Instagram Video Marketing has become a high priority in the marketing world. Here's how to compete and excel!

Breaking News On Instagram Video Marketing

Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app!

Instead, it will give more priority to video content. This was recently shared by Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram.

The decision to put more focus on video comes from their desire to compete with the huge success of ‘video only’ platforms like Youtube and TikTok, while still maintaining their current audience.

Video posts on Instagram already receive 38% more engagement than photos, and that’s only going to increase.

So if you want to stay relevant and grow your audience, Instagram video marketing should now play a major part of your video content strategy, and factor into your overall marketing for this year and beyond.

With that breaking news, let me present to you the ultimate guide to Instagram video marketing.

Let’s do it for the Gram!

What Is Instagram Video Marketing?

Instagram video marketing means posting videos on Instagram with intent to build awareness with a new audience, stay top of mind, and create more sales.

They do not need to be long form videos (save that for Youtube), rather they should be short and sweet, and tempt your viewers to want to learn more about your brand.

In this guide, we’re going to look at all the aspects of Instagram video marketing you’ll need to know so that you can dominate on the platform.

3 Major Benefits of Instagram Video Marketing

1. Increase Sales

Video across all platforms is known to increase sales, mainly because its visual impact is far greater than text and images.

Instagram, despite being a highly competitive platform to get noticed on, can give you the same results with video.

Wibbitz is an online video editing platform and leader in video marketing resources, and in one of their recent studies they found that approximately 30% of people make a purchase after watching videos from Instagram.

Those are pretty good odds!

2. Top Of Mind Engagement

One valuable outcome of Instagram video is to maintain your top of mind brand presence.

A massive factor affecting sales on Instagram is how expensive your item is. Low ticket items (such as items under $40) will sell pretty easily on Instagram. But items or services much higher than that require a much more developed business relationship.

This is where your Instagram video marketing can chip away at your buyer with multiple points of contact, building trust in you, and keeping you top of mind.

Over time, when your customer is ready to buy your services, they will remember you and look you up.

This is called “playing the long game”. But it works.

3. Diversify Your Marketing Reach

If you haven’t used video on Instagram yet, now is a good time to start. As mentioned above, Instagram has massively changed its algorithms so that video gets lots of air-time!

This means that you have an opportunity here that you never had before to attract new eyeballs to your brand. In the past, people mostly considered Instagram a photo platform, and video marketing didn’t get as much interest.

But the Instagram gods have spoken, because they realized that video outperforms on all platforms, and they want to compete with the likes of video marketing on Tiktok.

So consider Instagram as a brand new search engine that is hungry for video content. By adding some video to your grid, you can diversify your marketing in a brand new and impactful way.

Best Types Of Instagram Videos

The Mini Promotional Video

Use short form videos (10-60 seconds) to catch attention during a good scroll. A video with simple text, and appealing photo or video works great.

In fact, we invented a type of video perfect for this. It’s called The S.A.V.E.

The Animated Clip:

Anything animated catches attention on Instagram. Consider using a micro-length animation to add to your Stories, Highlights, or Reels.

The Snippet

You don’t need to always create a new video from scratch. If you’ve got a longer form video, cut it down into bite-sized snippets, and release them on your feed. Interviews, explainer videos, or webinars make for great content that you can break down into 15-30 seconds bits.

Gary Vaynerchuk does a great job of this.

The Mini Case Study

If you’ve got a testimonial video or customer profile, create a version that is 60 seconds or less, and showcase it on Instagram. People love seeing stories on this platform, so this is a relevant type of content to post. Just make it short!

3 Ways To Post Instagram Videos

1. In-Feed Videos

Aspect Ratio

It’s important to remember that your typical format of videos (16:9, or widescreen that you’d see on Youtube) does not look good on Instagram. It’s far more beneficial to ensure your videos are either 1:1, or 4:5.

Thumbnails

It’s quite important with posting videos on Instagram (and on most platforms) to have a strong and clear Thumbnail. Make sure there are minimal amounts of words, and a strong appealing image.

