What will your marketing strategy be for 2020? Will you pursue brand awareness, engage with customers, or both?

To form a solid strategy, you’ll need to understand your audience’s psychology, behavior, and motivations. You’ll also need to identify your competitors and benchmark their strategy.

Perhaps the only way to achieve a complete understanding of your target audience and the market is to closely observe and analyze consumer behavior across multiple platforms.

That’s why more businesses are turning to video in their marketing strategies. Thanks to the rise of digital video and the ease of video content creation, the opportunities for food marketers have greatly expanded.

If you’re new to video or feel that it’s still not a priority use of your time, I’d like to encourage you to consider changing that. Video is an essential part of any marketing strategy and a great way to connect with consumers, no matter what platform they might prefer to engage with a company.

No marketing initiative is too big or too small for video content. If you have an interesting or informative video to share, you should consider creating a short pitch to accompany it. And remember, shorter is always better when it comes to video content. It will make your footage more digestible to viewers and allow you to grow your engaged audience quicker than ever before.

Why Video in 2020?

Video is becoming an ever more important part of our lives, with 73% of millennials nowusing it regularly in various industries. Food marketers should take note and begin to implement video into their strategies.

Here are five reasons why food marketers should consider using video marketing in 2020 and beyond:

1. To Create a Video Diary

Even before the pandemic, people were often wary of restaurants and hotels, especially those that provide shared accommodation, as they don’t know what type of individuals might be living with them or if food is being served by unhygienic hands.

If you feel that video documentation might help overcome this issue, you can use the video to your advantage. Create a short video diary of your stay at the hotel or restaurant and show how food is prepared and presented to you as a paying customer. This way, you’ll gain the trust of potential customers who might be more comfortable knowing that a video is capturing the “true” experience vs. being told by the hotel staff that everything is fine.

2. To Generate More Leads

When someone lands on your site, whether it’s from an organic search engine result or a paid ad, you’ll want to have some kind of conversion moment to reel them in.

Usually this happens when they click on a call-to-action button or link, whether it’s to read more about your product or to visit your website. So, getting an additional click or visit from a video is, generally, an indication that your marketing strategy might be working. More importantly, it means you’re capturing the attention of a new audience.

3. To Improve SEO

If you want your business to be found when someone searches for it, you’ll need to make sure that your website shows up when they type in keywords or phrases that are relevant to your offering.

To do this, you’ll want to use SEO (search engine optimization) so that when someone types in a search term, your website appears at or near the top of the results.

By applying the right SEO strategies to your content, you’ll be able to gain the search engine rankings you deserve, regardless of whether you have a large audience or a small one. If your videos are properly optimized, they’ll even appear in the suggested videos section of YouTube, which often leads to more views.

4. To Create a Video Blog

Blogs are still relatively popular with 59% of consumers having one in their feed, as cited in the HubSpot Blog.

Although video is often used in tandem with a blog, it doesn’t always have to be. A video blog takes the form of a regularly published blog with videos embedded in it, making it much more visually appealing to a reader and allowing for more interaction, both of which are important in gaining credibility and trust.

Along with traditional SEO tactics, like on-page optimization, you’ll want to use video to your advantage by incorporating keyword research, video sitemaps, and structured data, such as those video thumbnails that appear next to blog posts in blog feed readers.

5. To Get More Instagram Followers

Instagram is the king of social media and a video marketer’s best friend. It boasts more than 500 million active monthly users and, as of September 2019, had nearly half a billion registered users.

If you’re not already using Instagram to grow your business, you should be. It provides a wealth of opportunities to digitally market your food and drink products, from creating videos to sharing curated content. In addition, it’s the perfect place to grow your Instagram following, which can eventually translate into increased sales.

Building a community of engaged customers on social media is a great way to connect with your audience and provide them with valuable information that will help grow your business. If you want to succeed in the online food market, you’ll need an Instagram account.

Why should you focus on Instagram as your main social media channel?

Instagram is the most popular social media channel globally, with more than 500 million monthly active users, as cited in Statista. It also boasts a large demographic of Gen-Z, who are more likely to use it than other social platforms. So, it’s a great choice for your target audience.

In addition, 62% of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 use Instagram, according to a study conducted by the social media agency Blue Fountain Media. So, if you want to connect with this audience, Instagram is a great place to do it.

Last but not least, with Instagram, you’ll want to pay close attention to your language and the content you post. Make sure that your posts are keeping up with the latest trends and are visually appealing. Post frequently (at least once a week) to maintain your audience’s interest.

How Can SEO Help with Video Marketing?

Search engine optimization can help with video marketing in a variety of ways, from getting your videos discovered to drawing your target audience to your website.

First, let’s discuss how to get your videos found:

1. Create video content that will be appealing to consumers

To begin with, you’ll want to identify your target audience and create content that will be appealing to them. Based on your research, you’ll want to create videos that match their psychological needs, such as value, curiosity, and trust. Furthermore, you’ll want to make sure that these videos serve a specific purpose, whether to educate or entertain the audience.

For example, if your target audience is millennials, you might want to create short-form videos to build trust, such as a explainer video or a food demo video.

These videos might appeal to millennials because they enjoy short-form videos that are often comedic in nature or use a combination of visuals and GIFs to tell a quick story. In addition, these videos might educate them about your product or service since millennials are often considered to be digital natives and are more likely to benefit from visual aids.

2. Optimize your videos for the most popular platforms

It’s important to know where your target audience is, so you can create content that will be appealing to them. When it comes to video content, you’ll want to focus on three major platforms: YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.

First, let’s discuss YouTube:

1. Create a channel for yourself

If you already have a channel on YouTube, you can use it to your advantage and drive traffic to your website or social media pages. In addition, you can use your YouTube channel to build credibility with your customers by demonstrating your knowledge and expertise on food and drink trends, products, and the like.

To get started, just type your keywords, like “food truck festival”, into the YouTube search bar and hit enter. From there, you can see a list of results with thumbnail images of videos created by other popular content creators. As you scroll down the page, you’ll see a variety of content, from anime to technology to music, all with thumbnails.