IT Video Marketing Strategy
Jan 09, 2024
IT companies are often in top most profitable businesses as the digital goods are quite easy to scale and the reachability for clients in internet era is higher than eve before.
The one offering digital product for end client is in far better spot, for an advanced content marketing promotion, mostly due to specification of the target client.
Services
If you are targeting high quality client you need high quality content, if your client considers investing $1,000,000 into software development then it’s not going to be spontaneous decision made based on some short video he just watched, and since that the one best marketing channel of present times, we need to strike this one-off.
Digital product
This is where the potential of content marketing shines bright as the sun, the right software, one that is targeted to everyone and has almost 0 cost of ownership is considered an Infinite Leverage, it’s that very pleasant state where your software can be sold infinitely many times at almost no cost. The example would be a Doulingo.
- Targets everybody
- No operational cost
- Provides real value
- Optimized for content marketing
That’s just a short overview from my case study on it.
Philosophy of client
You are not targeting the
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Entrepreneur – Everyone has the best idea for an application that can revolutionise the world, and some people even have the money to fund it. In such a case, this freshly baked soon-to-be businessman will have to ask for some help, because it’s rather rare for one man to do such a complex thing like startup/business on his own.
Now it’s up to you to either bring him back down to earth and make him realise that Uber Eats for dogs is not the best idea in the world and that its chances of success are pretty slim. Or you can congratulate him on his ingenuity and start preparing the contract. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but if you work in IT, you’ve probably heard similar ideas before, either from your colleagues or potential clients…
Not everyone is like that, some people have really great ideas, and there are many of them, constantly hearing stories of successful technology start-ups sparks hopes for a better life that you should always have. The effect of this is that a lot of people get into it, and you should treat them like potential customers, so how do you get them to know about you?
Social media, everyone’s on it and there are places for very ambitious people, not just on LinkedIn, but that’s a good example of what we’re looking for.
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Mid-tier corporate – It’s a bit tricky, companies like this don’t choose their contractors on a personal basis, the process is unusually complex and involves a face-to-face meeting between the CEO and the person responsible for selecting the contractor.
But to even be considered, you have to be aware of your presence,
Outreach is the other tactic, if you come to someone with the perfect solution, they may be interested enough to go on to further discussions with you.
- GOV & high-tier corporate – Pre-determined competition and nepotism, content marketing has no place here.
Even if you don’t win the end customer with content marketing, you shouldn’t sleep on it, there are so many opportunities.
Content strategies*
- Manifesting your presence – Nobody knows your company, if you are just trying to reach out to someone you need to present yourself from the very beginning. Being active in SM will not only attract potential customers, it will also be your testimonial.
Fabricating issue
If there’s no market for something, why not create one? It’s a process of gaining a wide audience and planting them with an idea that will gradually grow.
It’s often the case that you don’t know you need something, why? Because no one has ever explained it to you. An example would be the humidity of a room, I don’t know if I’ve ever met a single person who really understood that. After you have explained the problem of low humidity in winter and how it affects our skin, eyes, muscles, mood and general feeling of the room, our interlocutor is quick to buy a measuring device. Of course, he discovers that the humidity in his room is extremely low, and he buys a $200 humidifier, which he uses every day.
This is actually an ingenious problem and solution, but it doesn’t have to be, if you name some symptoms, a very vague and general one, like feeling tired and unwilling to work, then such a person will quickly identify with it and will obviously be interested in the solution.
The simpler the solution the better, but it has to be complex enough not to be easy to figure out, too high of a price might also raise some scepticism.
It’s quite a complex process and not something you can just do in your spare time, it requires advanced planning and strategies.
Creating Influencers
If there is an opening in the market that is so new that there are no creators as well as consumers, then why not?
Sometimes there are so-called single purpose influencers, whose purpose is developed by the sheer objective in mind, usually to promote something.
Journey
It’s hard to explain exactly why, but we love to see journeys, the process of achieving something, just like in the movies, there’s a struggle and a reward. We’re used to just seeing the end product in SM, and it’s hard to develop a feeling for that, but when we’re part of the journey, seeing all the obstacles and overcoming them, it really makes us care.
So that’s the idea behind “journal content”, it has very high potential for views and strong conversion, and it’s easy to create and maintain, since many platforms reward regular posting, it’s beneficial to show things partially.
Viewers of such content are often less judgmental and willing to help, and after you reach the set goal they will be more likely to buy the product.
I’ve loved this idea especially for video courses, showing the patch to achieve success is greaty selling point for a knowledge, as someones after seeing that you have put some real effort into it. So not only do you get an audience, but you also get them to care and establish your reputation.
Content
If you want to promote your services it is good to identify the target audience first, if you are targeting specialised instances with a high threat level like intelligence agencies or government security systems then running a YouTube channel might not be the best approach… But if you are someone who can benefit from a recognisable brand with niche specific content built around it then it might just be for you!
Answering the question
For many people, YouTube search is the first thing they will try before they try anything else. So it might just be a good idea to try and answer the first question you might have with the potential customer. If someone comes in with zero knowledge and no idea why they want something, it might be good to show them the potential benefits. So the general rule here is similar to an SEO-focused blog strategy, but in video format.
