According to Ascend2 research company, a staggering 48% of marketers find the lack of a video marketing strategy the main obstacle to video marketing success. Furthermore, a recent survey conducted by the Web Video Marketing Council reports that 37% of marketers feel they lack the video marketing expertise in order to write one.
A video marketing strategy sounds much more scary than it actually is. The value of having one however is huge in terms of video budget effectiveness and measurement. To help you put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard) below are 6 easy steps to help you breakdown the process.
1. Set your video content goals
Firstly, consider what your business goal is which has led you to want to produce video content. Do you want to build brand awareness? Or generate leads? Or help close business? Try and be single minded as your strategy will be quite different depending on your goal as the emphasis of your video content will be targeted to different stages of your buyers decision making process
2. Think like your audience
Next, think like your audience. If, for example your goal is to help close business, what questions are your audience asking at the evaluation stage of their decision making? Possibly “how easy is the product to use?” Understanding and listing the questions your audience is asking will help you identify what video content you can produce to help answer them, which will invariably set your product or service apart from your competitors to help close a sale.
3. Identify your video message
Once you know what your goal is, and your audience questions, you can start to identify what message your video content should have and what the one thing is you want your audience to take away from it. For example, to answer the question “how easy is the product to use?” ease of functionality and peer viewpoints would be key.
Knowing how you will answer the question will help you map which business department will provide the information, facts and figures to help you develop the content. For example, your product marketing team would be best placed to give you all the facts on product functionality, while your sales team could pinpoint a willing customer ambassador for a testimonial.
If you have video content already, it’s important at this stage to take stock of what you have. Remember, it’s not always about producing new content; it could simply be about re-editing existing content to be more focused.
4. Establish the best video type
You’re over half way through writing your video marketing strategy!
At this point, you can brief a video production specialist to recommend the best video type to meet your objectives. Understanding the wider strategy will also help your specialist produce your video content cost effectively. For example, knowing up front that 4 product demos are needed to show how easy a product is to use, the necessary product filming can be scheduled in one day. This is much more cost effective then shooting the 4 demos separately at different times throughout the year as this would result in 4 days of filming.
5. Distribute wisely
According to Forrester, many marketers underestimate the value of a well-laid out video distribution plan. Forrester goes on to recommend selecting your distribution channels before the project, not after, so you can tailor the content to the medium. Whichever way you approach it, knowing where your video will live is crucial. For example, the product demo’s to show how easy a product is to use could live on your website, your Youtube channel and also be embedded into an email campaign of sales follow up’s. Letting your video production specialist know your distribution plan will help them recommend the optimum video length.
6. Measure, Measure, Measure
Measuring video’s impact is about more than view counts and should be linked to your video content goal. If it was to help close business, the metrics could be numbers of opportunities influenced, length of attention span or click through rate from email. Understanding how successful the video content was will help you refine future video content development.
So, there are your 6 steps to developing a video marketing strategy. Having more focus will help you measure better your video content success and help your video production budget go a whole lot further. Good luck!
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