing automation systems such as HubSpot. And #protip: this is an ideal way to determine which thumbnail is most effective for click rates. In general of thumb, you could improve your campaigns" rate of conversion by adjusting your copy and design to correspond with the landing pages they drive to.

Your website, packed with amazing videos

 Home Page

A majority of businesses create an overview video for their homepage, one that describes what you're all about and why your work is important, and the problem that you're addressing. This vastly impacts how your brand is thought of by someone just coming across your company's name. Take Canary For instance.

 Landing pages

Although your website serves many purposes for a wide variety of users, your landing pages are great for educating specific segments of your customers about the wonderful things you offer in order to convince people to take an decision. People who market to your landing pages come from online ads as well as social media, blogs, and search engines. These videos help convert these leads into customers. For instance, take an look at our Business pages.

 Blog

This is an important source of inbound traffic to your website, particularly if your content contains informative information, business news and thought-leadership on the topics that people are interested in as they're likely to search for those subjects on Google. Also, it's a fantastic destination for sharing product and business news, special events, as well as best practices to share with your audience. Need an example? This article will be (hopefully) more engaging with videos sprinkled throughout.

 Page for FAQs and product pages

All that is needed to put everything together

If your strategy for video marketing works well it creates an amazing environment that helps grow your company by attracting new followers and engaging existing ones. Your video-rich blog posts are ranking highly in results for search engines and your emails -featuring stunning video thumbnails -- lead fans to to your landing pages, with relevant videos and distinct CTAs and clear CTAs. All of them can be optimized to generate leads and increasing the conversions. All of this is measurable, trackable, and able to be improved in the course of time. Speaking about...