5 simple steps to a stellar social media video marketing strategy

These days, no business can afford to forego social media video marketing. With younger generations focusing their attention almost exclusively on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and others, it’s the only way to reach certain audience segments. However, video marketing is a fundamentally different endeavor than other, more traditional forms of social media marketing. That reality drives plenty of businesses to contract out their video marketing efforts, often paying significant premiums in the process. To help them avoid that, here are the five fundamental steps involved in creating a performant social media video marketing strategy. We’ll even share some platform-specific tips to boost your odds of success.

Step one: Define a SMART goal

Every successful social media video marketing strategy begins with setting a concrete goal. However, not just any goal will do. It must be a SMART goal. That’s an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. In other words, you need to decide on a realistic thing that you expect your video strategy to achieve for your business. For example, a realistic SMART goal for your initial social media video marketing strategy might be to measurably increase brand awareness on your targeted platforms. In that case, you might set a timeframe of around six months and aim to increase your business’s follower count by 50% or more. Those are all realistic aims for your strategy and are eminently achievable.

Step two: Choose a target audience

The next step is to choose and define your target audience. If you’re already doing this for your other marketing efforts, you can even use some of your existing targeting data. The important thing is to get as specific as you possibly can. You want a fully fleshed-out target profile, including demographic information and lifestyle data. There are plenty of excellent guides on how to do this. There are even free tools and templates that can make the process quite simple.

Step three: Choose your desired platforms

Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to not bite off more than you can chew with your first social media video marketing effort. So, you should choose your initial platform targets wisely. And you shouldn’t try to run a full-blown campaign on more than one or two platforms at once. There’s just too much work involved, and it’s best to focus your efforts as narrowly as possible for best results. And choosing your target platform will, in most cases, come down to demographics. For example, YouTube has a majority of male users, while TikTok is predominantly female. Instagram has about an even mix of both. And if you’re looking for a younger audience, TikTok is the way to go. For older audiences, Instagram is the superior option.

Step four: Investigate your competition

One of the most important aspects of a successful social media video marketing campaign is to ensure that your messaging embraces authenticity. Audiences on social media don’t want cookie-cutter videos or videos made by brands trying to hop on popular trends. They also want messaging that uniquely represents your brand. For that reason, it’s vital to conduct a little reconnaissance to see what your competitors are doing on your target platform. To do this, you can use tools like Anstrex’s TikTok Ads Library. There are also similar tools available for YouTube and for Instagram. You can use the information you get from those platforms to craft unique videos that will seem authentic to your target audience.

Step five: Create a video release schedule

Finally, even perfectly-crafted video content is useless if your audience doesn’t see it. For that, you’ll need to set a release schedule suited to your specific audience. Fortunately, there’s voluminous information about how to use each social platform’s algorithm to choose the right release timing. For example, here’s what you need to know about the best time to post reels on Instagram, and you can find similar information about TikTok and Youtube, as well.

Platform-specific tips

Once you have an overall social media video marketing strategy put together, you’ll be ready to start making and releasing content. However, since different things work on different platforms, you’ll need to create different content for each platform. Here are some platform-specific tips for you to guide your efforts.

Creating winning TikTok video content

Of all of the social video platforms, TikTok is, by far, the hardest for marketers to master. This is because the TikTok format and audience are quite different from those on other platforms. For starters, you need to realize that you only have about three seconds to catch the attention of a TikTok user. Plus, the highest-performing TikTok content relies heavily on visuals and music. In other words, don’t plan to talk at any length to your target audience. Also, don’t spend your time imploring your audience to follow you. Instead, set yourself up for success by creating informative and descriptive caption text and by tagging your videos with hyper-relevant hashtags. This is how the platform’s algorithm knows what to promote and gives you the best odds of your content reaching your audience.

Creating winning Instagram video content

If you’re making Instagram Reels the center of your social video marketing efforts, there are a few ways to improve your odds of success. The first is to only post content that conforms to a 9:16 aspect ratio. Although Instagram will allow you to post content in any aspect ratio you wish, only 9:16 content will get priority placement. Plus, you shouldn’t bother trying to upload 4k video content to Instagram, although you should create your content that way. The platform only accepts 1080p-quality content. And if you upload a higher-resolution video than that, the on-platform conversion will result in a pixelated, blurry mess. So, you should create and edit in 4k, if possible, and downscale your content before uploading it.

Creating winning YouTube video content

As a video platform, YouTube is a bit different from the rest. For one thing, it allows brands to make videos of almost any length. For this reason, you can turn your YouTube marketing content into a way to build deeper relationships with your audience. To do this, focus on creating content that provides value to your audience. Things like instructional videos and deep dives on products work especially well on the platform. You can also use it as a way to cover real-world special events related to your brand. Unlike the other social video platforms, don’t expect to capture your audience with all style and no substance.

Achieving your social video goals

Now that you know what’s involved in social media video marketing, you can hopefully see that it isn’t something you have to hire an expert to handle. Any business can do the job themselves if they’re willing to make the effort and spend the time. By following the steps laid out above and putting some of the platform-specific tips into action, achieving your business’s social media video marketing goals is well within your reach.

All images are generated by Eray Eliaçık/Bing