Before you start making videos, it’s a good idea to understand what makes for a good video for video marketing. When you create a video, it’s important to have a few facts clear.

• Know your goals – You need to know why you’re doing the video. Is it to sell one particular product, brand awareness, or to report about an event? Be clear on the point of the video before you even start shooting.
• Know your audience – To make a video the right way you need to understand who you’re creating it for. If you don’t know who your audience is you could accidentally turn them away from you without meaning to.
• Tell a story – If you can turn anything you want to do on video into a way to further a story then you have a winner. If the focus is on the audience understanding the story you’re trying to tell, then the video will be more effective.
• Keep it short & simple – There are few times when the video should be longer than 4 or 5 minutes. The best course is to try to keep it down to about 2 or 3 minutes so that people don’t get bored. Plus, it will force you to cut things that aren’t relevant.
• Develop a Script – The best thing you can do is create a script as well as a shot list. While you don’t want the video to appear as if you’re stiffly reading something, you do not want to miss anything important when you tape the video.
• Get the right lighting – Hardly anything is more important than light. You can use lamps that you can buy relatively inexpensively to help light up the shot better. Test out how the shot looks before you commit to the recording.
• Ensure great sound – The other important part of your video is the sound and it’s really just as important as the light if you want people to hear your message. Test out the sound, and you can even do a voice over if you can’t get the sound accurate with the mic on your camera.
• Optimize for SEO – Getting seen is not going to happen automatically. You must ensure that the description, title, tags, annotations and call to action are impeccable so that you get more views and more answers to your call to action.
• Do more than one – One video is not video marketing. It’s just a random video. Video marketing should be a planned and regular addition to your content marketing efforts. Much like your website will look empty with just one blog post, you’ll need a few videos to really be engaged in video marketing.

Video marketing is an important part of content marketing today because of the ease at which the technology is available and the public prefers video over text. If you give it enough thought and consideration, you’re sure to develop a winning video marketing campaign for your audience.

To get started, a good thing to do is look at what other companies have done with video marketing. What have they done right, what have they done wrong and what can you learn from it?