Video is a powerful PR and marketing tool, used by so many in the industry to build stronger, more impactful relationships with businesses and customers. A brand using video marketing effectively will enjoy an increase in sales, conversions, and brand image. When launching a campaign, video has great storytelling potential – showcasing your brand’s campaign findings far and wide.
When video is captured and optimised successfully, it can add incredible value to your PR campaign, enhancing your message through the use of snappy, engaging visuals while telling a story in ways that imagery and text just can’t do. A strong video marketing strategy will help your brand tap into new, previously unengaged audiences and unlock real potential for your campaign.
In this blog, we will detail the reasons why video should be an essential component of your public relations strategy, and how it can add real substance to your campaign.
Drive Awareness
Video is a great way to grab the attention of your audience. Videos allow your brand to communicate its unique messaging, offering or products in a creative and emotive manner that snaps the attention of your audience, instead of getting lost in overly long text. This is backed by the statistics, its estimated that video accounts for over 80% of all consumer traffic – demonstrating the power of video on internet users, as well as the solution it clearly offers marketers.
For campaigns targetting new audiences, capturing the eyes of your target audience can prove half the battle. Ensure you give your brand the best chance at doing this, is by showcasing your campaign in the most aesthetic way possible while offering a clear call to action (i.e. “click to find out more”)- you will find that video does this better than most.
For your next PR campaign, ensure video and animation is considered, as a way to bring your campaign to life and grab audiences attention from the offset, ensuring your communicating your story clearly, concisely and in engaging way through the use of video, in a way that could otherwise be lost via still imagery and still assets.
Better inform your audience
As well as capturing the attention of your audience, you then need to carefully ‘sell’ your campaign story to your audience in a way that they find moving, leaving them interested and wanting to find out more, encouraging further engagement.
To do this is no easy task, especially if you’re campaigning to a fairly new, largely unengaged audience who may have little background knowledge about your campaign or your brand. You are immediately met with the challenge of communicating your campaign story in a way that doesn’t get lost or ignored. If a member of your audience finds your content is of no interest to them personally, it will prove a struggle to try and get that user back on your side.
With this in mind, consider using videos to ‘enlighten’ audiences – detailing key features and stats to your campaign in a short, 30-90 second video. Striking visuals, combined with quality, on-brand music resonates on a deeper level with online users, more than still imagery or a press release ever could. Storytelling is a huge part of PR and video marketing offers exactly that. Video builds trust with your audience, it leaves them both interest and more importantly – wanting more.
Enhance your Social Ads Performance
Paid advertising campaigns are a huge part of a brand’s strategy, creating extensive paid content to maximise everything from awareness, web traffic or sales directly from the company page.
Advertisers spend billions across social media platforms, targetting businesses and consumers alike with their messaging. However, paid advertising can be expensive and wasteful if the campaign does not incorporate content that successfully engages the audience. The best way to ensure your ads are optimised and perform above and beyond expectations is by utilising video. Video introduces a way to shorten down overly long introductory copy, as well as showcasing emotive content to make your ads more appealing to audiences. Among those using video 78% s felt they had directly increased sales for their business – demonstrating how advertising using video can significantly contribute to increased awareness of your brand and direct sales.
Ensure you consider using video in your social media advertising strategy. For those new to social media advertising, perhaps consider A/B testing video assets against still imagery to see the results yourself. If there is a clear increase in ‘results’ (whether that be link clicks, engagements or sales) then you must include video in both your advertising campaign, as well as your wider PR strategy.
Video appeals to all demographics and research indicates that video strongly resonate with potential buyers and those interested in your brand’s ideas.
Use Video Content to Score Well with Journalists
Every PR campaign will have a number of objectives in mind, including print and online coverage discussing the campaign and a bit about the brand. Alongside a written press release and an image, consider a video content to really sell the story to the journalist.
Not only does video offer a great medium for storytelling that resonates with your business and consumer audience, but journalists are also more likely to feature your campaign with video provided. Many journalists enjoy seeing video as it saves them and the team from capturing the content themselves. It also offers an insightful explanation to the campaign instead of reading through extensive copy or blogs.
Video alongside a tailored pitch, summarising the key details of the campaign is a great way to offer journalists something extra. Marketers must ensure the video is to a high standard however, if they want their video and campaign featured.
Boost SEO Performance with video marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of augmenting your website to rank higher on a search engine results page, such as Google or Yahoo, so your content and website is more visible to online users. The higher your website ranks on search engine results pages, the more website clicks and traffic you are likely to receive – contributing to greater awareness of your brand and more online sales.
SEO is a huge part of brand’s PR and marketing activity and there exists a number of proven strategies to improve search engine ranking. One such method, often overlooked however, is the use of video .
Video content is a vital tool for those wanting to enhance the customer journey. Websites will enjoy a search engine boost when they add video, increasing the webpage quality and increasing the time visitors spend on the page – engaging users further when they land on the page and thus contributing directly to higher SEO ranking.
Higher SEO ranking means more traffic to your site. Consider video to ensure your campaign content is more visible online when people search relevant topics.
Drive Sales
E-commerce continues to grow exponentially, helped certainly during the COVID pandemic. With so many brands competing and bidding for online space and customer interest, a successful campaign must stand out from the crowd with creative content that reaches its audience and cuts through the online noise.
Video can absolutely help do that, driving sales in the process. It will be no surprise to some, that over 80% of millennials consider video as a factor when making a purchase. It grips an audience, often proving the difference among those ‘undecided’, hovering over the ‘buy now’ button. This is true for campaigns too – video content drives customers to the website as well as building stronger connections with those who feel moved by the campaign. This results in both an increase in one-off and repeated buyers. More website traffic means an increased likelihood of purchase.
Ultimately, video offers an extensive list of benefits to your campaign and wider PR strategy. Not only does it engage users, but as a result of this engagement video drives traffic to the site, increases SEO ranking and improves online sales.
The best campaigns consider all mediums that can possibly uplift your campaign messaging. Video is just one of many strategies you should consider to ensure your campaign meets and exceeds objectives.
At Prohibition, we work with a range of brands across all sectors, B2B & B2C, to create compelling videos that help to achieve a business goals and objectives. Get in touch today to find out how we could help you.
For more interesting articles from us check out these posts:
- Five reasons why public relations is important for brands
- How brands can utilise TikTok to support PR strategies
- Step by step guide to create a corporate video for your marketing needs
About The Author
