What’s holding you back from running a social media video marketing campaign?

Perhaps you’re worried you’ll need a ton of money to get your videos filmed and edited professionally. Maybe you’re daunted by the thought of using specialist equipment.

The truth is that your social media video marketing campaign doesn’t need to be complicated – or involve spending thousands of dollars. You can get started with the tools you already have (even if that’s just an iPhone).

Here are the key elements of a successful social media video marketing campaign:

Knowing Your Goals Before You Begin

What are you aiming to achieve with your video marketing campaign? 

If you’re launching or promoting a new product, you might want to make a certain number of sales. 

If you’re aiming to raise awareness of your brand, you might be looking at website traffic, new social media followers, or new newsletter subscribers.

There’s no point investing lots of time (and potentially money) in creating a video campaign if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. By knowing your goals before you begin, you’ll have a much clearer picture of what type of content to create.

Learning from What’s Already Worked

If you’ve used videos on social media in the past, then you might well have data that lets you know what worked well. What types of videos saw good engagement? (And what types got ignored?)

If you haven’t used videos on social media much, you could take a look at what’s getting attention in your niche. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll be missing part of the picture here: you can see which videos have lots of likes, comments, and shares, but you can’t see whether that attention translated into more leads and sales for the brand that created them.

Planning Your Video Production

You might be creating a series of videos, but that doesn’t mean you need to film them all separately. It will most likely make sense to create your videos as a batch. This saves a lot of time, as it means you’ll only need to set up your recording space, lighting, microphone, and so on once. 

If you’re involving other people in the filming process, batching together multiple videos into one recording session also makes a lot of sense, as it saves trying to find several different dates to get everyone together.

You’ll want to have planned out your content ahead of time, along with whatever you need to record it – whether that’s slides, props, notes, a script, or anything else.

Allowing Plenty of Time for Post-Production

Most video marketers will tell you that the recording process might not take too long; what takes a surprising amount of time is all the editing.

Even if you don’t need your videos to be perfectly polished, you’ll likely need to make some edits, such as cutting out verbal stumbles, joining together different clips, adding in transitions or text, and so on. 

Leave yourself plenty of time between filming and publishing your videos so that you can make them as good as they can be. If you’re working with someone else who’s taking care of post-production, check with them how much time they’ll need.

Scheduling Your Videos

You’ll want to carefully plan when to publish your videos. You don’t want your campaign to be over almost before it’s started, but you also don’t want it to drag on for several weeks. 

Think about how frequently to schedule your videos. This may not necessarily be at set intervals, as you could well want to ramp up the frequency toward the end of the campaign (especially if it ties in with a new product launch or sale).

When scheduling your video marketing campaign, think too about what else is on your social media calendar or even your content calendar as a whole. You don’t want your videos to conflict with other promotions – instead, you ideally want to tie them in with everything else that you’re publishing.

Making it Easy to Find Your Videos

Not everyone in your audience will engage with your videos as you publish them. One easy way to make your videos visible to those joining in part-way is to publish them on a page on your website. You can then link to this page when you publish new videos on social media, letting newcomers catch up.

You want as many people to watch your videos as possible, so make sure it’s easy for your website visitors to share them. A great way to do this is to use share buttons for videos. Share buttons are free website tools that make it easy for your visitors to promote your videos (and other content) by sharing them with their social media networks.

As you create your social media video campaign, think about how your videos will work together as a set or series, as well as how well they stand alone for sharing on social media. Hopefully, you’ll have a successful campaign that brings you lots of new leads and customers.