Sep 1, 2021

Easy Ways to Scale Your Video Marketing Efforts on a Budget

8 minute read
Michael Aubry

As a marketer yourself, making the most of your content is essential to ensuring an effective and efficient campaign. While there are many forms of marketing available, video marketing remains one of the most popular.
However, creating new videos often for a video marketing campaign can quickly become costly and time-consuming. That said, there are ways to do so cost-effectively to get the desired results you want.

Video Marketing in a Nutshell

Video marketing, in essence, is using video to promote or market your business, brand, product, or service. An effective and efficient marketing campaign incorporates video, for example, customer testimonials, live events, corporate training, entertainment; the list is endless.

Why Use Video Marketing?

Humans have short attention spans; as such, if you show them lots of plain text alone, their eyes will naturally wander off somewhere really fast. As such, it would make sense to include media in the content package.

Clear, crisp, and colorful photos help heaps to capture your viewers’ attention, but having videos in the mix, certainly levels up the game. This is because videos are very compelling as they are much easier to digest and can trap people’s attention quickly, retaining their attention for a longer time.

Also, videos help break down complex concepts that help loads when trying to simplify and explain a difficult concept to others.

Caption: Digital video advertising expenditure in the US (Source: Statista)

Digital video advertising expenditure in the United States was projected to increase to 78.5 billion US dollars by the end of 2023. This shows a solid uptrend in the importance of video marketing to marketers.

Video marketing statistics don't lie, as videos certainly help boost conversion rates. Also, they are easily accessible via the many available platforms; YouTube, broadcast television, video boards, etc.

Furthermore, almost everyone owns a smart device; as such, consumers can access online videos anytime from anywhere. Unlike traditional paper marketing, you can easily reach your audience wherever they are more cost-effectively.

Videos are compelling as they combine visual and audio into a single format that can be very emotional, making a direct appeal to the vibrant center of a person. Simply put, the power of human connection via video is undeniable and can be more influential than just reading facts in text.


4 Easy Ways to Scale Your Video Marketing Efforts on a Budget

It is not surprising that video marketing is emerging as a platform for branding and product awareness and is also great for building backlinks and multiplying your likes and shares. However, venturing into video marketing can be costly. That said, this depends on how you eventually go about this, as you essentially don’t need a large budget to make it work.

For starters, all you need is a smart device. Smartphones and tablets come with quality built-in cameras that make creating a video so much easier and cheaper. You can then scale your videos to meet many different goals and purposes.

This then translates into you getting more views on your content using less time and money while at the same time reaching out to more.


1. Repurpose Your Content to Suit Various Platforms

You’ve invested much precious time into crafting a piece of content that has already been published. It is beneficial and meaningful. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to repurpose this content for other channels.

However, most of you may think this to be ineffective and deem this to be a rather lazy way to go about things; you couldn’t be farther from the truth. Repurposing your content for different platforms is an incredibly powerful tactic that, unfortunately, not many are using.

Let’s say you’ve created videos specially meant for your company’s YouTube channel; you’ll only appeal to that one particular audience on your YouTube channel and no one else. So why not take this approach where you create short-form and long-form versions of the said video.

Then, release the long-form video on your blog with in-depth analysis and the short-form one on your social media channels with a link to the blog post.

As such, you’ll pique your viewers’ interest with the shorter video and then entice them to visit your site for more. This increases your organic traffic. Repurposing existing content is all about consistently re-creating videos in new ways to refresh content.


2. Social Media

Considering the huge popularity of social networking platforms across the globe, it would be ridiculous if you’re not already in the social media game. Social media is perhaps one of the most challenging beasts that can be mind-boggling in marketing. While it is effortless to post content and push it out to your audience, identifying the best way to do so that can be daunting.

That said, there are ways you can leverage the power of social media to make it work for you. When it comes to video marketing, uploading and sharing your videos in online groups, forums and communities can help drive a fresh burst of traffic to your content. Remember, your audience is already interested in the topics you’re covering, so chances are, they’ll share your video.

You can up your game by looking at the new social sharing options available. Chances are, you're already familiar with Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. As such, you’d have come across ‘Stories.’

‘Stories’ is an area where you can post photos and videos displayed on your profile for 24 hours before they are automatically deleted. Many use this to promote upcoming events/happenings in a fun and exciting manner.

You can also use ‘Stories’ as a platform to obtain input from your audience. In short, ‘Stories’ are short-style, informal clips that require very minimal editing or planning, which means you don’t need to invest a lot of time and effort into getting some action out there.

Simply put, when used correctly, social media cum video marketing can be one of the most cost-effective ways to engage with your audience and gain meaningful visibility, not forgetting that this can also scale your marketing efforts.


