Jonathan Martinez
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In recent years, video has morphed into the king of social media content across the globe. Just look at how much TikTok’s user base has grown — Insider Intelligence predicts TikTok saw 755 million monthly users in 2022.
Companies have been forced to adapt to this short-form video content revolution (Instagram Reels is a great example of this) and have had to prioritize video on their platforms. Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, has even said that the platform is “no longer a photo-sharing app.”
What does all that mean for growth marketing? It means that you need to prioritize video content for your startup.
Here are four video marketing tips you can utilize immediately to get ahead of the curve:
Leverage creator marketplaces
It’s easy to get lost amid the plethora of tools available for online video marketing when you’re looking for one that best fits your company’s requirements.
It helps to prioritize. The first tool you should employ is creator marketplaces such as Billo or Backstage. These marketplaces make it easy to find talent who can film videos for your startup, and you won’t have to pay a large influencer fee either. For making influencer content at Coinbase, I worked with multiple influencer agencies that did all the sourcing for us across these marketplaces.
When signing up for a creator marketplace, there are a few important things to keep in mind that influencer agencies also pay attention to:
- Talent’s past work.
- Talent demographic.
- Budgeting.
Many creator marketplaces will have a section where you can see the talent’s past work. If your chosen marketplace doesn’t have this feature, ask the talent for a few examples of their most recent videos.
In addition, you’ll want to ensure that the demographics of your talent aligns with the demographic profile of your users. At Postmates, we regularly worked with influencers who we could picture as our users. One interesting, although not altogether unsurprising, discovery was that female influencers almost always outperformed male talent.
So, if you’re undecided about advertising with men or women, I advise starting with women.
Produce short-form videos
If you want to be at the forefront of current video trends, TikTok is the answer, at least right now in early 2023. It is necessary to be familiar with the content on the top video-based social media platforms to get a grasp of what is trending. It is worthwhile to set aside time to scroll through video social platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels before you start working on your own video strategy.
Short-form videos are likely here to stay for this year. Consumers’ attention span is shrinking, and instant gratification is what they look for. So even if you’re filming a two- or three-minute video with a content creator, make sure to splice that video into smaller 15- or 20-second clips that can be published on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
Many large YouTube creators have already adopted this trend and regularly post truncated clips of their longer videos on Shorts. It’s now par for the course to repurpose content from longer videos, and you will need to do so in 2023 as well.
Build lasting creator relationships
As you build your video strategy, you’ll want to contract with at least a handful of creators to produce content. It will be much easier over the long term if you can build relationships with these creators. By spending the time to educate them about your startup, long-term vision and brand voice, you’ll help your creators produce higher-quality and consistent videos.
For such an engagement to be successful, make sure to set aside at least 30 to 60 minutes to educate each influencer you bring on board. It’s important that they understand your startup, its target demographic and the problems it is aiming to solve.
It’s a good idea to set up a brief document to help establish guardrails for what your influencers are working on when creating content. It will also save you the time and effort of having to answer the same questions over and over.
Your brief document should include the following sections:
- Background.
- Goal.
- Timeline.
- Specifications.
- Content.
Including the background and goal in the influencer brief may seem redundant after the initial call, but influencers are often so busy with projects that it’ll help serve as a refresher whenever they need it. The Timeline should outline when the agreement will be sent to the influencer and when you will need to see the first drafts, provide feedback/review and perform second takes, if necessary.
In the Specifications section, include items such as preferred length of video, orientation (i.e., portrait or landscape) and other elements that are necessary for the channel. In the Content section, mention what the video should include, along with any available examples of similar videos.
Building a relationship with your creators and educating them has many second-order benefits as well. For example, when a new trend emerges, you can respond faster as your core set of influencers will already understand what kind of content they need to generate. This will speed up overall content production, especially if you’re building a video series on a platform like YouTube.
Cross-pollinate your videos
One of the biggest advantages of content creation right now is the ability to cross-pollinate content across your owned platforms.
Don’t stop at simply uploading your videos solely on YouTube or social channels. Instead, leverage them across:
- Lifecycle emails.
- Website pages.
- Paid social ads.
- White-labeling (i.e., TikTok Spark ads).
Emails are a great avenue to point users to your video channels or to specific videos and provide potential consumers more social proof for your startup. Motion, a calendar and project management application, does a phenomenal job of including videos across its lifecycle emails showcasing its product features.
I’ve seen startups get increasingly crafty with the webpages they place their video content on, such as on their exit-intent popups or creating an entire page for video testimonials. There’s no need to get too methodical here, but make sure to test the conversion rates when you are utilizing these videos against when you are not.
Another tactic to explore is white-labeling, which is basically running ad traffic through an influencer’s personal handle rather than your startup’s profile. I’ve written about white-labeling in a separate column, where I go more in-depth into this and other growth-influencer strategies.
If you’re entering 2023 without a video content plan for your startup, you will be missing out on a significant resource for creating brand awareness and reaching more consumers. There are many great marketplaces and tools that can make the process as seamless as possible, as well as countless placements to leverage videos.
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