Video Strategy - The Questions You Should be Asking Yourself
If you’re thinking of improving your video marketing efforts or commencing your first video project, you need to have a strategy in place to ensure that you integrate your marketing activities and get the best results from your efforts.
Here are nine questions you should be asking yourself before you embark on a video journey.
More than two thirds of marketing and business professionals are already enjoying the benefits of using video marketing to engage their audience, drive traffic to their website and boost conversions.
However, it’s thought that half of companies don’t have a digital marketing plan, which means that a total of 70% of business aren’t using video to its full potential.
If you’re thinking of improving your video marketing efforts or commencing your first video project, you need to have a strategy in place to ensure that you integrate your marketing activities and get the best results from your efforts.
Here are nine questions you should be asking yourself before you embark on a video journey.
1) What’s your budget?
It’s the single-most important factor in all your business decisions. And in the case of video, if you don’t have the money to invest and you’re thinking of trying to produce video without the required equipment or expertise, it may cause more harm than good. An audience automatically make an association with quality of content and quality of service, so low quality video could damage your reputation. Filming on your phones and mobiles will only work if you’re going for a very light-hearted and informal style of content, which is one of the next things to consider.
It’s recommended that rather than splash out on a single high budget commercial film that will help you to achieve one goal, you work with a digital agency and spread the cost over a number of short web-ready videos that will help you to achieve multiple goals.
2) How much time do you have?
As with all your marketing campaigns, you need to allocate time to spend on producing video content, preferably a couple of days per month. If you don’t have the man hours to come up with concepts, participate in production and, most importantly, get your video seen, it will be very difficult to run a campaign that works.
A digital agency can do most of the hard work for you by establishing a strategy, producing video content, and optimising it for best use on the chosen platforms, but you still need to determine a suitable liaison in your team to ensure the project runs smoothly.
3) Who are your audience?
To have gotten this far, it’s likely you know your target market inside out. But your audience for video is a slightly different crowd. Your audience is who is likely to be affected by your content, whether that’s new business leads, existing leads or another demographic altogether. Who are the people who discover your other types of content? Who are the most engaged by your content? That’s who we’re aiming for.
4) What’s the key aim of your videos?
Videos can be used to help towards achieving many business objectives. At a minimum, their presence helps to increase brand exposure and they’re particularly useful for improving social media engagement. Video is also great for improving conversion rates leading to more enquiries and increased sales.
Try to be specific in your aim i.e. “increase email click-through rates by 25%” or “boost average Facebook reach to 100” or “gain a 5% inflation on conversion”. By deciding on what’s a priority, and also what’s feasible within your budget and time limits, you can start thinking about the types of content you should create.
5) What types of videos should you create?
There’s a great deal of directions you could take your video in. Some of the most popular include customer testimonials, product demos, product reviews, tutorial videos, interviews with thought-leaders and industry experts, case studies, webinars, vlog and event videos. Here’s some suitable video types dependant on your aims:
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If you’re looking to increase sales on a particular product, you should create a product-based video like a product demo
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If you need to build trust indicators on your website, you should produce a series of testimonials to showcase your happy clients and customers
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If your aim is increased brand exposure, create some search-friendly video content with a wide potential reach, like advice videos
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If brand following will help you achieve your long term goals, you should consider a series of short vlog-style videos
6) What’s your message?
In order to deliver a cohesive video strategy, you need to decide on the key message you are trying to communicate across your video output and ensure each piece of content conveys this same message, no matter the style or format. You need to consider your business aim, the product or service you want to promote, the key selling points for the product or service, and what impression you want to give your audience.
An example would be: “The videos should showcase our video offering [service to promote] and show clients the positive return on investment that can be achieved from using video in their marketing strategy [key selling point]. The videos should inspire the audience to want to know more about the video service [audience impression] and should lead to increase number of enquiries [business aim].”
7) What platform should you host your video?
There are four options for hosting your video. The most popular place to host video is a content-sharing platform like YouTube, but you can also host video on your own server or on a third-party hosting platform. In some instances you could upload video to a social media channels like Facebook, where it’s hosted on their internal servers.
There are benefits to each hosting solution and it depends on your video type and business aim, as this determines the method of optimisation. To put it simply, emotive and educational videos that need to reach a wide audience and generate brand impressions work best on popular public hosting sites like YouTube. Informative and shareable videos that need to reach a targeted audience and improve domain ranking should be self-hosted or on a secure hosting platform.
For more information on the best hosting solution for you, consult your digital experts.
8) How should you share your video?
It all depends on your business aim, key message and brand style, but it’s worth promoting video on all your social media channels as inbound links are great for optimising your video for search. You should also put your video in an email, as it can dramatic improve click-through rates. For more information on which social media channels to publish your videos on, read our previous blog.
9) How are your competitors using video?
This has purposely been added as the last point to consider because you shouldn’t let your competitors dictate what you do. Having said that, you should still follow your competitors activities to ensure you’re on top of your game. Are you competitors using video in their digital marketing? If so, you can use them as a good source of inspiration, but make sure you go one better. If not, you can feel good that you’re already one step ahead. It’s a win-win situation.
When you’ve gathered and documented all this information, you’re ready to start producing.