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Many businesses feel left or lagging behind when it comes to video marketing. They don't know where to start. Some have begun implementing video marketing tips and creating video content only to realize they're not finding the right audience or they're leaving viewers disinterested. You don't want video content that wears your potential and existing customers' patience thin. It has to be part of building your brand. How do you do that? Start with these helpful tips for video marketing:

1. Personalize Videos

User data means you have the information to be able to segment your customers in particular ways. The easiest is to plug in every customers' name in each individual e-mail. This is old hat. You may even tailor different versions of content for different groups of customers. Usually this means having three or so different versions of content that target by browsing or buying habits.

Can you do this for each and every customer with video content? Yes. Think of how Facebook does this by employing user content to generate videos with images, events, posts, and even words. Now, you don't have that kind of information, but you can still produce personalized video marketing content that incorporates different elements based on products purchased, location, weather, upcoming events, and other data that you have.

2. Thumbnails Represent Your Video

They say the eyes are the window to the soul. Thumbnails are the window to your video's soul. When posting videos online, make sure they use a visually interesting thumbnail that encourages someone to click. At the very least, it should be an entertaining screen grab from the video itself.

Ideally, the thumbnails for your marketing videos should incorporate multiple elements that represent the videos' contents. Many businesses hire their own artist or work with marketing firms or freelancers to create thematically consistent and eye-catching art for thumbnails. It's not something you can go out to a different artist every time with. This risks a wild range in quality and no visual consistency. Working with the same artist or artists who can reliably deliver content along a theme is important.

3. Live Streaming

Live streaming is extremely popular. It helps share a version of who you and your brand are that seems unfettered and less produced. The effect is to offer “behind the scenes” looks or build a brand based on personality and activity. For instance, fitness companies might live stream personalities working out and running in the gear you sell. There are some things to consider first.

If you don't want to live stream yourself, who does? Is there someone with whom you work that you trust to represent your company well online? Would you rather partner with an existing live streamer?

Live streaming is something you should also rehearse. If you're live streaming a behind-the-scenes look at how a product is designed, build a test video first so you can make sure only the things you want to see are in shot. This helps you hammer out technical details such as sound and lighting, too. It also helps you pare down elements in your stream that might be boring or unneeded.

Think about how craft and cooking shows are presented to live studio audience. Whenever a famous chef prepares a dish and places it in the oven, they immediately pull a previously-cooked version. This skips hours of dead time that would just be spent waiting for something to bake. If you're just sitting there with dead time for even a few minutes, this can completely undermine a live stream.

4. Create Short Videos

When thinking about video content, businesses often think about full 10- or 15-minute YouTube videos. Even the last section talks about live-streams, which can run hours. That's a lot of content to fill.

The opposite end of the spectrum is also important. Short form videos can be strong on their own, and especially when paired with longer form videos. They can even serve to tease longer form videos and streams.

What's meant by short-form? The average Instagram video is only 26 seconds. Ads before YouTube might be as short as 6 seconds, and they've proven incredibly effective. This takes different strengths than longer videos. You want something punchy, concise, and focused on a single message. A fifth of viewers will click away from a video within 20 seconds. What can you communicate to them in that amount of time?

5. Video Content SEO

You're looking for your videos to create strong SEO value for you. As burdensome as the phrase “SEO value” has become, it still dominates whether people see your content or not. Let's cut to the chase. These are the ways to improve your video's SEO, allowing Google to find it easily and feature it more prominently. If you can't do them all, start with what you can. Even doing a few of these massively upgrades your SEO results:

• Host video on your own domain.
• Enable embedding so others can share it.
• Create a video sitemap. A what? It's explained here.
• Videos with descriptions allow Google to make sense of the content.
• Videos that accompany content such as a blog build on each component's SEO.
• Tag your videos with SEO keywords.

6. Don't Sell

Wait, what? Isn't that the whole point of video marketing? Yet one of the most helpful tips for video marketing is to make it about a story. Make it about a personality. Make it about the brand's identity without making it about the brand itself. We live in a world where people are empowered to turn off advertising whenever they like. They can skip ads, fast-forward TV, pay to opt out of ads on services like Spotify, Hulu, and Twitch – people are conditioned to skip ads with immediacy. If your content feels like an ad, they'll go somewhere else.

This is why so many brands share stories and thoughts about what's connected to their industry instead of the products themselves. They're telling stories that are interesting and emotional. People invest their time in that where they'll turn off something that's trying to close a sale. If you don't have experience or interest in telling stories, work with a digital marketing firm – an experienced one, like THAT Agency,  can create some phenomenal pieces.