If you’re somewhat active on social media, you’ve most likely watched a video within the past few days – or even hours.

It’s no secret that video content has taken off, completely transforming the way brands reach and engage with customers. Video marketing allows you to deliver messages more effectively while connecting with your audience through storytelling elements better than text and still images ever can.

And there’s no question as to if video helps marketers reach goals. It’s simple – the more engaging your social video is, the more people will see your content, and ultimately the more traffic will come to your website; meaning more conversions and customers. In fact, 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.

Compelling video content has a direct impact on the customer experience – 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service. If you still don’t believe in the importance of social media video marketing, here are a few more stats:

  • 45% of people watch an hour or more of video per day (HubSpot)
  • More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day (WordStream)
  • 84% of consumers have been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand’s video (Wyzowl)

Social media directors and managers should continuously be paying attention to the rise of video. They must understand the impact social media video marketing has on ROI and overall digital marketing efforts.

As social media marketing recruiters, we expect video to become an increasingly important part of every brand’s social media marketing strategy (if it isn’t already). We also understand that creating compelling video content is easier said than done as it’s more challenging than designing a graphic or writing a blog post. However, it isn’t as difficult as you may think; and the benefits you can get from it are far more valuable.

Do you feel like you don’t have the time, budget or resources to create compelling video content? The good news is that with the right strategy, tools, and marketing talent in place, you can implement an effective social media video marketing strategy without spending much. Creating engaging, high-quality videos doesn’t mean you have to dish out thousands of dollars on extravagant tools and rent out a studio. It can simply be done in the comfort of the office or conference room. Most of the time, all you need is a good idea, background, lighting, and audio.

Social Media Marketing Recruiters: How Great Social Media Managers Can Create Even Greater Video Content

Today’s digital marketing landscape has completely evolved, and social media managers must invest in social media video marketing. To do so successfully, you must understand the best practices for each social platform in order to build an effective strategy for each one (something we’ll get into in a later post).

Social media marketing recruiters understand how challenging it can seem. That’s why we’ve collected essential tips social media managers, directors, and their teams can understand and implement into their social media video strategy. We’ll touch on core elements that go into killer video creation like the ideation, equipment, and various layouts you need to consider.

Engaging Topics

The first step to creating great video content is to pick topics that your target audience would find interesting – even a simple video requires planning and building a strategy to successfully execute.

Understand your audience – what would they be interested in and find valuable? What is going to be said, and what will be shown to deliver your message? You’ll want to create a script for videos that focus on dialogue and conversation as it helps keep your messaging clear and the production process organized. However, keep in mind that scripts don’t have to be extremely formal.

It helps to do a practice run of your script with team members to make sure it flows nicely and doesn’t have words or phrases that are hard to understand. If you don’t think a script is necessary, have a basic outline of how you want your video to go and rehearse it so your video doesn’t look disorganized.

A few ways to generate topics are to re-purpose popular content, identify top blog posts, or find popular videos in your industry. If you’ve created videos that have performed well before, look at the…