Video Content Creation: Should Your Business Be Using IGTV for Marketing?

Video content creation has become increasingly popular on social media and should be seen as a holistic business approach for brands. With this in mind, it’s important that businesses recognise the impact IGTV can have on their target audience and start creating engaging content through this medium.

Since Instagram TV, or IGTV, was launched last year it has proven to be an exciting new feature working alongside Instagram stories. IGTV allows users to upload their own videos and watch videos from 60 seconds to 1 hour in length on the platform. As omnichannel marketing is essential for all types of brands and influencers, it has added a new visual and engaging way to enjoy content marketing.

Instagram can be overlooked by businesses as they can feel they don’t match well with what marketing opportunities can be offered. However, according to Instagram 80% of users follow a business on the platform and 60% have heard about a new product or service on the app. Furthermore, at least 30% of users have purchased a product they first discovered whilst on Instagram. And with over one billion monthly active users, Instagram is one of the most popular social platforms used by individuals and brands.

Who’s Having the Most Success With IGTV?

Put plainly, the brands that have the most success with IGTV are ones that are already established on Instagram or whose sole aim is based upon videos or visually displaying their product/service. Namely, retailers that can show how their products work and how to use them.

How can retailers leverage IGTV?

IGTV offers an interesting and creative new platform for any business to connect with their customers, which is particularly true for retailers. On top of the shopping on Instagram tagging feature, IGTV provides a method of advertising that is particularly useful for ecommerce purposes. Shoppers want to hear from experts and other consumers about the products they want to purchase. Therefore, creating a stream of content that is consistent with your brand, informative and visually appealing is a great way to attract attention.

If you are looking for ideas of the type of content that is received well by Instagram users, these are a few categories that receive high levels of interaction and engagement:

• How-tos / Tutorials – Showing consumers how products/services are used. Namely, Buzzfeed posts recipes on its IGTV stream that consumers can watch and learn from so they can create the dish.  
• Educational/Trend or Mission Based – Teaching consumers about what your business does, often to reflect current trends. This could be an activewear company with sustainability accreditations using #PlasticPollution on their video to reflect worldwide trends. Any company can create a mission video that explores their brand purpose and what drives the products/service they create.
• Brand Collaborations – Building interest and engagement levels by creating content that involves known individuals. Brands such as Sephora have celebrity guests answer Q&As in their IGTV content, this way you can effectively bring their following to your channel.
• Styling– Showing consumers how products look (this is particularly great for cosmetic, beauty, homeware and fashion brands). This could be through outfit styling or home tours and works brilliantly in combination with shopping tags on posts, to add more ease and usability to online transactions.
• User-Generated Content – Creating IGTV videos that are based on your consumers creating content. The natural beauty and baby product brand, Honest Company, created an IGTV series that followed the stories of four women who found out they are unexpectedly pregnant. This made viewers feel more connected to Honest Company as a brand.

IGTV Best Practices

Here are five tips to follow when it comes to IGTV:

1. Give Your Audience Insight Into Your Brand: If people can physically see who they are spending money on, and believing in your mission as a brand then you are much more likely to build a loyal customer base.
2. Maintain A Consistent Aesthetic: Much like your social media image being in line with your website, you would want your IGTV content to also reflect this. This could be through using the same shade of grey for banners or using the same imagery format throughout.
3. Optimise for Silent Viewing: Most people will not have their sound on at all times on mobile devices, so make sure that the video makes some sense without sound at the beginning and has visible subtitles. That way, if people catch a glimpse of your video and like the look of it, they will click onto it and turn their sound on for optimal viewing.
4. Surprise Your Audience: This can be tricky when you feel stuck on where to go. But perhaps take some inspiration from Netflix, who love to create conversation when it comes to their social media marketing strategy.  They launched their IGTV channel with a 1-hour video of Cole Sprouse eating a burger to promote a new season of Riverdale, instead of a regular trailer that you may find on YouTube. This sounds ridiculous – but it got over one million views and six thousand comments, which is a lot of traffic out of a simple video construct.
5. Create Series’ that People Will Want To Stay Up To Date With: Much like YouTube, consistent content from people that consumers find worth watching is highly important when it comes to moving people up the purchasing ladder.

B2B or B2C?

You may be reading this and thinking that IGTV will not be suitable for B2B businesses as the type of visual content shared on Instagram is often aimed at consumers and creating authentic, personal content that your audience will enjoy can be a challenge with a different target market. However, with a broader perspective IGTV should be seen a great method to share relevant, knowledge-based content that is appealing to other businesses. Take Hubspot: they use IGTV as a means to share marketing tips for other businesses that are consistent with their blog post topics.

So, Should Your Business Use IGTV?

Using IGTV as an extension of your marketing strategy can only be positive, provided you have time to get creative. IGTV appears to have been most effective for retailers that have consistently utilised Instagram shopping features to make it even easier to shop specific products.

However, we urge you not to discount the power of video content as a business if you are not a retailer. Often, the more simple and raw a video is, the more authentic the content seems. Creating content that viewers like and relate to is ultimately what really matters to your audience.

The best thing that brands and retailers can do with IGTV is to extend and complement their exiting Instagram feed. IGTV can be seen as another means to create rich, visual content in a stream to drive consumers to their main feed, where they can be directed to your website and make a purchase, which is the ultimate business goal.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is that it is crucial for businesses to adapt their content offering and change their social media marketing methods based on how target audiences are choosing to consume content, to be seen as modern and relevant. Instagram’s efforts to create the volume of clickability that YouTube does has not gone viral yet, but it does provide a new opportunity for brands to entertain, educate and engage with their audience.

So, why not start updating and adapting your content? If you need help with your social media marketing, contact SilverDisc.