Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups.
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In recent years, video has morphed into the king of social media content across the globe. Just look at how much TikTok’s user base has grown — Insider Intelligence predicts TikTok saw 755 million monthly users in 2022.
Companies have been forced to adapt to this short-form video content revolution (Instagram Reels is a great example of this) and have had to prioritize video on their platforms. Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, has even said that the platform is “no longer a photo-sharing app.”
What does all that mean for growth marketing? It means that you need to prioritize video content for your startup.
Here are four video marketing tips you can utilize immediately to get ahead of the curve:
Leverage creator marketplaces
It’s easy to get lost amid the plethora of tools available for online video marketing when you’re looking for one that best fits your company’s requirements.
It helps to prioritize. The first tool you should employ is creator marketplaces such as Billo or Backstage. These marketplaces make it easy to find talent who can film videos for your startup, and you won’t have to pay a large influencer fee either. For making influencer content at Coinbase, I worked with multiple influencer agencies that did all the sourcing for us across these marketplaces.
When signing up for a creator marketplace, there are a few important things to keep in mind that influencer agencies also pay attention to:
By spending the time to educate them about your startup, long-term vision and brand voice, you’ll help your creators produce better-quality and consistent videos.
- Talent’s past work.
- Talent demographic.
- Budgeting.
Many creator marketplaces will have a section where you can see the talent’s past work. If your chosen marketplace doesn’t have this feature, ask the talent for a few examples of their most recent videos.
In addition, you’ll want to ensure that the demographics of your talent aligns with the demographic profile of your users. At Postmates, we regularly worked with influencers who we could picture as our users. One interesting, although not altogether unsurprising, discovery was that female influencers almost always outperformed male talent.
So, if you’re undecided about advertising with men or women, I advise starting with women.
Produce short-form videos
If you want to be at the forefront of current video trends, TikTok is the answer, at least right now in early 2023. It is necessary to be familiar with the content on the top video-based social media platforms to get a grasp of what is trending. It is worthwhile to set aside time to scroll through video social platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels before you start working on your own video strategy.