Also, make sure it’s respectively on brand with your colours, text and photography. The more on brand your imagery (including your video thumbnail) is, the more people will want to like and follow you, because it’s more consistent and they know what they’re getting.

Unfortunately if you’re using widescreen as a post, the full impact of the video will be lost, because the video will show up quite small.

Ideal Video Length

You can you make your video as short as 3 seconds, and as long as 60 (before it boots you over to IGTV.

But Hubspot’s studies show that 26 seconds is the most ideal length.

We can process visuals much faster than text, so your video needs to be short.

Audio

Studies show that 83% of people watch videos with the sound turned off, and 50% of people prefer captions when they scroll Instagram.

Keep this in mind during your content strategy, and seek to make videos that can be consumed without sound. One simple way of achieving this is to have videos with kinetic text. That way you can get your message across with some simple lines of ad copy, and maintain a visual aesthetic that keeps attention.

Our S.A.V.E. video package is perfect for this.

2. Paid Video Ads

If you want to increase your success and engagement on Instagram, consider using paid ads.

A simple paid ad campaign costs roughly: ???$

Paid video ads perform far better than paid photos.

With paid video ads, you can actually get up to 120 seconds (2 minutes) per video.

You can also carousel up to 10 videos at 60 seconds. That’s quite a lot of video time.

Instagram recommends you use a 1:1 aspect ratio for in-feed, and 9:16 for ad on Instagram stories.

Setting up Ads

You actually set up your instagram through facebook’s ad manager. I’m gong be honest, I found this process extremely complicated. My recommendation is to hire an expert at ads to do this, because you may pull your hair out trying to navigate Facebook’s ultra complex ad managing system.

Paid video Ads Top Tips

Use very minimal text in your ad thumbnails.

Facebook for Business has shared that you’ll get less reach if your images (video thumbnail included) exceeds 20% text.

Best Length For Video Ads

Instagram found that videos approximately 6 seconds long perform the best. As watch time increases, drop off times increase as well.

Think of it more like an appetizer at a restaurant. Use this to whet their appetite and send them back to your website or landing page where you can wine and dine them with much more information.

Keep It Simple

Facebook for Business has also found that you need to make your language and messaging super simple. On Instagram, our minds are generally overstimulated after being on the platform for only a few minutes, and our concentration won’t allow for anything unclear or confusing.

Keep your text simple. Then go through it and simplify it even more.

Optimize Your Landing page for Mobile

Since the vast majority of people using Instagram are using it on mobile, they are highly likely to see your landing page or website through mobile and not desktop. So you should ensure that wherever your ad takes them, it’s fully customized for mobile use.

Otherwise you’ll be wasting ad spend driving folks to a landing page that doesn’t work.

3. Instagram Stories

Stories are bite-sized videos that only last for 24 hours. They are designed by Instagram to be the most noticeable section, since they flash red at the very top of your feed.

You won’t necessarily gain new followers from Stories, but it will supercharge your engagement and keep you top of mind.

They’re also great because you can focus on a wider scope of content, and break away from your brand without causing harm. An example of this is posting something about holidays, or content related to special/current events. They won’t mess with the flow of your grid, because they will disappear in 24 hours!

Length & Orientation

Stories only last 15 seconds, however you can record several back to back.

Orientation is always 9:16 (otherwise known as portrait mode), so keep that mind when you’re planning out your stories.

A great example for B2B’s or Agencies is to post an educational highlight.

Use Stickers

One super fun aspect of Stories is that you can add cool animated “stickers” to your video.

Take advantage of these, as they add a lot of appeal and engagement to your video. They’re also just a cool way of spicing up the artistic factor of your content.

You can even use stickers to create questions and polls!

Carousel Stories

One way to get some major mileage out of your stories, is to add multiple, and create a catalogue of sorts. You can make these related and build context, or you can just create a barrage of fun and interesting topics.

I hope this inspires you to consider using more video Instagram, and gives you some ideas for how you can use the platform to grow your brand.