Producing corporate video production content is one of the most powerful ways for a company to communicate their message to their desired audience. But without a video content marketing strategy, the fruits of your labour could go unseen. In this guide we uncover everything you need to know about developing an effective video content marketing strategy.
What is a video content marketing strategy?
A video content marketing strategy begins with research is how to use to use video content to reach and communicate with your desired target audience. Like any other strategy it is about assessing where you currently are and knowing where you want to be and creating video content that helps you achieve your goals and ambitions. A video marketing strategy will guide you through the video production process and ensures that all key stakeholders and your video production company make you a great corporate video in budget, on time and targeted to the right audience.
How do you create a video content strategy?
A great video content strategy needs to start with a deep dive discovery process. Conduct a SWOT analysis, taking a step back to look at your current business situation as it stands today, what video content do you already have, is it fit for purpose or is it brand damaging? What video content are your competitors pushing out if any? What value can you create for a defined group of stakeholders with video? What problems or obstacles do your team have that could be better supported with video content? Where are the opportunities to make video content that stands out against the noise and help you gain competitive advantage in your market?
Video content aligned to your business goals.
Quite simply you need to make video content that will contribute directly to helping you achieve your wider business goals. Reach out to the teams responsible for driving or delivering on these and have an open discussion with them on the problems or obstacles they are currently facing in trying to achieve these. Once you understand the issues you can better create video content that moves you closer to achieving your defined objectives. A lot of people think that its likes and social shares that count but really these mean nothing if the video is not generating the required business action. The goal of each video needs to be defined and agreed upon by all involved stakeholders. The goal could be to drive ticket sales, increase better quality applications or reduce customer enquiries, whatever your goal is, its needs to be clear, simple and with a targeted call to action that will drive a desired behaviour. Check out our case study for Grays Inn - there goal was to change perceptions and engage a younger Gen X audience.
Make video content with an audience first approach
Video is only successful when it becomes meaningful and relevant to the lives of the audience you are seeking to engage. Understanding who your desired audience is, is absolutely fundamental to making great video content. You need to go beyond the standard demographics of age and gender, and start asking yourself questions on who they are as people? what makes them get up in the morning? What keeps them awake at night? What do they care about? and why should they care about what you are saying? With the most important question being, whats in it for them? Great video is all about finding the sweet spot between their minds and your message.
Video message with clarity
You have approximately 60 seconds to convey your message using video and in some cases you really only have 8 seconds so the key message must be short, sharp and simple. Cut to the core of what you need to say. What do you want your audience to think after watching your video. If you can try to summarise this in one sentence youre winning. Make sure to get full agreement from all stakeholders involved from the beginning to ensure absolute alignment on the message you are pushing out.
Make video content that shows up throughout the buying process.
Your audience is on google searching solutions to their problems so you need to have a variety of videos that show up throughout the buyer journey from discovery, through to conversion. Each video should have a different goal, whether that be to drive awareness, educate the viewer on your brand, product or service or build trust and confidence. Google uses the Hero, Hub, Help programme video content strategy.
Hero Video Content
This type of content is your big bang promotional video production, all about generating a buzz or raising awareness of your product, company or service to a large audience. With hero video content its all about creating an emotion and telling a story, it is your brand centrepiece that may sit on your website and be shareable across social media.
Hub Video Content
This type of video content is less flashy and more about nurturing long lasting relationships with your audience through regular video content that fulfils the needs and motivations of a specific target audience with video content that adds value to their lives beyond your product or service.
Help Video Content
This video content is designed for search. It is video content created to answer the questions that your target audience is searching on Google. This video content is designed to draw your audience to your website. Ultimately you need to view your video content as a journey of discovery with each video elevating your brand in the eyes of your viewer with video content strategically designed around their journey.
Video Budget
Video can be expensive so its important to know how much you have to make great video content. Know what you can make in house or even user generated video content for social and know what you need to outsource to a professional video production agency. When devising your budget think about the results you want to achieve and then decide how much you would reasonably want to invest to achieve these goals. When speaking witha video production agency, always share what your budget is and what you need to create for this budget so they can advise you what can be achieved in line with your budget.
Video production timeline
Its important to have in mind a deadline for when you need your video to be distributed especially if it is working towards supporting a campaign or event. Video production can take time and there are 3 main stages to a video being created, pre-production where an agency will work with you to understand your business and pull together proposals and creative ideas to tell your story, production when filming will take place. Its worth noting that at this stage logistics is a key element that can hold up production as its important that you get all people who will be on camera in on the same scheduled shoot days. After your vidoe has been shot it will move intot he post production phase where your video is edited to music, colour graded and animations if required are added. So a lot of moving parts to consider so always best not to leave to the last minute if you have a pressing deadline.
Who we are
At mhf we are here to partner with you and support you through all stages of the video production process from content strategy through to delivery. We love helping brands and businesses connect with their audience on a meaningful level by creating video content that is relevant to their lives and their challenges. We believe successul video production is about capturing the energy and pulse of a story and its why our purpose is to make video content less corporate and more human. Video is just the bridge for you to communicate with your digital audience, its the content that matters and its why we will pull together a team that is passionate about finding the human in every story.
If you need help creating a video content strategy for your business or brand or you require a video production team that knows to create video content aligned to your business goals and needs then get in contact.
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