While all the other video formats on Instagram restrict you from creating long videos, IGTV (short for “Instagram TV”) helps you take your videos to the next level by allowing you to stretch them up to an hour.
This opens up an enormous opportunity for brands to create long-form video content to engage with their audiences.
While short videos do work well for video marketing because people tend to have short attention spans, if you can create powerful long-form videos, you’ve got yourself a solid deal with IGTV.
But how can you go about it all?
Let’s take a look at how you can get your IGTV strategy going.
Methods to Get Your IGTV Strategy Going
Here’s how you can jumpstart your IGTV content strategy to get the most out of this feature on Instagram.
1. Understand Your Audience
Before you take the IGTV plunge, it’s important to understand your audience extremely well. You need to know what content formats they prefer and whether they’ll truly warm up to longer videos or not.
Even if your audience isn’t very keen on seeing long-form content, you can better understand how long your IGTV videos should be.
And why is that?
It’s because IGTV lets you create shorter videos as well. Even videos that are only a minute long. The idea here is to find what your audience wants to see and then determine the sweet spot when it comes to the length of the videos.
When you get both these factors right, it’s the perfect recipe for IGTV success.
2. Decide on Video Orientation
The best part about IGTV is that you can choose to create videos in both portrait and landscape orientations. This, in turn, raises another question for you — what should be your video’s orientation?
For this, you need to turn to your audience for answers. You can conduct audience polls on Instagram through Stories and find out which format works the best for them.
You also need to think about the type of videos you’re going to roll out. For instance, if you’re planning on uploading videos of natural landscapes, it helps to use landscape mode over the portrait. On the other hand, if you’re putting up a how-to video, it might help to use the portrait format.
3. Come Up With Content Ideas
Your next step should be to decide on the content that you’ll create in your IGTV videos. The reason for this being that you need to plan out your content well in advance as the process of video creation can be quite lengthy.
Additionally, by zeroing in on a few topics, you’ll be able to better understand whether your audience will like or dislike your content.
And that’s not all.
The whole process also helps you understand how relevant the IGTV video will be for your audience.
4. Create Relevant Videos
After you’ve come up with the topics for your IGTV videos, you need to start the process of bringing your video ideas to life.
You first need to find the right footage and then leverage reliable video-making platforms to create your videos. Alternatively, if you’ve got YouTube videos, you can seamlessly edit them for use on IGTV.
While making your videos, make sure that you keep them relevant to your audience’s interests. That will help them gain traction quickly.
Once the videos are ready, you should consider showing them to a few people in your company and collecting their feedback. Accordingly, you can make them more engaging by incorporating those changes.
You should create innovative videos like how-to videos, behind-the-scenes, explainers, and even interviews. It’s also a great idea to make IGTV videos for new product launches.
Once your videos are ready and you’re uploading them to Instagram, you should consider adding a catchy caption for each. This will not only attract your audience but also give them more context about the video.
But the most important part of your captions has to be the hashtags. You should conduct hashtag research to find relevant hashtags that are popular too. However, they shouldn’t be extremely popular as that would mean that your videos might get lost among the crowd. You can also choose to come up with your hashtag by leveraging hashtag tools.
Finding and incorporating the right hashtags into your IGTV video’s caption can help you grow the video’s reach.
Apart from the caption and hashtags, you must also pay attention to the video’s thumbnails. These need to be attractive enough so that your audience is inclined to click on them to watch your IGTV videos. You can leverage Instagram designing tools to create such thumbnails for your IGTV videos.
Final Thoughts
IGTV videos can be a great addition to your Instagram marketing strategy. However, to get the most out of them, you should first understand your audience and then decide on the video’s content and orientation.
It’s also important to pay enough attention to the video creation process and hashtags. You must also add catchy captions and thumbnails for each IGTV video that you upload.
Do you have any questions about the steps mentioned above to jumpstart your IGTV strategy?
Feature Image Credit: raphaelsilva, CC0, via pixabay.com
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Shane Barker