Having a successful channel requires good talent, so the strategy assumes that there is one person in the company who can step in front of the camera and do a great job of delivering valuable information that they actually know how to do.
[[Choosing an talent]]
Tutorials
Covering technical aspects of things with explanatory video tutorials will give you an exposition for other specialists,
Podcast
Podcasts are quite interesting, they will not give such a huge reach, but they create a strong bond and are highly targeted. Covering the latest trends in a given niche will eventually lead to exposure to other specialists in the brand, which can be useful for talent acquisition. The other thing is building a recognisable and respected brand image, talk shows are often identified with expertise, even if the content itself is not that groundbreaking.
Informative content
Anything covering latest news,
Interviews
Advanced strategies
Hype machine
If you have something really great, something that could potentially revolutionise the market, or just seems like it could.
LK-99
Excellent product promotes itself, it is also true for non-existing ones, just ideas of having such product, speculations and predictions, you do not need much to make it reach all the world. Just share the existence of it, preferably in a natural informative way, don’t try to sell it, just show it, and if it is something exciting then it will snoball itself.
Leak
It’s all a lot more interesting when you’re not supposed to see it, so a lot of companies have decided to do these more precise and controllable leaks. There are many ways to do this, you can “accidentally” make it public on your website, you can make it non-public but accessible by URL, and people who scan URLs will spot that easily, you can make a post from some random Twitter account. People love to mess with companies, so when the opportunity arises to do some damage with no consequences, people are quick to act, and the damage in this case is retwittering and sharing it on reddit. So this basic retwittering psychology can be so useful, and because it’s a ’leak’ it’s undifferentiated and there’s no one to stop you changing some fact about the product, you can colour it however you like!
OpenAI
Danger to humanity
At the end of the year 2022 we had one of the biggest marketing campaigns ever, which led to 100,000,000 users in 2 months, how crazy is that?
How that happened is a bit of a mystery, the quality of the product played a significant role, it was good, extremely good.
The UX
I’ve been playing with GPT models before ChatGPT 3.5, you have to run them in CLI, on your GPU, so not many people were even able to use them, but even though the base mode didn’t change all that much, the quality of the generated responses is night and day between these two. So when it was released it was amazing, it outperformed everything a normal person has access to, who knows how it compares to confident LLM’s that government and professionals have since 2013.
It’s been great for normal people, and the advantage it’s given you has been pretty world class, and it’s been promised to get substantially better soon. It’s obviously caused some concern, as it’s already outperformed humans in some tasks, As we’ve seen from fututre, nothing like that has happened, at least not in the way we’ve been expecting it, it has overtaken some jobs, but those were the jobs that maybe shouldn’t have existed in the first place, for example SEO copywriting, with was just really utuilling on problem we’ve created ourselves.
It will take our jobs!
It hasn’t completely overtaken them at the time I’m writing this, but it has introduced changes so huge that the provisional state can no longer be maintained, as anyone can position themselves in Google search then it no longer gives you any advantage.
“We made a great effort to end up in the same place as we started.
It ended up as usual, it increased our productivity and the efficiency while the salary remained in place, the rat race now everyone needs to know these tools to stay relevant, increasing their efficiency by 1000% while being compensated even low, due to the saturation of the space and the ease of providing services.
It’s just like in this movie!
Real time marketing is basing your campaign on current trends, it’s really quite simple in assumptions, just make content relative to that given thing, but the actual implementation doesn’t present itself so brightly, especially in the professional space.
You may have heard or even experienced the Apple “1984” commercial, Orwell was quite popular, and it is always exciting to get into the year of action of your favourite real-world futuristic novel, like “Back to the Past II” or “2012”*. So it was the thing that people were talking about, and refrecing it was quite real time, they had a lot of luck that they firrind in the spot with they corporate philosophy.
It doesn’t really matter that Apple turned out to be the very “Ministry of Truth”, and they’ve been mocked many times over this ad, it didn’t perform very well, it’s considered by some to be the greatest ad of all time.
Product oriented video marketing
If you have a product you wish to promote then you have couple great options as well
Influencer marketing
One that requires the least effort and potentially the most impressions, but also one that is costly and potentially harmful. Depending on the digital creator they may have very different ethos, if they find your product uninteresting they may refuse to cover it for any money, with at best a sponsorship fragment which isn’t the greatest option. This works quite well with universal products with insanely high ROI like VPN’s for example, they are not needed for 99% of it users and often they do more harm than good, but after manufacturing a problem you may have found some users, still conversion will be low but it does scale quite nicely.
The best case is to have a great and innovative product that promotes itself, but as we all know, we can’t all have that.
Video AD’s
This is a no-brainer, short video ads have the highest conversion rate of all, and they go well with SM performance marketing. A good 30-second video may be more expensive to produce ($5k-$50k), but if you are planning to spend money on paid promotion, you should have decent material to show.
Tutorial
There is no better way to showcase your product than to use it to actually solve a problem. The idea here is to take some common problems and offer a solution to them. There are people searching for video tutorials all the time, if the product you make solves the problem then you are in a great position to make a sale!