3. Use the Right Tools

To create videos, you only need something as simple as your smart device that you carry with you every day. You don’t need to invest in all that expensive equipment. Also, you can use natural light for the required lighting; you can shoot the video near a window or outside in the hour right after sunrise and right before sunset.

Once you’re done recording your video, there are additional steps that you can undertake through inexpensive tools that you can use to extend your reach and help you gather more data to make the most out of your video marketing:

Tools to Capture Leads

When you have your videos posted, you’d also want to obtain potential leads. As such, capturing those who have watched your videos becomes a necessity. All you need to do is integrate a tool that requires viewers to add their email addresses before they can watch your video.

Some of you may believe that adding such a step will turn more away but bear in mind that those who are seriously interested will not mind doing so. And it is this segment of people whom you want to capture - the serious buyers.

Tools to Create Personalized Videos

Personalized videos connect better with the audience since they’ll feel that they were made especially for them. But you cannot possibly make one video for each person; this is not practical. Instead, you can look into personalized video tools which allow you to create dynamic videos to engage their customers.

Such tools allow you to connect more effectively with your audience by adding personalized tokens to your video content.

Add Text to Video (Source: Motionbox)

You can use Motionbox's Story Creator to add text to your videos easily. There are many text options available; you can change the text size, weight, and even colors. While this may not sound like rocket science, it does add a new dimension to a common medium and enriches the viewing experience.

Tools for Live Video Streaming

You can choose to live stream your marketing videos to engage with your audience in real-time. You can use tools such as OneStream Live for broadcasting both real-time and pre-recorded marketing videos to more than 40 social networking platforms simultaneously. You can also embed the same live video streams on your brand’s website to capture your target audience and interact with them in real-time.

Tools to Post Play Screens

Once your video has ended, you want your viewers to take favorable action instead of just leaving to another site. There are tools that allow you to post a call-to-action (CTA) for your viewers at the end of the video. It can be in the form of a survey or to direct traffic to a landing page.


4. Track Video Progress

Creating and then executing a marketing campaign alone is not enough. You need to also track and identify what works and what doesn’t as early as possible. Then only can you fine-tune and make the necessary improvements. But in order to do so, you need to have the relevant data at hand to make well-informed decisions and scale your video marketing efforts over time.

There are two key metrics that you can use to track your video’s progress:

Play Rate

This term measures how many people visited the web page containing your video and actually played the video. You can also compare the performance across your different videos to get a better understanding so that you can get early traction and organic shares.

What you want is a high play rate; this means that most people who visited your web page actually found your video exciting and decided to watch it. This indicates an increased level of engagement on the page, which helps them stick around longer. This ultimately improves the chances of them sharing the video.

However, if you get a relatively low play rate on your videos, you’ll want to analyze the content of the video, the call to action, and also the placement of the videos on the page. You can try tweaking them one at a time to see which ticks.

Engagement Rate

This measurement tells you how much of your video the audience actually watched. This is computed by dividing the total seconds watched by the total duration of your video in seconds. So, if your video is a minute long and a viewer watched it for 45 seconds, your engagement rate equates to 75%.

Caption: 16 Ways to Increase Your Average Video Engagement (Source: Databox)

Viewer engagement is crucial as it measures the efficacy of your video marketing campaigns over time. If you have a high engagement rate, chances are, your message is getting through.

On the other hand, if you have a low engagement rate, look into specific drop-off points that could impact the viewer experience, like lousy and sloppy editing, dull dialogue, or boring content, even repetitiveness. You’d be surprised to know that a tiny tweak here and there can make a world of difference.


Conclusion

Given everyone’s natural affinity for visuals, it’s not surprising that video is one of the most effective tools available to marketers. In essence, video marketing is powerful when you wish to promote a story, brand, product, or service. A simple video is not only able to reach out to many and build a strong rapport, but it can also help provide a potential buyer the necessary information required on any product/service to help complete the sales funnel.

Bear in mind that having created a video alone is not enough. You’ll need to scale your video marketing efforts to reap more significant benefits and boost conversions. As explained above, there are many ways you can do so on a budget, so feel free to pursue them and try them out. You’d be amazed at what they can do for you.

Michael Aubry

Hey 👋 I am the founder and maker of Motionbox. My mission is to build useful tools in the video space. I enjoy science, art, and sports. Feel free to reach out to me.

Join the Motionbox community

Engage with the team, receive frequent updates, share ideas, and solve issues.

Showcasing what our community channel is like, inviting you to join our community where we share video content around using Motionbox

Motionbox on Youtube - Livestreams, Events, Tutorials and Talks

Motionbox’s YouTube channel is the headquarters for new videos, livestreams, and meetups with Motionbox folks.

Join our fans on Slack

Engage with a vibrant community of creators and teams adopting Motionbox