7 steps to build a stand out video content marketing strategy

What is a video content marketing strategy?

A video marketing strategy is a tool that is created by the marketing team in the early stages of the video creation process. It is the guide that informs every decision you choose to take from creative treatments, to casting, to distribution. It keeps all key stakeholders and your video production company in alignment and ensures you get an end video product that delivers on your key business objectives and guides your audience through the buyer journey or candidate experience acting as a highly effective lead generation tool.

Video content audit

The video content marketing strategy begins with your video project stakeholders sitting down and doing a video content audit and assessing whther this content still aligns with your business goals and brand fit.

This involves sourcing all your corporate video content output and quite simply watching it.

You can use a video audit template to help you assess each video against a consistent framework to help you determine whether, you keep it, delete it or rework it.

A video content audit can be broken down into 4 stages:

Understanding your business goals and how video supports these.
Watch all your current video output and analyse are they aligned with your current business goals?
Analyse where each video sits in your sales funnel.
Spot the video content gap opportunities

Video goals

Before you make a corporate video its very important you know from the start what you want the video to do and the metrics you will use to measure success.

This is best done with all key project stakeholders to ensure everyone is aligned and its essential this is communicated to your chosen video production agency.

A good practice is to align your goals with your sales funnel or candidate experience as depending on where the video sits within these funnels will have a direct impact on the creative treatments chosen to best achieve these objectives and where and how you distribute the video material.

Corporate video goal - examples

Raise awareness of product or service - metric video views
Increase web traffic
Increase leads
Improve the quality of applications
Reduce customer queries
Increase conversion rates

Target audience personas

The key to creating a great corporate video is understanding who the people are that you want to watch it.

You need to think of them beyond mere demographics but truly get under their skin as human beings.

What keeps them awake at night?
What are they passionate about?
What motivates them?
What do they want or aspire to be?
How do they like to be communicated with?
What inspires them?

As part of your video marketing strategy work you may find that you have more than one target audience person that you need to create video content for. This is absolutely normal but it is important that this is clearly documented and outlined before you reach out to a video production agency.

Singular core message

Think about the products and services you offer and conduct a SWOT analysis on each one. The main focus of your video content will hone in on where you discover opportunities to market your product or service better.

Ultimately you may have a found that you have a brand perception problem and therefore there is an opportunity to use video content to show a different side of your organisation that works to counteract audience perceptions.

Ultimately for each video you want to hone in on one singular core message - its important to know what this is and brief this to a video production agency to pull together a video production proposal that delivers on this message.

Distribution

Its important to understand first who your target audience personas are as this will help you define where they hang out online and where they will likely come into contact with your corporate video content.

This will also inform whether you need to put some of your video marketing budget aside for paid media google ads.

This is an area that people can forget and its so important as you can have the best video production in the world but if the right audience doesnt get to see it then its a collassal waste of money.

Video Production Budget

Video production is not cheap and its important that you have a rough idea of how much you want to spend on making your corporate video before briefing a video production company.

The reason for this being that video content comes in all shapes and sizes and can be made on a low budget or large budget.

The amount of budget set aside will inform the production values of the video so a video that comes in at 30 seconds will be cheaper than a 1 minute video as it takes less time to edit a 30 second video.

By being upfront with your video production company on your budget they can be clear from the beginning on what you can best achieve and advise you getting the most value for your investment.

Remember always keep around 20% of the final video amount aside for video marketing activities.

Timeframe

When developing your video marketing strategy think about whether you need certain videos to be delivered by certain dates in your corporate calendar to align with other marketing activities that you may be doing.

THis is important as if you are working to certain timelines then you need to get your video production brief out to video production companies at least a minimum of 8 weeks before your delivery date.

Video production can be a long process particularly in the post production part of the process so the sooner you can brief out your requirements the sooner your video will be ready for you to share with your target audience.

Conclusion

Video production content only works if there is a strong video content and marketing strategy behind it. Like any other form of marketing content corporate video production needs to have purpose and it must deliver a business defined result otherwise its an expensive waste of your valuable time and marketing budget.

Video content marketing strategy in 7 Steps

20th May 2022