5 Ways to Build an Optimized Video Marketing Strategy

With TikTok’s future now secure (for the moment), it’s time to revisit how you can build an optimized video marketing strategy to grow your small business. As a small business, video is no longer a nice addition to your marketing plan, especially if your market includes a significant number of younger consumers. Video marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox as a small business because it’s perfect for attracting, engaging, and converting consumers.

As most consumers spend a significant part of every day on social media platforms (as much as three hours a day for Gen Z, with three-quarters of that time spent on TikTok), it’s challenging to build an optimized video marketing strategy for your small business due to factors such as cost and technical skills. However, optimizing videos to share on social media platforms, like Instagram Reels, YouTube, and TikTok, involves more than simply creating them. You need to build an optimized video marketing strategy, focusing on reach and return on investment (ROI). In this post, we discuss five ways you can build business success by optimizing your video marketing. So, read on!

Why your small business needs an optimized video marketing strategy

An optimized video marketing strategy can enhance key performance indicators (KPIs) across all types of businesses. Among these KPIs are engagement, search visibility, conversion rate, and branding. Here are a few statistics from Forbes that might help convince you that your business NEEDS an optimized video marketing strategy:

• 82% of consumers say they bought a product based on a video
• 89% want to see brands produce more video content
• 90% of your competitors are already using video marketing as part of their overall marketing plan
• 79% of younger consumers (under 35) use their phones weekly to watch video content
• 84% of marketers say video marketing has increased sales [source]
• 98% of consumers say they watched an explainer video to learn more about a product
• 80% higher conversion from landing pages with video
• 1200% more shares generated by video as compared with text and images combined [source]

How to optimize your video marketing

Above, you see a summary of the five steps needed to build an optimized video marketing strategy for your small business. Let’s expand on these one at a time. Of course, there’s much more to know about creating an optimized video marketing strategy

Step 1: Understand your target market and goals

Building an optimized video marketing strategy starts with a step that’s common to all marketing strategies: understanding your target market and setting your goals. Hence, you’ve likely already accomplished this task if you followed my directions on building a strategic marketing plan. The difference in building a video marketing strategy is that you likely want to emphasize different goals before you start creating your first video. And remember, you will likely produce a number of videos, each hitting on a different, related goal from this list. Here are some goals you might consider:

• Driving awareness with short, attention-grabbing clips
• Building trust with educational or behind-the-scenes content that highlights your expertise, values, and people
• Boost sales with product demos and customer testimonials
•  Nurture leads with how-to videos, explainer videos, and instructions

Note that these goals include both terminal goals, such as conversion, as well as intermediate goals like awareness. Since conversion is a process, each stage in that process is worthy of creating goals and videos that help you achieve those goals.

Step 2: Optimize videos for search

Yes, Georgia, search engines can watch video if you optimize it with elements that search engines can see. Since you want your videos to show up near the top of search engine results pages related to your keywords. Video SEO is just as important as optimizing any other online content for them. Below is a graphic outlining the steps in SEO:

Depending on the social media platform you use to share your videos, naturally add keywords to your titles and descriptions. You should also use them when creating tags and categories on platforms like YouTube, as well as choosing thumbnails that entice users to view your entire video. YouTube also allows you to add transcripts of the video and all platforms enable captions. By including relevant keywords in these elements, you create optimized video marketing content.

Step 3: Focus on engagement and retention

The algorithms used by most social media platforms prioritize videos that keep people watching, thereby enticing users to engage with video content beyond the first five seconds, which is crucial for gaining exposure from these algorithms. Consider the entertainment or educational value you provide and ensure you tap into viewer emotions to get the best results.

As with any type of digital content, your video must meet the norms and standards of the platform. For instance, TikTok and Instagram Reels videos work best if they’re short (30-90 seconds) and provide clear value. Meanwhile, YouTube explainer videos are often between 10 and 15 minutes. Ultimately, optimizing video marketing depends on your target market, goals, and the type of video produced. Focus on providing value with your video, and you’ll make successful ones.

Since a video marketing strategy for a small business is designed to support the business’s goals, you should include a CTA (call to action) within your video, in the description, or in the caption.

Step 4: Repurpose content

Let’s face it. Content marketing is costly and time-consuming, but essential if you want your business to succeed. Repurposing content allows you to maximize the returns from a piece of content. For instance, I produce a video series designed to teach marketing principles and applications to small business owners and managers.

I create content for my website, then use that content as an outline for creating a video, as different prospective clients will find different versions more helpful. I combine the two by embedding the video within the website content. I then share the content across my social media platforms to attract more visitors to my website and entice them to view additional videos.

Depending on your target market, you might break up a longer video into short clips that you can share on TikTok or Instagram Reels. You can convert a frame of the video into an image to support a blog post or as part of building an infographic.

These efforts to repurpose your content not only optimize your content marketing efforts, but can also attract more attention to your other marketing efforts. For instance, my SEO results show that using these images attracts more visitors to my website.

Step 5: Track performance

As with any other marketing tactic, an optimized marketing strategy relies on metrics that track performance and offer insights that can help improve it. You’ll need to learn how to effectively use various analytics platforms, including Facebook Insights (Instagram), GA4 (for website data), YouTube Analytics, and TikTok Analytics.

But tracking key metrics isn’t enough. You need to build insights using this data if you want to build an optimized video marketing strategy, as these insights help you make informed decisions about how to make and market future videos.

Here are a few of the metrics you should track:

• Number of views – which tracks how well you’re doing at attracting attention (building awareness). Also, track the number of subscribers to your channel for the same reason.
• Watch time – this measures how engaging your videos are.
• CTR (click-through rate) – demonstrates how well you do at driving viewers to the next stage in the conversion process, the consideration stage.
• Conversions – which you can find by following those clicks as the visitor moves through your website or other places where conversion happens, such as an app store or third-party sales platform like Amazon.

Optimized video marketing on a budget

I realize that, even more than other businesses, small businesses must build an optimized video marketing strategy on a budget. Luckily, there are tools designed to help you without breaking the bank.

First, AI is a bonanza for small businesses for all types of content marketing. For the small price of $20 a month, you can gain access to large language models like ChatGPT, which you can use to craft images and short video clips you can use as a basis for any type of video you want. Of course, use care as some of the content created by these models is inaccurate, incomplete, or inappropriate. However, AI involves a conversation with the model, which allows you to direct edits of the original created by the model until it fits your needs.

You can also use inexpensive tools like Canva or Adobe Express, which contain their own AI tools, to help create content. User-generated content alleviates a lot of the stress, cost, and time needed to create original content. More importantly, it resonates with your target market better to produce better results.

Your job doesn’t stop with creating video, however. You must edit your content to produce a high-quality video that positions your brand as a professional and encourages viewers to consume more of the video. Tools like iMovie, Canva, and Adobe Express can provide valuable tools for editing without requiring extensive training. If you have a little more skill (or time to learn) and money, you can use Adobe Premiere Pro to create videos that rival anything created by Hollywood.

Conclusion

An optimized video marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. By setting clear goals, optimizing for SEO, focusing on engagement, repurposing content, and tracking performance, small businesses can use video to build trust, boost visibility, and drive measurable growth.

If you’re a small business owner, now is the time to lean into video marketing—before your competitors do.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.