At the core of every marketing campaign is this question: What makes your audience tick, and how can you grab their attention to take them through your entire marketing funnel? Video is your golden ticket. When executed correctly, video marketing can be the most compelling asset to drive action in any campaign.
Recently, our Healthcare Practice published a survey of 20 health system CIOs to find out how they wanted to be marketed and sold to and what drives them to purchasing decisions. When it comes to vendor content, our survey showed 75% of these CIOs prefer to consume videos over other content like case studies, websites, webinars, social media, and white papers. This actually mirrors what we are recommending to our clients—video is packaged into many of our campaigns and is usually a key part of every landing page we develop.
Inspired by our recent findings, let’s dive into some tips on how you can incorporate an effective video marketing strategy into your next campaign.
Video—a healthcare marketer’s secret SEO weapon
Videos can directly impact your website’s SEO. Google crawls millions of pieces of content to determine its rankings in search queries, and its algorithm will prioritize high quality content that best matches the searcher’s original search term. To build these rankings, Google scans your content to determine what your webpage offers. A landing page with a balance of text and visual elements (including static graphics, photos, animations, and video) will perform better because the content is both informative and diversified. Google also prioritizes video content that is optimized for SEO with keywords, SEO titles, and other optimization methods.
On top of boosting SEO efforts, videos are better attention grabbers than standalone images. Unfortunately, most audiences won’t actively engage with a static post anymore. There needs to be an element of visual movement, audio, something engaging that viewers can interact with—not just read.
Take your marketing campaign to the next level with these quick video tips:
Tip 1: Design videos to be more versatile
Your campaign videos should be usable in multiple areas of marketing. Building a video that only serves one purpose and isn’t malleable to other initiatives isn’t a strong piece of multimedia. To truly make the most of your investment in marketing videos, the videos must be scripted to be dissectible later and designed to be applied to other marketing strategies, like social media campaigns, digital ads, etc.
Tip 2: Keep it short!
Your campaigns don’t need to be documentaries. Generally, our attention span lasts about 90 seconds. We find that videos 60-90 seconds in length perform well—they are short enough to hold the attention of your audience but long enough to ensure your message is accurately portrayed. Of course, longer videos may be necessary in certain situations, like training videos for example.
Tip 3: Prioritize accessibility
Designing videos to be accessible for all should be the standard—there are several ways to make sure your campaign videos are accessible. An important rule of thumb is including captions or audio descriptions in all videos so viewers with hearing or visual disabilities can still watch and understand the video. If you are including graphics or other visual elements in your videos, make sure the color contrast for text meets the minimum requirements.
Tip 4: Leverage video at company events and industry conferences
Of course video can be valuable for supplementing presentations and panels at in-person events, but videos are also increasingly being used to engage non-attendees in real time through short highlight clips shared on social media or even live streaming which—thanks to advancements over the last several years as a result of the pandemic—is fortunately not as technically and logistically difficult as it used to be.
Events are also great places to connect with industry partners, opinion leaders, or customers and gather strategic video content to be used at a later date. Spend some time before each event thinking about who you may connect with and what questions you would ask them—perhaps it’s about recent news/changes that you haven’t been able to get a pulse on yet or challenges your marketing team plans on focusing on as part of future marketing campaigns.
Tip 5: Balance low and higher quality videos
The pandemic broke down walls and increased acceptance of Zoom and other virtual platforms in a way didn’t exist before. Because of this, over the last few years, there has been more room for and acceptance of lower quality video in certain cases. Video content filmed in a casual Zoom meeting is accepted over higher quality content captured in a studio.
The pandemic also impacted the type of content marketers could capture, like valuable b-roll footage to supplement videos. A popular substitute for original b-roll is stock footage, but that can be expensive to obtain. To bypass this challenge, consider opting for creative 3D animated content to add a layer of sophistication to your videos.
Tip 6: Take advantage of beginner-friendly tools
If you aren’t a professional videographer (like most of us), designing a compelling video for a marketing campaign can seem daunting. Luckily, there are a few easy-to-use tools ready at your disposal, including Canva. Canva is a user-friendly design platform with hundreds of ready-to-use templates for nearly every graphic design project under the sun, video included.
Vimeo is another marketing and design platform that is user-friendly, and a great option for beginners. With a free version and several subscription options, users can create a myriad of types of videos to enhance their campaigns. With these tools, you can whip up a creative video in little time without Adobe certifications or professional design skills.
Again, we understand that health system CIOs are busy and have little downtime to mentally download lots of content when making buyer decisions. And as our survey showed, they value video. This notion is applicable to other bustling industries, like cybersecurity and technology. Video could be the missing piece that takes your marketing campaign to the next level.
To learn more, check out our “2023 Healthcare Technology Marketing Guide: Marketing & Selling to the Health System CIO” for important considerations for your marketing strategy.
